A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  Sometimes I don’t actually hear defined music but just the distant impression of music. The sense that something is coming, like the sky darkening before the rain. I might get a chill, or even want to laugh. At what? I don’t yet know. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I even hear applause sometimes.

  Like anyone, when I get impatient, and before I have a solid idea, I might rush straight for an instrument, hoping to stumble upon something that will lead the way. From the piano to an iPad—I can turn my brain off and just play something. That’s fun sometimes, but remember that a menu of drum loops is far more limited than your imagination.

  Here’s my suggestion to musicians: When you’re about to reach for whatever musical tools you use, virtual or real, guitar or computer, ask yourself if you’re doing so to save time or because you don’t feel like straining your brain. Or, more important, ask yourself if you have anything to say yet. If not, keep working (or playing) upstairs, in your brain. Sure, it’s okay to react to what happens playing with the tools—the way a chord sounds, a loop, or even an accident. But make sure you express what you wanted to say or what you have imagined. Don’t let your tools make you their bitch.

  Measure twice, cut once. Resist the urge to skip steps. The limitations of the real world will soon impose themselves on your creation. Even the limits of your technique will cut your imagination down to size in time. So imagine wildly first. Or at least try to do so from time to time.

  I’m grateful that the piano, the drums, the tape recorder, and the smartphone weren’t immediately available to me as a kid. I’m thankful for the boring afternoons spent hanging out with bags of concrete and two-by-fours. I highly recommend enforced boredom as a way to develop your imagination. But don’t take my advice; listen to Neil Young. He said it best: “There’s a lot to learn for wasting time.”

  Writing songs while pacing outside—circa 1988

  BIG EARS, THIN WALLS

  MOST NIGHTS AT OUR HOUSE it was lights-out at a reasonable hour. Lying in bed, I’d hear the muffled tones of my parents’ voices from the other side of our bedroom wall. On the odd occasion, the TV would stay on long enough into the night that I could hear local stations signing off with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But sometimes, usually on the weekends, things would get louder. Something fun was happening on the other side of the wall, like the night my father wrestled the morbidly overweight teenager from next door. There was a house-rattling thud and laughter, the sound of breaking furniture, some cursing, and the needle scratching loudly right off the turntable. Then more laughter. Who was winning? My father? Or the oversized kid?

  I’d try and guess which adults had dropped over by their voices. Did I know them? How did they all know to come? None of it sounded planned. Maybe it started that afternoon with a few neighbors stopping by to watch a Muhammad Ali fight, with a party spontaneously building from there. They got louder and louder, and the conversations weren’t the kind I ever heard in the daytime.

  “All right, goddamn, Dean! Bet’s on! If the wingspan of a condor isn’t twelve feet or more, you’ll kiss my ass right out on Glenwood Avenue!”

  What? He can’t mean that literally, I thought. But, then again, shit was getting crazy, so maybe he did….

  “You know you’re wrong, Dean! You know it!! Right now, let’s go outside! I’m gonna pull my britches down out on the goddamn street, so pucker up! Condor’s wingspan my assssss!!…”

  With big ears through thin walls, I listened to every detail as the speech got more slurred, happy, and dangerous. The music got louder, and the needle on the record player would often bounce out of its groove as clumsy feet shook the floor. A kid can begin to gather a lot about how music works, how a song unfolds, by just listening intently and putting the clues together. Dynamics, the loud and soft sounds. Accelerandos, crescendos, indicating excitement. The long mysterious silences, the intonation. Sonic stories.

  * * *

  —

  But it wasn’t an official parent party until they broke out the live comedy records. The 1970s were a golden age for comedy and comedy albums. I memorized every word through the bedroom wall. These comedy records are as close to a lullaby as I can recall. Only better. At seven years old I was often serenaded to sleep by George Carlin’s routine about farting noises, which he classified as a “bilabial fricative.” There were many other gems that my young mind could never un-hear, like, “Get the cross out cho pussy!” which was from Richard Pryor’s reimagining of The Exorcist, as played by black people.

