A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  If I may flatter myself for a moment with a broad comparison to one of my favorites: Early in his career, Randy Newman was a bit misunderstood. After a few poetic, ironic, beautiful albums with no real hits, Newman broke internationally in the late-1970s with a massive perceived novelty radio hit called “Short People,” which unfortunately defined his career for a while. When I was a kid I saw him play it on Saturday Night Live, and he followed “Short People” with something that he probably felt made better TV than any of his serious and nuanced pieces. He sang “Pants.” A song that repeats “I’m gonna take off my pants” for three and a half minutes. It does make sense that he chose to do that. Because what can a piano player who doesn’t get up and dance, whose songs are too poetic and nuanced for prime time, who isn’t a career love-song crooner, do to be noticed on mainstream TV? Threaten to take off his pants? Throw stools like a monkey?

  OUR TURN TO RIDE THE BULL

  AS BEN FOLDS FIVE GOT our turn in the music-business rodeo, riding our stylistically schizophrenic album from diminutive shitbox in Chapel Hill to the top of radio charts, we found ourselves with the opposite of the Randy Newman problem. We’d been rocking, snarking, distorting, and ironic-ing our way through the rock dives of America, but we were about to be defined by a painfully introspective and vulnerable song about teenage abortion.

  In the summer of 1997, Sony 550 released “Brick” to the same radio format that had given moderate play to our first two rockers from Whatever and Ever Amen, “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” and “Battle of Who Could Care Less.” Their accompanying rock videos each cost literally one hundred times the budget of our first album. This new format that had embraced us was called “modern rock,” and it specialized in indie rock gone mainstream. It was all-rock, all-grunge, all-day. Modern-rock stations were receptive to playing “Brick,” which would be the format’s first piano ballad, but the listeners weren’t so convinced. It seemed that a wintry-sounding tale of abortion set on the “day after Christmas” wasn’t an appropriate soundtrack for the sun-and-fun of June 1997, and so the song was pulled after a couple weeks of lukewarm reception. Our label blamed themselves for having promoted “Brick” in the wrong season.

  Whatever and Ever Amen–era publicity photo

  By the time “Brick” sank (like the title) on summertime rock radio, we had been hitting it nonstop for quite a while. So we were given a month off as the business folks figured out what to do about the state of our album, which was stalled with no real radio traction. We needed a breakthrough. Touring with a baby grand wasn’t going to be sustainable, and the label wasn’t going to keep investing forever in a band who didn’t yield a significant hit.

  Time off sounded miserable to me, but Robert and Darren had the right idea and took the break to get their heads together. I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a whole month. I couldn’t sit still, and I was still reeling from divorce. So, what the hell. I decided to record the pain away and made an experimental LP under the moniker “Fear of Pop” in Bloomington, Indiana. It was a sort of “techno” album, except with all organic instruments. There were no synthesizers or programming. I performed layers of repeating beats and riffs on mostly acoustic instruments, running around the studio like an insane child as Caleb chased me with mics. One song was a faux seventies’ cop-show theme, and to keep it real I had assistant engineers doing donuts in their cars around the parking lot as we recorded it. We even beat up an old truck with baseball bats and recorded that too. There were distorted pianos, backward drums, and singing through a talk box like Peter Frampton. The talk box is a tube that blows loud distorted guitar into your face so you can mouth the words and make the guitar speak. It vibrates your teeth a lot.

  The raw tracks of Fear of Pop were a clusterfuck of sound that was unlistenable. But that was just the first part of the plan. The intention was to complete the composition by muting select tracks—the way you would carve a sculpture out of a log. A subtractive approach. The mixes became the performance, which was what had fascinated me about the new techno music in the nineties. This side project consumed each hour of every day for my entire month off. I didn’t believe in processing emotions and getting proper sleep. I’m still glad I made the album.

  * * *

  —

  During that month, Alan and the label decided they would rerelease “Brick” in the colder months that the song itself evokes. Polly Anthony flew to the big radio stations herself, which was unusual for a label head. That was some real and rare commitment. Sony 550 just acted like we hadn’t released the single in the first place and pressed RESTART. It worked. I’m convinced that without their persistence we would have been headed home with a dead record by the new year.

  When we resumed touring in December, Alan came backstage after a show at American University, in Washington, D.C., to tell us we were invited to play Saturday Night Live. That’s the only moment I can remember thinking, Damn, I’ve actually made it. It seemed the fix was in and “Brick” would be a hit. SNL had been the pivotal TV performance for every rock act I’d loved when I was a kid. I held this in higher esteem than I would have any award, opportunity, or endorsement. This one counted.

  Our SNL performance was on January 10, 1998. We were told that the music-biz machinery would kick in right after SNL, and what was already a shit-ton of airplay would quadruple. I cringed. “How many times can radio listeners stand to listen to that song?” I asked.

  “A lot more,” Alan explained. “A real hit gets pummeled with airplay. Just wait!”

