Good Life Project - Ben Folds | Music, Creativity & Nonconformity

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Acclaimed musician, composer and creative visionary, Ben Folds, has created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes mega-hit pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, and countless collaborations. He currently serves as the first-ever Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Ben's first book “A Dream About Lightning Bugs,” is a story-driven meditation on art, life, and music.You can find Ben Folds at: Instagram | Website-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Ben Folds, widely regarded as one of the major music influences of our generation. He's created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Folds 5, solo albums, so many collaborative albums, starting as a drummer and then a piano player and eventually a singer and a band member. For over a decade now, he has performed with some of the world's greatest symphony orchestras as well, and currently serves as the first ever artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. And in addition to solo rock and orchestral touring and scoring and getting involved in cinema and TV now,

Foles also branched into the writing world with a new book, A Dream About Lightning Bugs, that debuted as a New York Times bestseller, dropping you into sort of the pivotal moments and stories that have shaped his fiercely engaged life of nonconformity and perpetual creation and collaboration and reinvention. You might also recognize him as a judge for five seasons on NBC's The Sing-Off. And Ben is also an outspoken champion for arts education and music therapy funding in our nation's public schools. And we dive into all of this in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Let's take a bit of a step back in time and tell a little bit of the story that's brought you in and out of here, and then kind of circle around to what you're up to these days also. Grew up in North Carolina. That's correct. Greensboro. Greensboro. Well, it was in Salem, actually. I was born in Greensboro, and then we moved when I was four.

Yeah. Music touches down for you at a really young age, but it seems like actually before you were ever playing it, you were just listening. And it sounds like even from the earliest stages, kind of nonstop on repeat and a huge number of hours. when I was two years old. That's a lot. I mean, on one hand, it shows somewhat of an obsessive streak that's been part of my life. And on the other side, I think it's interesting for how much musical information and associative memories you can cram into a two-year-old's head. And I feel I benefited from that. Yeah. I mean, it's funny cause I know parents now will start to play certain music to their kids in utero trying to sort of like, you know, figure out is this going to in some way affect them or do something to their

brain. I have friends who've just done it because they really want their kids to love classic rock. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. We all suspect that the stuff that the parents play the kids is probably going to have the

opposite effect for some time, you know? But yeah, I mean, exposure to music early seems to be pretty good for a brain. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting also to talk about that at this moment in time, seems to be pretty good for a brain. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also to talk about that at this moment in time when you look at a lot of education. And what's one of the first things that gets stripped out of it, especially a lot of public school education, especially in areas where the school district is challenged financially?

It's like music goes. That is precisely where it happens, and it affects the kids that need it the most. Same old story. Music education, if you look at a graph, there are really pretty efficiently drawn graphs in order to understand these things. And if you look at it from the time I was a kid, it does decline slightly overall, but not that much. But where it's really declining is in poor neighborhoods. And that's a damn shame because those are the neighborhoods where the dropout rates

could be really quickly affected positively by music. That's been shown. If you put a little bit of arts, a little bit of music in the uh in the curriculum your dropout rate goes down every my experience is as i travel around the country we do these little things called a master class not really a master class but uh it's just sometimes they turn into a little town hall if anything you know it's like master class q a really is what they are uh often bringing a public school music teacher in to talk as well. And this is for fans, people coming to my shows. And I've just found just the wildest swinging variety of communities.

Some of them, the music programs are better than we've ever seen a music program, even in a public school. And some of them are absolutely nothing at all. You have, like, on one hand, you'll have one county where, you know, you might have some kid, essentially, 20-year-old, new music teacher, straight out of college, and they're driving a hatchback around with broken instruments to all of the schools, just trying to get something going.

And on the other hand, especially, you know, if, if, if, if it's, if the place can afford it, then you've got the opposite. You've got a state-of-the-art music curriculum with singing two orchestras, all kinds of stuff. So it's, it's, it's the disparity that bothers me. Yeah. I mean, it's so bizarre to me also. I get their budget constraints, but at the same time, if people are trying to figure out like, what are the things we keep and what are the things we jettison? It's so bizarre to me also. I get there are budget constraints, but at the same time, if people are trying to figure out what are the things we keep and what are the things we jettison, even if you want to get scientific, there's clear research which shows how important music is to psychological and emotional development, to academic performance even. And that's the thing's a really good thing for us to hang on to facts here in this era, because the data is pretty clear.

It's good for test scores. It's good for well-being. It's good for dropout rates. And it's good for making well-rounded, happy humans. But the incentive is for administrators and principals and anyone involved in the school, when they see the test scores going down, panic kicks in. That's the best I can tell. Panic kicks in and they go, okay, the music's already costing a couple bucks.