  Laughter roared from the cheap Fisher speakers and from the adults in the living room. The audience on these old comedy records had a distinct and haunting sound. One that carried weight. It meant something! That much I could sense. It was the sound of catharsis in crazy times. The comedians seemed to be saying what everyone already knew. The laughter was a sort of “amen.” It was a knowing laughter, a drunken and intense laughter. It was post-civil-rights-era laughter, post-Vietnam laughter, post-Watergate laughter. Not always an altogether optimistic sound. But it was the sound of people who proved they could survive and would do so again.

  The intensity of these records still gives me chills. I think the comedy of the 1970s tells you as much about what society was going through at that time as the music of the 1960s did. Comedy was already starting to seem like the new rock and roll when I was a kid. And don’t get me wrong, I love the music of the 1970s, but it had become big business. Rock music was performed in arenas now, but comedy was still intimate, lean and mean, honest, and the comedians seemed more like the outlaws. Indeed, my idea of rock and roll came in large part from those live comedy records my parents played after bedtime. I mimicked the comedians at school as much as I did the musicians. And I got in a lot of trouble for it. Trying out your own Richard Pryor– or Andy Kaufman–inspired comedy in second grade is not advisable.

  It makes sense to me that the first notable entertainers to show up at Ben Folds Five gigs were comedians. I felt right at home with most comedians in a way I haven’t always felt with musicians. I don’t think the reason I relate to comedians and vice versa is that my music is funny or that I’m funny. Because I’m probably not that damn funny. That’s not my job. But I sensed the weight of humor early on. I believe, to my core, that the saddest things are often best illuminated by humor, and I’ve always felt compelled to express emotion through a comic lens. The type of laughter can indicate the height from which we fear we may fall, the depths to which we could so easily plummet, and the effort required to retain composure in our darkest times. And, of course, sometimes life is just funny.

  After a night of comedy, wrestling, and drunken bets, Sunday morning in the Folds household was for sleeping in. No Sunday school for us. I may not be able to recite prayers or sing hymns like many adults I know, who spent their youth at church, but I can reel off George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” And I know the wingspan of a condor is not twelve feet. Not even close.

  A LINE AND SOME CLUES

  ON A FROSTY JANUARY AFTERNOON in 1977, an eleven-year-old me trudged his skinny cold ass down Peace Haven Road, squinting directly downward to avoid being stung by the horizontal snow. But I didn’t need to look ahead to find my way. I had the recent trail of a bicycle tire to show me roughly where the sidewalk was. Someone else had done the hard work and all I needed to do was follow, head down. And so I fixed my gaze on this thin line in the snow and forged ahead.

  Who rides a bike in this weather? I wondered. For that matter, what kind of monster teacher insists their students wade to piano lessons in this shit?

  Mrs. Dyer, that’s who. My new piano teacher, and I wasn’t so sure I liked her. The other few teachers I’d had just let me goof off. My mother had fired the last teacher, the fun young guy who played rock, when she heard the lesson from outside the door. I’d spent the half hour showing him how to play a cool blues riff I’d made up.
In fact, I carried that riff with me into adulthood and used it as a big one bar descending solo run in “Song for the Dumped” by Ben Folds Five, nearly twenty years later.

  There would be no blues riffing around Mrs. Dyer. She was old and serious, and I thought she talked funny. It was a European accent, Mama said. Her house smelled strange from some kind of weird food. And she was the only one who had dared to torture me with scales, arpeggios, and all that pesky technique. She was just no fun at all.

  Beethoven Sonata in G? I grumbled to myself. How about “Cantina Band” from Star Wars instead? I don’t think I like these Europeans. Old people can be so mean.

  * * *

  —

  The entire walk to Mrs. Dyer’s was probably all of a half mile door to door, but the snow made it seem longer. Meanwhile, the thin bike tire began to occupy my imagination.

