Up Till Now: The Autobiography

Man . And now, probably because of the attention I was getting from playing Denny Crane, after thirty-five years I was asked to record a second album. My career had made a full, singing circle.
    Several years ago I listened to The Transformed Man and I had to admit that parts of it aren’t very good. In my memory it was much better than it actually was, but at least it was an attempt to do something interesting. It was a concept album. For it to work you had to listen to the entire six-minute cut, which consisted of a piece of literature tied to a song; on radio they played the three-minute song and it sounded mostly like me screaming and yelling. What I had intended to be drama had emerged as comedy. People mocked it and it was somewhat humiliating. I had smiled and tried to carry it off with some sort of grace, but I felt bad about it.
    But had it been even slightly better it probably would have been quickly forgotten. Instead it has lived on in legend. Some people believe my version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is the worst musical rendition of all time. Apparently George Clooney picked it as one of the few things he would want to have with him if he were marooned on a deserted island. As he explained, “If you listen to this song, you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it to get off the island.”
    Comments like that kept the album alive by creating curiosity. How could anything be that bad? So people wanted to hear it. And because of it, I’ve been given the opportunity to talk-song in movies, on television, and on other records. On the 1992 MTV Movie Awards I performed all of the Best Movie Song nominees. On the animated science-fiction show Futurama, for example, I talk-sangEminem’s “The Real Slim Shady,” proving it was possible to do a spoken-word version of a rap song.
    Surprisingly, some of the people who took the time to listen to the long versions of the songs actually appreciated it. One of them was the well-respected musician Ben Folds. “I got The Transformed Man at a yard sale as a kid, and that’s how I got a little Shakespeare burned into my head. And hearing that next to Bob Dylan, that was pretty interesting. Maybe it was laughable to older people or people who thought they had it all figured out, but I just locked onto his voice and his timing.”
    In 1997 he wrote and asked me to participate in an experimental album he was making, Fear of Pop . One of my daughters loved his music and convinced me to do it. As a result Ben and I became friends and worked together on several other projects.
    The company that made the most money from Transformed Man was Rhino Records, who used several cuts from that album on a series of very popular albums called Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing Off . Not to take all the credit for the great success of that album, several of Leonard’s songs were also used, including his version of “Proud Mary.”
    In 2003 the Foos brothers, who had produced Golden Throats, came to my office and sat on my couch and asked me to record another album. And they did it with straight faces. They had sold Rhino Records and were starting a new label, Shout! Factory. Now, I knew they were hoping to produce another album that people would mock. I probably would have turned them down, but as they were sitting there my phone rang. Ben Folds was calling from Nashville, a coincidence too amazing to ignore. Literally, Ben called me while they were in my office. He was coming to L.A. to do a live show, he explained, and wanted me to perform with him.
    Boy oh boy, did I have a great idea. I put my hand over the speaker and asked the Foos brothers, “Can I do anything?” Anything I wanted to do, they said.
    Although I’m quite certain the last thing that they expected me to do was a good album.
    I asked them, “Would you take Ben Folds as my producer?” They agreed instantly. “Ben,” I said, “the two guys who used to own Rhino Records are in my office right now. They want me to do another record. Would you produce it?” Ben agreed. It was amazing, I was going to do another album!
    Only after the Foos brothers had left my office did I realize I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do an album. I called Ben back. “Now what am I gonna do?”
    Ben had a simple answer. “Tell the truth. You write it down, I’ll make the music.”
    With Ben’s advice I sat down and started writing songs about my life. I tried to distill the important