We're cutting that out. We're going to stick their head in the books for another 15 minutes a day and hope to Christ that we keep our jobs. And I just think that's what people do when we panic. We jettison the facts and we jettison the data and the experience and there's no steady hand on it. Also, you can't really account for the social divide that causes people to double down on things that they haven't considered just because they're on the other side of an issue. And so we have to watch the way we preach these things.

It needs to remain nonpartisan because anything that becomes partisan suddenly is not subject anymore to reason. And this so far, I think that all citizens on either side of the political divide want their kids to have music and arts in their education. They just differ on who's going to pay for it. And honestly, it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. That's something that some of my friends more on the left will be quick to tell me to hush about. Don't tell them it doesn't cost any money. They won't give you anything.

But the truth is, if you really want these kids to have some music, they can sing. They can slap their knees and dance. They can do things that are inherently musical. They can listen to music and talk about it. I prefer we had instruments and they worked. And you had a teacher that was able to direct a band. That's better. But if it's not going to happen in this moment, I would prefer to see the next four or eight years of kids not go through a system with no music and more art at all just because we couldn't get them the instruments.

I sat on the floor when I was a kid because we had an experimental school. It wasn't that we were poor, but we sat on the floor. And every 30 minutes, we did a music exercise then went back to studying. No kidding. It was like it was – and they would draw it on the staff, on the chalkboard. It was a little music staff permanently on the chalkboard, and they would draw in. Today, it's ta-ti-ti-ta, ta-ti-ti-ta. And we clap.

We might sing a song, and then we just go back to work. And I have to think that that was really good for me. Yeah, that's so interesting, just kind of dripping it in here and there in little micro moments almost. Yeah, if the teachers, if in order to teach school, you have to know a little music, good for the teachers. And then the kids are in a class that may be a history class or just a general education class, and they take a break. The same thing with just going out to play in physical education. If nothing else, the taking the break has to mean something and that it's music or that it's art is even better for them. Yeah. I mean, and not even getting to the fact that this is a really

powerful form of expression for whatever is going on inside your head at any age, let alone a kid, especially going through angsty years. And it's like, okay, so I can express this in a lot of different ways. Some constructive and creative and some destructive and harmful. Oh, that is an excellent argument and point for music and art in education young is that music and all forms of art are expression and they're communication. And if a kid doesn't yet have a 700-word vocabulary, certainly they're expressing themselves in an artistic way. And in fact, I more and more believe that music, maybe the way that we teach it, should be adjusted a little bit to take into account that it is expression, that everyone can do it. Because we tend to start copying music first.

Copying is great for technique and for someone who's going to get really good at it, and it's necessary. But right off the bat, it might be worth pointing out to kids that they hear music all day long. And the car horns and someone dragging a trash can down the alley, you hear it speeding up, slowing down. Then when someone gets angry, they speak quicker and higher and they yell. To go into all those things as music and say, what's your song today? And the kid might go, I want to go home. Boom, we got a song. Suddenly it's expression and story, which is really the way our brain is wired.

Yeah, so it's almost more about musicality rather than sort of like classically defined music. Yeah. I mean, I think that music as an art form is hijacking what three quarters of our brain uses anyway in order to tell us a story about the days that we can survive. Certainly people evolved. There's a reason that the brain lights up when exposed to music in a way that it doesn't when exposed to anything else, including speech. There's only a small part of the brain that lights up to create the thought, to express the thought verbally, and then to listen. But when it comes to music, you just almost can't keep track of it. It's a Christmas tree, as a friend of mine who's a neurologist

likes to say about what happens. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree, as a friend of mine who's a neurologist likes to say about what happens. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. So I feel like music is hijacking that evolution of our brain in order to enjoy it, in order to tell the story on a higher artistic level. But that doesn't mean that children should expect to achieve that unless they are meant to do that. Otherwise, they should enjoy music for all the reasons that music was intended, and they don't have to become a professional. So teaching them music technique before you teach them that it's expression, I'm not so sure.

I know a lot of professionals who still haven't figured out that it's expression. And I think that their best performances are oddly then when where if you look at the industry and so much recording is done, you know, like on the Pro Tools grid and auto-tune and it's like, everything is not about just let out what you need to let out and the way it needs to be let out. But how do we make this as technically perfect as possible? How does everybody fall into the exact same formula and the exact same grid so that we can come as close to possible as believing we've got something that's commercially viable. And it's like it flows through from being taught from the youngest kid to what's happening in the industry today. It's like it's rejecting the humanity side of it. Yeah.