  At first, the line was straight and controlled. Confident. But sometimes it would squiggle a bit and you could see the ghost of its second tire, revealing moments of uncertainty, loss of balance. A story was unfolding, I thought. I wanted to sneak a peek ahead, like glancing at the last page of a book, to see if I could spot the rider or any clues to their whereabouts, but I resisted the urge and kept my head down. This was the kind of entertainment a bored eleven-year-old could get lost in while nearly hypnotized by the sound of crunching snow or the rhythm of his own breathing. It reminded me of the sound at the end of a record before you lift the tonearm. In fact, the tire trail itself, as it passed beneath me, seemed like the groove of a record, and I was the needle. The needle doesn’t know what’s next. It just follows the groove and plays it as it comes.

  The more clues I got about the rider, and where he’d stopped, the more interested I became. Maybe I knew him! Or maybe it wasn’t a him at all. Maybe I’d find myself awkwardly face-to-face with some girl! That would be awful. I never knew exactly what to say to girls. I slowed a bit.

  * * *

  —

  I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve. You just have to take the trip to find out, following a simple line with some clues along the way. I like to think of songs that way. The sequence of the music is like the line in the snow, or the groove in a record. You put your head down, or you put the needle down, and ride it from beginning to end. But something has to propel you forward. A song, like any story, has to hold your interest with clues that are musically paced and poetically ambiguous enough to spark the imagination.

  I remember listening intently to “Hotel California” on the radio at about this age. I was sure it was about someone who had died. There were clues. It seemed someone was trapped somewhere, maybe in limbo? The beat, the repetition of the chords, the music itself, was the thread that kept me on the path. And as I followed, listening to the radio in the back seat of the car, I came upon this:

  You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!

  Man! Whoa! That was it! That blew my tiny mind! Of course, there’s nothing that special going on here—just some rock-and-roll poetry as interpreted by a child. But it’s operating outside the literal in a way that sparked my interest, more than it would have had it been stated clearly. It’s a five-minute trail of music with imagery scattered along the way.

  I was now certain the singer of this song had passed into the nether world and was trapped in a place he couldn’t escape, called—I didn’t question why—the Hotel California. There was mention of heaven and hell. A spirit. Being greeted and led somewhere. He was witnessing some kind of ritual or play that demonstrated that evil can never be eradicated.

  They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast

  (By the way, I’ve always used “kill the beast” to cue a drummer to play the kind of fill that accompanies this line in “Hotel California.” “Right before the last chorus, just go ahead and ‘kill the beast’!” I consider that drum fill an institution, equal to the one in “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.)

  Who knows what the Eagles meant. The point is that what piqued my interest were the clues I was fed and the rate at which I was fed them. Guided by the line of the song’s groove, and interested by well-timed mysteries, I put together the pieces. Then, of course, there are a bunch of guitar solos with no words, which gave me time to chew on it all. All part of the beauty of a song.

  Composers like Maurice Ravel have said that they actually composed one painful note at a time. He said, “I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.” I understand that. Philip Glass says he likes to wait to see the tip of a ship come through the fog, while Bob Dylan said, “My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.” Stephen King puts a few characters in an impossible situation and he follows and reports on them as they find their way out. Whether it’s a sprint or a crawl, we’re always following something. Something simple. A line and some clues. We don’t have to know where it might lead. In fact, your song may end up a question mark, an unsolved mystery.

  * * *

  —

  When I was a couple of blocks from Mrs. Dyer’s house, the line in the snow took a wide swerve to the left, then a jerk to the right, increasing in amplitude and desperation, then violently veering out of control, finally surrendering to gravity, and leaving only a big wide mess of snow, at which I now arrived. Ouch! Not such a subtle clue. I paused to take it in. Seeing a wipeout is a gift from God for any young boy! So, sure, I wanted to laugh, but I was also concerned. I’d made a little connection with whoever’s bike trail I’d been following. I now looked up through the blizzard—North Carolina’s idea of a blizzard—and I saw that the line picked up again, in defeat, I imagined. It was now accompanied by a set of sad footprints, trailing off as far as I could see down the road. Why were they sad? Because I said so.

