A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  But it is difficult getting there. Added to the challenge of looking for something for which you have no prior example, once you find it, you’re the only one who will never truly see what’s special about it. What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself. It’s not terribly profound or abstract to say that the way we hear our speaking voice, reverberating in our own skull, is not the way we sound to others. We never get a chance to meet ourselves the way others have. It’s the same with the artistic voice. It’s something you feel in the dark.

  When I’m working with successful artists—usually in the studio, that particularly self-conscious fishbowl—I can often see them working the angle they think is their calling card. And they are usually way off. Of course, they’re pros and accustomed to finding their way back, so they snap out of it. But it’s striking to witness. It’s like when you ask a little kid why others like her and she says something like, “Because I’m funny! I make farting jokes in class.” Well, if you ask her classmates, they may well tell you that they tolerate that class-clown crap but that actually, “I like Ethel because she’s nice.” They see her in a way her ego will never allow. Ethel never needed to act like the village idiot to make people like her. Being herself was all she needed to do. It can take some time to find the thing that lives in your blind spot.

  As you get closer to finding your voice, you’ll feel resistance. You’ll want to retreat. It’s scary to just be you. You may notice that criticism from others starts to sting more, because now it’s personal. You’re being seen and addressed directly, not through the sunglasses you finally removed. But once you’ve relaxed, you can apply the effort to the important part—that which projects and amplifies the expression of the real you. That’s technique. And by the way, when it’s said that someone is “trying too hard,” we should take that to mean “trying too hard at the wrong thing.” Once the wrong thing, usually affectation or tension, is stripped away, by all means, please try too hard. Try as hard as you can to express what you feel, and don’t let anyone bully you otherwise.

  * * *

  —

  I arrived at some kind of unique artistic voice in my songwriting, my piano-playing, and my singing at different times in my life. And I’d say the whole package came together rather late. And that I lost my grip on it and found it over and over again. It’s still something I struggle with.

  My songwriting clicked first. That’s where I put the time in early on, enduring constant failure, mostly in the privacy of my bedroom. Imitating my heroes and then rebelling against them as I matured. Writing and throwing away hundreds of songs.

  I came to a point in my musical development where I wanted to listen to albums that didn’t exist. I wanted more than anything to hear a specific record and realized I had to be the one to make it. For instance, I wanted to hear a rock star who didn’t need to cast themselves heroically. I wanted to hear a record where, for once, the singer wasn’t always right. Where the rock star didn’t have to always be the sexy one, the strong one, or the victimized party. Because even when on the losing end, they didn’t seem to me to be showing honest vulnerability. They’d sing shit like, Girl, I cried for you. As if that revealed anything at all. Who the hell says that in real life? It’s dress-up and playacting. Disingenuous vulnerability. Amanda Palmer has a fantastic verse that touches on this in her song “Grown Man Cry”:

  I’m scanning through the stations as the boys declare their feelings

  But it doesn’t feel like feelings

  It feels like they’re pretending

  It’s like they just want blowjobs

  And they know these songs will get them

  And, sure, it’s fine to cry and it’s fine to write about it, but she’s right. It so often doesn’t feel like feelings. I was highly suspicious of most rock lyrics. It felt like rock bands were selling a brand too hard. What if you risked ruining your brand? I wondered. Wouldn’t it be riskier and more dangerous to admit that I was too shallow or too afraid to show feelings? Honesty like that, that didn’t cast a singer in the most flattering light, seemed more like real-life vulnerability. It seemed sadder. Cultivating my vulnerability, nerdiness, and weakness, all in the key of awkward, is what eventually felt right for me. That was the imaginary record that I wanted to buy, that I would have to make myself. A great leap away from the herd, and toward my voice.

  * * *

  —

  I learned to embrace lyrics that didn’t match the music, gravitating, for instance, toward major keys (usually considered happy keys) with sad lyrics. You know, lyrics and music don’t have to agree. The music can refute or ridicule what is being said, and I loved playing with that effect. That sort of contradiction reflected the way I felt life worked, and it also felt naughty and off-limits. I called it “breaking the law.” And feeling bolder with each misdemeanor, I began to enjoy words outside the usual rock nomenclature. Even words more commonly found in a physics book, for instance, would probably be more compelling to me than dithering lyrics with lots of baby, baby, baby, I’m so hurt. Staid technical language might even be used to portray a singer who wants to divert attention from his true feelings. Not to mention that it’s a shock to hear obtuse, jagged language in a song. We so rarely hear that, and it can draw you in. That’s the impulse behind the waltz, “Boxing,” that I wrote about Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. I knew it wasn’t cool to couple a sports story with a pretty melody, or to write from the perspective of old men in rock and roll. I just wanted to hear that record and so I would have to make it myself. Since then the times have changed, and it’s not as unusual to project awkwardness anymore—it’s actually become fashionable. But when I was finding my voice, it was by feel, like learning my face with my fingertips in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  My voice as a pianist had been evolving all along at another pace. Style is often steered by circumstance and necessity. When I was younger, trying to jam with loud guitars and drums on an unamplified upright piano in various neighborhood garage bands, I couldn’t hear myself at all. The guitars could just turn a volume knob and blow me away. But one day when we played “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, while copying the original piano part I discovered the power of sticking the top of the piano range loudly and repetitively. I could finally be heard. And it wasn’t the velocity alone that made the piano speak above the loud garage band. It was also a matter of what range to play, and when. I was like the runt of a litter who learns to bull in to get food. I can fucking stick it in any loud band and make myself heard.

