A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  Rap musicians understand the power of spontaneous songwriting. Freestyling is still essential to the art form of rap, while classical music has left freestyling behind for the most part. But it used to be the way a classical musician earned his stripes. Nineteenth-century composers regularly dueled with other pianists at what were called “salons.” They created pieces from thin air on the spot, as they tried to outdo one another creatively and technically. The jazzers have taken improvisation to a high art, but I wouldn’t quite call it freestyling. Jazz musicians generally improvise over already existing song structures, which they call “the head.” They might play one pass of “Someday My Prince Will Come” and then continue the chord structure as they take turns improvising over it. But the kind of freestyling that connects Biggie to Beethoven requires creating the whole ball of wax in the moment. When it’s over, poof, it’s gone. Next.

  Freestyling an RTB with orchestras is a nightly lesson in orchestration for me. I can hear the result immediately as I dictate my spontaneous ideas to musicians. Few budding orchestrators like myself get to hear their ideas on the spot, to determine if, for instance, the flute might be heard in unison with all the violins, or if the French horns would be better in tighter harmonies or broader intervals. A computer simulation only gets you so close. You have to actually hear it with real players. Oddly, I find that my riskier, more audacious on-the-spot ideas often play better in an orchestra than some of the more considered ones that were auditioned with the computer beforehand. A good reminder when composing: Imagine big. Imagine beyond those tools.

  I’ve mined the recordings of hundreds of RTBs and completed some of them, like “Effington,” “Cologne,” and “Hiroshima,” for albums. All of these songs were surprisingly complete the moment they were improvised, as a quick YouTube search would corroborate. They had verses, choruses, and sometimes complete forms, all done on the spot. I just needed to give them a little help to get them polished enough for a record. But, like most freestyling, most RTBs were meant for the people in the room. This was the spirit in which they were improvised. As badly as I might want to make songs out of all of them, we can’t be too greedy. There’s always another idea. You can turn the faucet on anytime you like.

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  I recently taught a class in songwriting at a music retreat, and I had each songwriter do an RTB in front of the class. I’d throw the songwriters a title and say, “Go!” They did great! It is not a matter of genius to do this, as I prove each night at my own concerts. Something just kicks in. It’s intuitive, natural. You just need to be in front of an audience, with no way out, with the intention of saying something, anything. It can begin by the repeating of the phrase “I’m scared of improvising,” over two changing chords. You’ll get tired of singing that over and over, and you’ll naturally discover and explain more of what you mean, and in doing so will develop your song. Who knows where it will go? We find out together, which is the way any song should feel.

  And nobody expects an improvised song to be a masterpiece, so keep that in mind and maybe you’ll relax a little. You and the audience will live in that moment together for the ups and downs. And since you can’t edit those lulls out, you will have to own those lulls and find your way up. This is a gift. It teaches us that dynamics don’t always have to be about literal sonic loud and soft. Dynamics can be about the tone of the content musically and lyrically. Anyway, a song can’t actually be “all killer no filler.” That’s not the way life works. We can’t just edit out the boring bits of our lives—the ones that led to the exciting ones. Those were necessary. When freestyling, you have to accept that you have found yourself down in the valley, own it, and do what’s necessary to get to the peak. As an audience, we appreciate being in on the journey.

  Then there’s form, something we take for granted in songwriting. Where did that come from? How can it be that while freestyling intuitively I keep stumbling into intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge and so on, which is textbook form? It could be that I’m trained that way, but I can feel something else going on. Form has evolved because it’s intuitive to organize your thoughts in real time when you’re communicating. This is more obvious when you’re forced to create onstage. It all suddenly makes sense. For instance, if you’re the one onstage, and I shout at you, “Rock this bitch!” you’ll most likely instinctively go for a simple repeated riff on your instrument. It’s what we normally do to get it going. To the listener, this riff sets the backdrop and tone. We assume the artist knows what’s next. But for the freestyler, that riff is just buying time to figure out what to do. The jazzers call this a “vamp.” The classical musicians call it “ostinato.” Form and proper song development, as you discover when you improvise a song before an audience, is not only for the benefit of the listener; it happens to be the natural way an idea rolls off the tongue, as it comes from the heart, filtered through the brain, when you’re just trying to discover and communicate a point musically.

  I’ve been Rocking This Bitch for more than fifteen years now, and I imagine I’ll keep that up until I shit the bed one day—if for no other reason than I keep learning. I know it’s what all the cool old men say, but, really, we’re all students for life. It’s important to try new things. What’s newer than performing a song that didn’t exist until that moment?

  FOLLOW THE BROWN

  DON’T THINK FOR A MOMENT that I believe a song that’s blurted out onstage is the best we can do. I’m actually an impossible stickler, and a painfully slow songwriter. I sometimes sit on an unfinished song for years. Like “The Luckiest,” or the title track from my most recent studio album, So There. I had originally planned for “So There” to be a centerpiece on the 2005 record Songs for Silverman. At the time I was going to call that album Death of the Cool, in response to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool. The vamp of the song “So There” was going to open Death of the Cool with an overt tip of the hat to Miles’s “Someday My Prince Will Come.” But Songs for Silverman ended up going in a different direction, and I didn’t get “So There” finished anyway. Albums and years went by and I kept not finishing that damn song—until I finally did. That’s a whole decade on a song—about as far from freestyling as it gets.