  I wished at that moment that I had a camera to take a picture, to capture it and share it. But would a photograph capture the story? Probably not. It would probably just look like snowy chaos on the ground. But there must be a way of framing this story, I thought. Then again, I didn’t actually know the story. I only had some clues. Oddly, that was part of the excitement.

  I couldn’t wait to talk my parents’ ears off about it the rest of the afternoon. Maybe I would even add a few slightly fraudulent details, like how there was blood in the snow too? Or that I saved the day and helped the kid carry his/her bike home? The literal bare-bones story seemed pretty underwhelming, come to think of it. All I’d really seen was a trail, and the trail had become a mess, big deal. So why was it all so real for me? Why was it so much more interesting than if someone had said, Once upon a time there was a bike that went for a while and then fell down? Could I possibly create a story out of just this bike trail as exciting as the one I had followed in the snow, and what would it take to do so? I wondered.

  Practicing piano in the house near Mrs. Dyer’s, 1979

  * * *

  —

  I had arrived. I trod up Mrs. Dyer’s porch stairs and rang the bell. I’d soon be going over boring scales and getting a lecture on how I needed to practice, and I’d have to fake my way through a child’s version of Mozart’s “Turkish March,” which I had neglected to practice. But an eleven-year-old can’t yet appreciate what technique is really for. It’s for later, when you need the skills to tell a whole story with just a line and some clues.

  1979. THE SUMMER OF LOVE

  Cultural Latency, Symbols, and Repetition

  YEAH, MAN, IT WAS THE seventies. And the times they were a-changing, if perhaps a little more slowly in our parts than elsewhere. The cultural latency of the South often afforded my childho
od the authentic feel and look of the 1960s, even though it was well into the disco era. The styles, the colors, the language, all felt a few beats late. That may be why today I sometimes find myself reminiscing about the sixties as if I actually grew up in them. In fairness, ideas and trends, especially in music, rarely land everywhere at the same time. Two towns just thirty miles apart can feel like they exist in different decades, and unless you grew up in New York, L.A., or London, you too probably felt that all the cool stuff happened everywhere else first.

  Music that was too cool for the South often made its way to me under the radar, by way of a few friends whose families had money and traveled. They brought home glimpses of the future, like the first Sony Walkman I ever saw and the punk and new-wave albums that changed my life in high school.

  Big-city trends often took a while to traverse the short distance to the surrounding rural areas, what we called “the county” (outside the city limits, but within the county line). When we lived in the county, the bus ride to school felt like time travel. Two worlds, side by side, existing in different decades. I’d board the bus in what looked like an early-sixties’ documentary about white Alabama and get off the same bus in the seventies, in full color, filled with post-civil-rights hippies, Afros, and bell-bottoms. Just ten miles away! A few years later, the county people would have the bell-bottoms too, and the city people would decide that school integration was perhaps too idealistic after all, dial it back, and yearn for the 1950s (I, personally, don’t understand the romantic appeal of the fifties).

  The 1960s that we see in movies, where everyone is on acid and looks like Jim Morrison or Tina Turner, nearly passed us by down South. And what did make its way to us came late and watered down. The “Magic Bus” that the Who sang about never officially stopped in North Carolina. It just lost a wheel eastbound on I-40, which went rolling unnoticed past the WELCOME TO WINSTON-SALEM NORTH CAROLINA sign and hobbled to a halt just inside the newly automated doors of a grocery store called Food Town. And there in the cereal aisle, Chuck and I got an eyeful of our first grown man with long hair. Wide-eyed and suppressing giggles, we followed this poor man like amazed third-world children getting a glimpse of a shiny red sports car for the first time. We referred to him as a “boy girl.” Soon, more “boy girls” and their bell-bottom-wearing wives would proliferate, whizzing through Winston-Salem in Volkswagen Bugs and compact Japanese cars. Long-haired hippies had been around for years elsewhere. Had the revolution actually been televised, we would have only seen the reruns.