  * * *

  —

  After performing a ploddingly unlistenable version of “Brick” on SNL, I kicked myself all the way through the cast after-party. Not even being seated next to Samuel L. Jackson was sufficient consolation for having performed so badly on such an important show. I don’t think I said a word to anyone. I just sulked. Our crowd pleaser “One Angry Dwarf” had been cut last minute, due to a rare instance of SNL running overtime, which sucks because we killed that song in the dress rehearsal. But oh well. It seemed their Titanic movie skit went too long and we would have to make our stand on live network television with a quiet ballad on upright piano. Going out to play “Brick” cold fucked me up badly. In trying to keep the tempo slow and make sure the song was sad, we went way too far, and the song dragged. My nerves kicked in harder mid-song as I realized how bad I was sucking on this legendary show. As we hit the bridge of “Brick” I just knew we were finished for good.

  Following the Saturday Night Live after-party was the traditional Saturday Night Live after-after party, which I also attended, continuing my drinking and mental self-laceration. And by sunrise, I, along with a panel of drunken entertainment strangers, had decided to fly to Australia for my next month off—I would leave that day.

  “Just do it!” One of the crowd egging me on was a girl with whom I’d recently gone on a few dates. And she offered to go with me. Why not? I booked the flights as soon as I stumbled back to my hotel room at 9 A.M. I called Alan from the airport, bitching incessantly about how our career was cooked because “Brick” was the wrong song. I told him that we were “going to be like that fucking Walking in Memphis guy!” (As if being Marc Cohn, a brilliant songwriter, was some kind of death warrant.) I then called my answering machine back home to hear the long train of friends and family who called to say that they’d just seen me on SNL—and asking if I was okay. See? Cooked.

  Once I got to Australia I rented a car to drive all the way around the perimeter and face some of that quiet time I’d been avoiding. The girl I’d flown down with decided to go in a different direction from me. She mainly wanted to see Ayers Rock. I drove off to do a lot of sitting on cliffs alone with a notebook to try and get my head sorted. Because something in my life wasn’t quite working. I was getting big prizes like I’d always wanted, but I was more and more miserable. How clichéd, I thought. And I’ve always hated whine
rs. Especially successful rock whiners. I figured clichéd solutions for clichéd problems.

  I drove the coast of Australia with my Moleskine and camera, climbing around on cliffs, taking rides in hot-air balloons, even trying a bungee jump, and sleeping in cheap hotel rooms above pubs. I was a young man at sea—a good melodramatic metaphor for a lost young man. Marriage wasn’t the right anchor, and I must have written that a hundred times in my little journal. I was aware I should avoid relationships for a while. But I did contemplate the possibility of having kids. Even without a partner, maybe. I could ditch the piano tuner and hire a nanny. That might give me a real human concern outside of my work and save me from being a robot. Ah, maybe not, I thought. Hell, I don’t even have time for a dog.

  Of course, old patterns die hard, and at the very end of the trip I met a yoga teacher in Adelaide by the name of Frally. After less than forty-eight hours together, I heard myself as I blurted out, “We should have kids!” She seemed to think that was pretty funny. Well, at least I hadn’t proposed. Yet. Before I returned to the U.S.A. to ride the bull up the pop charts, I heard a report on the radio of an American tourist who had to be airlifted from Ayers Rock due to heatstroke and severe sunburn. I found out later it was the girl I’d flown over with.

  * * *

  —

  The following eighteen months are a blur, and what I remember mostly makes me sad. But there are a few things that stick out that make me smile. Like Mama co-hosting a Mother’s Day MTV show called “Mother’s Cut” with Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s mom. The two moms got on amazingly, and Mama was a natural! She said she thought I “sounded like Elvis.” Classic! I also have fond memories of touring with Beck and Elliott Smith. Once I asked Elliott if he could play his song “Angeles” at some point on the tour. I loved that song—I still get goosebumps just hearing the title. Elliott said he was sorry, but his band hadn’t learned that one for this tour. A couple hours later, in our shared dressing room separated by only a thin curtain, Elliott played the whole thing for me solo, so I could hear on the other side.

  I also have a fond memory of reading our first really bad review in the U.K. It was of a live show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Most of the piece was dedicated to personal jabs at me. The way I talked, what I wore, how the audience and I deserved each other for being such twats, my sagging weak chin and wimpy shoulders. This reviewer didn’t let up on me for two pages. After Robert got through the brutal review, getting more and more upset with each word, completely steamed and ready to fight, he exploded, “What an asshole! He never mentioned me once!” There was a pause in the airport and then the three of us laughed until tears came. Maybe we were just tired.

  In all honesty, the chart-climbing, platinum-collecting, famous-people-meeting, and world-seeing blur of 1998–1999 doesn’t go in my “good times” file. Now, with a bit more experience, it’s easy for me to understand why this was. And the reason is not that damn sexy. In fact, it’s downright elementary: I was just tired and I needed some sleep and good advice. I needed to slow down and even probably get some help. It’s something you need sometimes in a world that moves so quickly. Self-actualization is a bitch, and so is jet lag—two years of perpetual internal clock abuse. There are some things that can’t be solved with a notebook on a cliff.