I mean, you give people a chance and we will conform to fit in to survive. And when you give people every tool at our disposal in order to achieve that, of course we're going to do it. Further, I think that the menus lower the creative resolution incredibly. Your creative resolution personally is we don't know how much you can imagine. It could be anything. The issue becomes solving the problem. So if I thought, well, I would like to just jump into the air and fly to Mars, well, I can imagine that. That's incredible creative resolution. Can I solve that problem to get there? Probably not by myself. But when you start to get the solutions before you have the imagination of what you're going to do. So if someone says,

here's five plugins and five grids and things that you could put your music on first, you haven't yet decided that you're going to fly to Mars. First of all, you need to think of, you need to allow your imagination to lead the way and then use those tools in the form of a grid or whatever, hijack those, make those your bitch as it were, and make the music out of it. But the more tools we get with menus and the more that menu stuff happens, then it's no surprise. Your hands look pretty much like most people's hands. So if I sit down at the piano and play the first three chords that come to mind, and I decide to write a song around that, then I'm allowing the piano to kind of dither my creative resolution. And so it's not just menus. It's also an instrument.

If you sat down on a guitar, you'll hit the first few bar chords or something that's easy for you. So I think that also is a problem that our tools now are so menu-based that the resolution of creativity is way too low. Yeah. It's like it's constraining what we're even willing to explore as the realm of possibility. Yeah. Why would you explore if the computer is going to suggest or prompt you? It's interesting. A couple years back, I had a conversation with a guy named Milton Glaser, who's this iconic designer who's in his 90s now. He created the iHeartNY logo, co-founded New York Magazine. He's done all this incredible stuff. Still works in his studio. How about that?

And you go into his studio, and he's got people who work in the studio. They have computers. He doesn't touch them. And I asked him about it. And it was almost the identical thing that he said to me. He's like, I don't want my creativity constrained by what I might feel this particular tool can give me. He's like, first, I want to come up with the idea.

Maybe it can actually be actualized or not. But first, let me come up with the idea and then go back to the tools. That's so important. It's important creatively to imagine something, whether or not it's yet possible to actualize it. That's what creativity is. And if you don't sort of dream big with your ideas, if you allow, first of all, say all say okay now where are the four walls first of all uh then you're like okay well i'm out you your ideas will be cut down to size don't worry about that like no matter what it is like it will be and an old engineer uh who one of the greats from a long gone era now said what he misses about making records is the problem solving

because it would come in with an idea of what the record could be and they had to just figure it out the technology was new every day so like well we've only got eight tracks and you have a you have an idea that is going to be beyond that so we'll put four people in one room and we'll you know do what we what we can to make it happen now it's sort of like the idea is the sky's the limit inside the computer. And it tells you what the limit is. It's like, here's the sky and the sky is suspiciously low. Yeah. Let's talk about, I think, a related, but almost like the flip side of that, which is when you have, especially in the early days as, as somebody who is sort of like trying to channel this thing, you hear or you see or you feel this thing in your head.

You know what you want it to sound like. You know what you want it to look like. But you don't yet have command over the craft, the tools, whatever it may be, to actually get it out in the world and look and sound and feel that way. That as an artist, and I'm thinking about in the know, like in the context of you, for example, you get exposed to piano really young and then to drums also and become, take that sort of like semi-obsessive devotion and say, I'm all in on this. Did you all reach a point where your brain is starting to come up with all sorts of things, but you couldn't actually get them out?

Yeah. Well, I mean, that was, you know. I started playing piano when I was nine. But at least three years before that, I was walking around with music in my head and just daydreaming it all the time. And I suspect that I was hearing performances that were probably synthesized, misunderstood, what I'd heard before. I was probably hearing flutes that extended down into the bass range. I might have been hearing singers that were singing in a range that's not humanly possible and instruments that morphed into other instruments. The idea was that it was creating an emotional effect that was making me happy. It was either exhilarating or hypnotizing, something about it. And as I started to learn to play various instruments, my frustration was finding that, solving that problem of getting the things that I was waking up with in my head. I think what that's taught me as a concept, even before I had time to really knock this out too much, was that it was a lot of bored time,

a lot of time focusing on what was possible in my imagination. And that translates now to a lesson which is essentially sit on your hands for a while. Don't jump straight to the tools. Take that time that I got between the time of being six years old and nine years old, like today, travel to the city on train, realize as soon as I got on the train that I left my computer and all my notes to something I'm composing. So I find a notebook, I borrow a pencil, and I just sat there on the train and I imagined all the various passages that I need to work on today. I described them, I listened to them in my head. And when I got off the train, I felt a lot better than I would have had I jumped

to the computer. The computer is important, but I needed to have waited. So luckily I left my bag, hopefully not outside. I just don't know. I don't have my bag with me. It's gone. Somebody's walking around with Ben Folds computer and the notes for the next great piece. Yep. Hopefully not. Did you have a sense when you finished that work on the train, was there any sense that maybe this is actually interesting or different or better than what I had originally had? Had I just opened the computer and continued to iterate on that? You know, it's hard to know. There's just such a time for everything.