  My training as a percussionist also contributed to my style. Drums are traditionally set up with the highest drums to the left and lowest to the right. That’s the opposite of a piano. But I’m a left-handed drummer and so I lay the drums out like a piano. Lower drums to the left and higher drums to the right. This has allowed me to play drums on the piano. My embellishments on the piano are rarely melodic flurries, which couldn’t be heard in a garage band anyway. They’re more like drum fills that I learned to play left-handed. Style by circumstance.

  But what really gave me a voice on the piano was my songs, which were a product of my imagination. My songs taught me to play piano. What I learned and practiced at the piano was driven by my desire to play what I heard in my head, and my piano-playing became its own thing once my tunes fell into place.

  I now had words, songs, and a pianist, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to find a singer who could bring it all out. At first, I looked everywhere. Everywhere but under my own nose.

  Where oh where is my voice…

  my voice…my…

  Ah! My voice! My physical voice? That damn buzzy thing?

  It made sense for me to sing these songs I was writing, but I had one problem. I was a terrible singer. So I sought real singers to bring my songs to life.

  To be
fair, it’s not that I had a terrible vocal apparatus. It’s just that this God-given vocal instrument was not what I wanted to hear. It was too…me. Too scary to reveal. I made things worse by trying to disguise it, which resulted in my singing badly. I harbored a grave misconception that singing involved some herculean effort and strain in order to force it into something interesting. I thought this is what all the real Singers™ did. It turns out, singing does require effort, just not the kind I imagined.

  I didn’t understand singing at all, because I hadn’t grown up doing it. It was like trying to learn to ride a bike in your twenties. I was ashamed to be seen trying. And so, as an adult, I contorted and distorted all the elements of phonation, from overbreathing to pushing my larynx up into my jaw. It was quite a feat turning an otherwise unique instrument into a distorted, airy squeak-box. There must be some magic trick to singing, I thought. It couldn’t possibly be as simple as hitting the notes and telling the story…Could it?

  I would nervously step up to the mic, choke out a few overwrought whisper screams, lose my voice, and walk away frustrated.

  Where oh where is my voice? I squeaked to the heavens!

  The first clue came from the cassettes I made for the singers in Majosha. Demonstrating a new song into a tape recorder, without feeling pressure to be a Singer™, I felt safe singing the melodies plaintively, in a way that simply elucidated the words and the intent. I was actually singing, but I didn’t realize it because it seemed too easy, too obvious. It didn’t hurt. Doesn’t it hurt to feel? Those tapes were just meant to get the point across. They didn’t count. But they sounded right.

  Here’s how the song goes. See?

  “Pitched mouth noises,” Frank Zappa once called them. Words with notes. I recalled how impressed my piano teacher, Robert Darnell, had been with Eric Clapton, who simply spoke the notes. But even as I began to discover I didn’t need all that strain, I still couldn’t always relax on command. As soon as it counted, I would get anxious and involuntarily revert to my old habits. It was an impossible nervous tick. It was my soul hiding behind a rock. It took a while.

  I like to say I suffered from a vocalizing disorder—something akin to an eating disorder, only applied to the voice. I suffered from a case of extremely low voice self-esteem, driven into me from youth. You know how you can hear that one awful comment about your body, at exactly the wrong time, and it can plant a seed in the center of your soul? That was what had happened to me with my voice. I guess feelings of inadequacy, like old habits, die hard.

  You see, my father, with absolutely no mal-intent whatsoever, had always proudly insisted I had a weak and unlistenable voice. It was actually a compliment from his perspective. Raised poor in the macho South, he learned that real men don’t go around singing. So Papa boasted that he also had a useless set of vocal cords, and the same went for my brother and me. We were all real men. Papa liked rock music just fine but considered rock singers “sissies” and “fruitcakes,” mostly. Sometimes he gave them a pass because he figured they were laughing all the way to the bank. “Shit, I’d put on mascara and shake my ass in leather tights like a little girl for that kind of money!” he might say. So sure, I had to dig out of a little insecurity hole vocally, but I don’t blame my parents for this. We are all a work in progress.

  * * *

  —

  It was when I heard myself singing on the demo cassettes that I realized I had no choice. I had to be the singer. Now I could suddenly creatively visualize my songs making their way in the world. But I would have to grow a pair, lose a pair, whatever—it’s all so confusing—and just sing. I learned to state the facts and nothing but the facts vocally. That’s the way I shed the strained affectation. Pitched mouth noises, speaking the lyrics, letting the songwriting do the heavy lifting. I would be myself. A non-singer sort of singer.