  I don’t want to sound like a little whiny bitch. I can certainly appreciate how amazing all this was. How fortunate we were. It was a trip of a lifetime. But the success felt like a detour, oddly. A fluke. When I first sat down to write this book and reflected on this peak time of Ben Folds Five, it was difficult to identify what lessons, if any, could be gleaned and passed on. Hmmmm, I learned how to do interviews with wacky morning DJs, how recoupable budgets work, and where to do my laundry in Paris. I wasn’t so sure I learned much more. I was mostly on autopilot, in survival mode.

  * * *

  —

  By mid-1998, Frally had come from Australia to join me on tour with Beck. By the end of 1998, as Whatever and Ever Amen was winding down, an exhausted Ben Folds Five had a stack of awards waiting in various cardboard boxes back home. We attended the MTV awards, and our nomination was announced while I was in the bathroom trying to stuff toilet paper into my fancy new shoes, which were making my heel bleed. So it’s probably best that we lost that one to Green Day, because security wasn’t going to let me back in while the cameras were rolling anyway. On that trip to L.A., we found out Frally was pregnant. I guess this is what I’d asked for, brooding on those cliffs, the way I’d asked to be a rock star when I was fifteen. This package was definitely on its way, due to arrive in nine months, in July 1999. Would it be a boy or a girl, we wondered? Well, as it turns out, it would be both! Twins! A triple anchor, an instant family to keep the piano-playing robot from floating into space. And then, of course, there was another important due date: our next album.

  With an immovable, already announced release date for early 1999—and not a single song written—we headed to L.A., grew mustaches, and got to work.

  REINHOLD

  AS WE EMBARKED ON OUR third studio album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, I arrived at Sound City in Burbank with a notebook full of song fragments. There’s a world of difference between fragments, good ideas, and actual songs. It’s called craft, and I’d brought little of it to the session. I was tired of crafting typical verse/chorus kinds of songs, so I did what songwriters typically do when trying to avoid being typical. I went prog (for the uninitiated, this refers to progressive rock, a genre of awesome self-indulgence that dates back to the mid-1960s). I began gluing these fragments together as one long song, loosely connected by a few common melodic and lyrical themes that weaved in and out. It was a revolutionary approach, except of course that the Beatles had done the same thing on Abbey Road thirty years before. Still, the fragments themselves had loads of soul.

  The long string of fragments had its moments, but the band and Caleb were right when, after a few weeks of this expensive experimentation, they urged me to consider dividing the material into normal songs. You know, the usual four-minute ones with beginnings, middles, and ends. As I struggled to have new material to record each day, coming in hours before the band, tearing things down and rebuilding, rewriting, and adding new stuff, Robert and Darren became understandably frustrated. Most of these fragments had no words and no titles, so I referred to them by time signature and key. Like, “Let’s go back and work on that 6/8 dirge in C.”

  But Darren gave us the shot in the arm we needed when he brought in a finished beautiful soft guitar song he’d written for our friend Stacy, a great musician who’d recently died of an accidental overdose. It was called “Magic.” It was a completed melody with words that I could sink my teeth into, rearranging it for synth, timpani, and upright piano. The proper way around! Oh! But of course! Writing the song first, and then arranging it. I needed to be reminded of what it was like to just sing a simple great song, without faffing around with bits and pieces, composing and orchestrating it like it was an unfinished symphony. We recorded “Magic” mostly live, vocal and all, in the studio, and as we went on Christmas break, I knew that I needed to get back to the business of actual songwriting.

  In the two weeks of holiday break I wrote “Mess,” “Jane,” and “Your Redneck Past” from scratch. I started another song called “Carrying Cathy,” which I couldn’t quite finish in time for our deadline, as well as two others, “Zak and Sara” and “Jesusland,” both of which I finished later for solo albums. Those new songs that I finished over Christmas, plus Darren’s brilliant “Magic,” and the various reworkings of my abandoned frag-prog symphony got us to the thirty-eight minutes of music we needed for an album. Just under the wire. It was a short but somehow heartfelt and interesting album. The record is a snapshot that evokes the insanity of it all, my struggle not to be a robot, and how it felt when the three of us finally got to escape back into pure music. I’m proud of it, and however we got th
ere, my fragments ended up being real songs.

  As we were mixing our record in New York, Frally fell dangerously ill in her first trimester and ended up in the hospital on the Upper East Side. Being an Australian citizen who had booked a spontaneous ticket to the United States to hang out with a piano player, she was now within days of her visa deadline. She was half conscious, living on a drip, and in grave danger of losing the twins. I was never so despondent in my life as the night a nurse flippantly mentioned that “Yeah, you’ll probably lose the babies.” But in the morning, their little hearts were still beating. My nights during the Reinhold mix and mastering sessions were spent sleeping in a chair next to Frally’s hospital bed and cabbing back down to the session when the sun came up. Those two weeks in the hospital cost us both our life’s savings. Dear reader, always get traveler’s insurance. Really.

  Barely well enough to walk, Frally managed to catch her plane back to Australia the day before her visa expired. I finished the mix and the mastering with the band in New York and headed to Adelaide. The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner juuuust made the deadline for its release in April 1999.