  The most common question I’m asked about songwriting is whether the words or lyrics come first. And that’s a reasonable question. Hell, I ask my songwriter friends the same thing. We all want to know what the spark was. What was the first syllable the writer uttered before the musical sentence was complete? What stuck to the page first? For me, it’s almost always music. I believe my subconscious clues me in to my feelings by expressing them abstractly through music—a few notes, a musical sentence, that I don’t yet understand. I will follow the music to the edge of my lyrical comfort zone, because I firmly believe the music is about something and that’s for me to decipher. Often, the music fools me into writing something I’d rather not have revealed lyrically.

  The spark of a song can come at the oddest time. Maybe at a stoplight, a meeting, or in bed at 4 A.M. For me, there’s usually a subtle glow in the air just before the notes start to come. A sense that something is around the corner. Like the farm animals in a disaster movie right before an earthquake, who seem to know what’s coming before the humans do. It feels the way light often looks at “magic hour,” before sunset, when it suddenly seems that anywhere you point the camera will make a good picture. That’s the kind of feeling that tells me to watch for some music. It’s coming soon.

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  If freestyling onstage teaches us that you can always turn on the faucet and that some kind of music will always flow, then songwriting in solitude confirms that the water can sometimes flow muddy brown. Non-potable melody. You have to let it run for a while, until it begins to run clear. Yes, it hurts to hear the brown ideas coming from the center of your soul, but you don’t have to show them to anybody. Don’t let brown get you down
. Here’s a common bit of advice I’ve heard from every songwriter I’ve ever met: Just keep moving.

  I personally do not believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. It’s just that we don’t like everything that comes out. When our self-judgment takes over, it shames us into submission and we shut off the faucet. We say we have no ideas. No. We have ideas, but we aren’t willing to fess up to how bad they might be. But, really, who gives a damn? Own them. They suck, and they came from you. Fine. That’s not a crime, that’s normal. Take it easy on yourself. Remember that you can always write something, it’s just that sometimes it’s shitty! Let it be so! And then follow that brown until it runs clear.

  A great musician and producer named Pat Leonard told me that it’s important to know when to send your inner editor away. His advice is another version of my faucet metaphor. Maybe it works better for you. When you’re creating, make a deal with your inner editor—that judgmental but necessary part of your psyche that keeps telling you what sucks. Tell this trigger-happy editor in your mind that you need them to step out of the room while you create. You need to be free to follow all ideas, bad and good. You need to create with impunity—alone. However! The other half of the deal is that the editor gets to come back the next day—with a chain saw. Your editor will get to go to town on what you’ve written. The editor may even throw the whole song in the trash. But not now. Now you must create.

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  I consider myself a part-time artist. I’m not always all that damn creative, so when I’m not in artist mode I store up observations like a squirrel for the winter. I try and keep my antennae up so that I have a lot of extra pieces with which to complete a song when I’m an artist again. There’s a time to collect data, a time to run on the fuel of inspiration, and then there’s the heavy lifting at the end—the craft.

  The craft might not seem all that damn sexy, but you need compositional tricks, and some understanding of music theory, formal or informal, to knock a song together. I cannot accept the notion that knowing less about music can be a good thing, though I recognize everyone has their own capacity for the technical stuff. Some of us stick with three chords, while others go full Schoenberg on it. You should learn as much music as you can stand. You’ll know when cramming in one more scale will break your brain. And until your brain is broken, keep cramming, keep learning, keep storing up for winter.

  Some songwriters like to say it’s all about feel and that too much musical vocabulary or time spent in craft will kill the emotion. To them, it’s about smoking a joint and telling the truth in three chords. At times I agree. Others feel it’s a process of consideration and requires technique and a grand palette from which to paint, because big feelings require a big vocabulary. I’ve found that to be true as well. I’ve often sat on these funny songwriting panels where I wondered if the two camps might come to blows over how a song is best written. What we can all agree on is that songwriting is about communicating. In real life, we might find the best way to communicate something difficult to a friend is doing it while drunk at a bar, in a single blurt. I fuckin’ love you, brah! Other times it requires deleting and revising an important email for days on end, while quoting Voltaire or The Bridges of Madison County to get the point across. It’s whatever it takes to just say it. How you feel, what you saw, what life is about. My experience is that if I continue to stubbornly swing into the dark, if I just follow the brown until it runs clear, any feeling will eventually find its corresponding notes and words, and be set free.

  VINCIBILITY

  AT THE END OF MY last solo piano show of 2002, not a drop left in the tank, I found myself struggling to walk in a straight line just to make it offstage. Post-show applause ringing in my ears, my peripheral vision began to darken and the horizon spun. I did not—did not—want to wobble and fall down in front of people. Fuck that. Steady, Folds! I ordered my knees to get me a few more steps. And they did—just.