  There’s an immediacy to hearing a non-singer singer deliver a song. It draws our attention, because we suspect the non-singer singer must really have something to say. Why else would they bother? Certainly not to show off their vocal gymnastics. We trust somehow that they’re telling the truth. They’ve cut out all the sugar coating and they’re telling us the way it is.

  The non-singer singer was a sort of unmentioned genre. There were loads of them, only I didn’t quite fit in there either. Non-singer singers always had a character voice. But my voice wasn’t gravelly or odd like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits. I had a boy-next-door sound I hadn’t heard much on records. One who definitely doesn’t wear sunglasses and smoke cigarettes. I figured I had to just go for it, belly flop and all. I began to push this boy-next-door quality front and center. No apologies, no disclaimer, no effects to hide behind or defensiveness that would indicate fear. I was tired of being afraid. I embraced my fear so I could get my songs out there. I still do.

  I began to record my new songs on a four-track cassette machine in my bedroom. I had one track for drums, one for bass, one for piano, and one for my newly discovered non-singing voice. I sang into the mic, almost in a whisper, so nobody outside the room would hear me. I locked myself away, wrote and recorded the songs “Jackson Cannery,” “Silver Street,” and “Underground” in one week, sometime in 1988.

  This was, I thought, the real deal. It felt like a significant step forward.

  After hundreds of forgotten songs, and humiliating adenoidal attempts at singing, I had found the first hint of my voice. And it was so much easier than I had imagined.

  NASHVILLE—THE BEST (PREFERRED) WAY TO FAIL

  MY FIRST GIG SINGING MY songs at the piano fell in my lap. A local pop and soul singer by the name of Marc Silvey hired me to play bass for him on what is known as a “showcase” gig, which is basically a publicly attended audition for record labels. A chemist by trade, Silvey had made a home demo tape that grabbed the attention of record companies and music-publishing execs, who would be flying in from L.A., Nashville, and New York just to hear him play a few songs. If they liked what they saw, then he would become a signed recording artist. This being Marc’s first gig, he didn’t have many songs, so he casually asked if I might play a few of mine on piano as the opener. I didn’t put enough thought into it to be nervous. I said, “Sure thing.”

  On Marc’s big showcase night, Raleigh’s venerable Rialto Theatre was full and buzzing. The local press had whipped up a lot of interest with stories of the talented young chemist who’d attracted so many big-city music reps. The lights came down, and I wandered out alone to the piano, unannounced. It was easy. There was no pressure or expectation. I just relayed the stories of the songs musically, speaking the pitches. I played “Jackson Cannery,” “Tom and Mary,” and a song that was never released, called “Half Asleep.” After that I immediately ran backstage to tune my bass guitar before shaving my head with a number-two electric razor. I thought it was funny to play my little piano set with a full head of hair, then shave my head to be the bassist for Marc’s set.

  Following the showcase, a fellow who worked at BMI (Broadcast Music Inc., which is one of the three big publishing-licensing companies in the United States, the others being ASCAP and SESAC) pulled me aside and told me the labels were all flipping out about my opening set. Most had expressed interest in seeing me again on my own gig. He asked if I could manage to book something quickly while there was excitement. This was innocent beginner’s luck, I suppose. I was over the moon at first. And then very nervous. Suddenly it counted. There were expectations! My next performance could determine my future.

  I booked the first venue that would have me and I hired the two hottest local musicians around, hoping I could make it a real show and impress the boys and girls from the big cities.

  *Cue sad trombone.*

  A few months later, seated behind an electric piano in a conference room at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with a band I’d never even rehearsed, I faced an audience that consisted of a few music execs who
had flown in, my family, and some friends, all seated on folding chairs underneath flat fluorescent light. It was utterly unnatural. I nearly puked the whole time from nerves. I relapsed vocally, trying again to hide behind effort and strain, adding embellishments and fake gravel that I couldn’t pull off. Luckily, it was over quickly because I ran out of songs. The bored label execs in their hip sneakers had already migrated to the back of the room, where the food was. My BMI man worked the room afterward, but to no avail. Well, with one exception. A small publisher/lawyer from Nashville named Scott Siman, who stayed behind after the room cleared—and, boy, did it clear—was interested in my music.

  Scott invited me to Nashville, but Anna suspected he was a con artist.

  “Is this man a lawyer or a publisher?” she asked.

  I nodded yes.

  “He’s both? Hmm…That sounds worse. Anyway, Nashville is good at country music, not rock music.”

  All legitimate concerns, but I was undeterred. I ended up signing a deal—whatever it was Scott put in front of me, I didn’t really read much of it. Technically I didn’t sign without a lawyer, of course, because Scott served as my lawyer and my publisher all at once. I know, I know. It’s a terrible idea. You should always get your own lawyer. And it’s true that there were parts of that original publishing contract that became a massive pain in the ass down the road. Still, I must emphasize that Scott did not screw me. He was sincerely interested in developing talent, not taking advantage of it. I was lucky.