  I collapsed into the arms of a nice security man backstage. I remember him telling me I was “one tough motherfucker”—a kind thing to say to someone who doesn’t even have the strength to walk. He’d been aware of my 104 fever when he’d told me “good luck” as I’d walked out onstage at the beginning of the show. He’d seen me with ice-water towels on my forehead, inching the fever down one degree from 105 before stubbornly bounding out for a two-and-a-half-hour set. After all, I was invincible.

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  The previous night in Detroit my fever had been just as high, but damned if I was going to cancel a sold-out State Theatre show. I muscled through and even signed autographs in the freezing cold for forty-five minutes before driving to Chicago. Now here I was at Chicago’s Vic Theatre, being carried down the stairs like a limp rag by a 250-pound stranger with a shaved head. Tour over and done.

  Self-portrait, just before pneumonia, late 2002

  I was devastated and humiliated that I was being sent home. Goddamn it, I sold out next week’s New York’s Beacon Theatre show with just a piano, y’all! It was to have been my big “I told you so” gig. Only a year prior I had accepted the professional prognosis that a solo piano tour would be the nail in the career coffin. But I did it anyway—no band, no production, very little press. The Beacon! Six times the size of the venues I’d played when I’d started the tour. Sorry to gloat, but, Christ, it was an uphill battle of a year, and I do love to prove naysayers wrong, even if I had been heard to say a few nays myself in moments of uncertainty.

  How do some musical artists become “career artists,” artists that survive the changing trends and generations, that stick around for decades? Who knows? Aside from talent, it’s probably mostly luck, and a dash of unreasonable stubbornness. I probably should have been dropped from my label in 2002, because commercial radio pretty much dried up for me that year, and everyone around me was getting dropped. But as Rockin’ the Suburbs seemed over and done, some noncommercial under-the-radar radio stations, like WFUV at Fordham University in New York City, kept my career going. Sometimes when you persist past the expiry date, if you’re lucky, you can catch an unlikely break.

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  During my 2002 piano tour, whenever I had a week off, I flew back home to Australia to be with my kids. It was usually a twenty-hour plane trip each way. When that proved impossible to maintain, I decided to move the whole family to Nashville, where I also took on a major studio business I had stumbled upon while mixing the Ben Folds Live album. I assumed the lease at the historic RCA Studio—it had been sitting empty for quite a while. Large studio spaces were less in demand as home recording and plug-ins, which simulated big rooms, became common. Moving a family from one country to another and taking over a new business put a few more boulders in my backpack. But it was all exciting stuff.

  I might have made it through this incredibly jam-packed year if only I hadn’t put myself on a rigid cleanse diet early in the fall of 2002, just as we were moving to the new place in Nashville. I thought maybe I’d purify myself, like all the cool kids were doing, and I went all in —as I do. The peak of the cleanse was a one-week fast of water, carrot juice, and raw almonds. That’s it. I was down to 120 pounds. Upon returning to tour, with its shared van drives of hundreds of miles a night, I stubbornly stuck to only raw vegan food. And if I couldn’t find that while traveling, I just had water or a piece of fruit and got on with it. Now, recovering in Nashville after my dramatic made-for-television movie collapse in Chicago, I lay in bed with a dangerously high fever and reflected on the idiocy of dietary extremism.

  For my first few days in bed, I felt like an otherwise healthy person dealing with an annoying infection. That’s the way sickness had always felt to me before—like something in the way. But this became something else, something I’d never felt before. I was struck with total lack of confidence that I would ever recover on my own. And at that point I submitted to a visit to the do
ctor, who confirmed that I had advanced pneumonia.

  It turns out there are some things that just can’t be outrun or buried beneath work. Cheap lessons weren’t sinking in, so the cost was rising. I bent over for shots of antibiotics fit for a horse and followed doctor’s orders. And I actually stopped everything I was doing. I surrendered. Something I hadn’t done before. But now I had to. I was now officially Vincible.

  Oddly, I file this month in bed under “pleasant times.” It was probably the first quiet time I’d had since that month spent on Australian cliffs with a notebook in 1998. The doctor warned of seizures that might occur because of the sustained high fever, but luckily that didn’t happen. However, fevered and weak, I did find myself a bit emotionally vulnerable. I’m ashamed to say I shed tears at a fucking life-insurance commercial, there alone in my room. I also cried at two points during a Ronald Reagan biography. Especially when the horse trainer had to tell the Gipper his horse-riding days were over. I should have just had the seizure. It would have been more dignified.

  I had time to read while I lay helplessly in bed waiting for good antibiotics to prevail over evil biotics. I had time to stare at the ceiling and shudder as I reflected on a couple of times we damn near died in that touring van, driving through snow in the mountains too many late nights. I had time to write letters and call family and friends. I even had a moment to clear up some confusion I’d caused over a practical joke I staged earlier in the tour.