When you start throwing stuff up against the canvas, you can't expect to remember every stroke as you did it. So if someone asks you what you just did, sometimes, at least for me, I back up from that music the way someone might back up from a canvas. A little mystery involved, like I'm not sure exactly what the order of this was and where my head was at when I did that. So it is important to almost have that canvas or the computer or a recorder taking the notes and sort of you know memorializing it as it goes along there comes that time but before that and maybe between those periods equally as important is the time where you're just imagining i wouldn't want to tell someone that you know they need to imagine more than they realize or more than they memorialize or, or score or whatever, but do it some, you know, and it's like, and I was heading towards not doing it enough. I feel like if I hadn't left my stuff at home, I wouldn't have

had today to do some really important thinking about some transitions just to sit as if I was listening to the record or sitting in an audience and feeling what it really felt like. I was becoming so impatient about playing with these bits and micro bits of ideas, it probably was time for me to slow down. But I think most of us don't take the time to sit on our hands anymore. And so it was forced today. Yeah. I mean, you just brought up another interesting thing, which is the idea of the part of the process, which is about you getting out of your head what needs to be gotten out. And the part of the process, which is a curiosity about,

and maybe an intention wrapped around, how is this going to land with people who would be in the audience like is this when you're working on something do you strip out that last part um in the early days uh do you is that a factor in your process the last part being how people receive it yeah well you can't control how people feel about things and react to things i I think, you know, the only external issues I think of are I consider anything that I may be doing in what I'm creating that might be causing anyone to fold their arms because the folding of the arms certainly covers the heart. And you're not going to open yourself up to a piece of music if if you have a piece of music and it quotes something does something abruptly and you know it's it's manipulated someone in a way that they they they

don't open themselves up it's kind of hard to explain what that might be i mean in a song it might just simply be just saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. That's not to say that I sanitize things or cater. I just want to make sure that if you're on my planet or genetic, same genetic, whatever brain footprint, if we're all in the same thing, you're going to like what I make. I want that person to have the chance to hear it. And it's real easy to make something in a way that doesn't invite somebody in. That's the only issue. As far as the center of what I make, if someone agrees with it, responds to it, I can't help it if that's negative or positive. So I put myself in the audience mostly. And I do have that

moment where I go, okay, have I screamed in someone's face or have I been too needy up front? Have I not taken my time? So you can create a piece of music that you can't get into. And that's what intros are for. And especially the classical music of the 19th century gives you a lot of time to get there. And now people are like, I don't have time. So now the issue is if you could boil it down to da-da-da-da and just be there. But back in the day, the way to unfold the arms was to like you would with a dog. You don't go straight for the dog and go, yo, what's up, strange dog? You put your hand down, you sit, you're humble, let them come to you.

That's the way music used to be. Now it's a little bit more like, okay, what's your elevator pitch, yo? That's okay. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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i was listening to somebody um describing how they literally will they'll write and record differently for something they know is going to be streamed on one of the major platforms versus played on the radio versus played live because they know like on a streaming platform they've got what like three seconds yeah to grab somebody so that becomes the major thing and then like okay so let me feed them what i want but it has to hit hard and fast immediately and hook them so they don't flip away to the next thing whereas you know radio you would have had a little bit more time by the time somebody's in a live audience that kind of they're with you already so you can kind of like ease it out even more gently but yeah it is interesting how i feel like the creative process is changing

based on not just people's attention spans but on the platforms that were consuming creative output but it always has i mean like right when when uh RPM came in, suddenly we could have a long play record. One of the first records, maybe the first record made for the medium was by Duke Elling to open up and it goes back to another you know then no longer does he have to get this out on a 78 where he's got two and a half minutes and i i think that that what you do then as an artist is remember again that music is communication so yes it's about your idea and the preciousness of your idea is always invited, is always welcome. But if you've really got an idea and someone allows you two seconds to tell people, yeah, you're going to try to communicate. You should try. If you've got five minutes to do it or two seconds or an hour, you should try to fit it to that because what you're trying to do is communicate something. If you know

that you can't just open a window and blurt it out then you might you might you know say uncle immediately wave a flag and not try it but i don't have i don't i'm not so precious that i wouldn't like i realized every time they made me cut down a song for a pop music edit back in the 90s which my band was making records which we had to do that constantly my first instinct was i'm an artist do not cut cut my, everything I ever cut, I like it better 20 years later. So, you know, like, like I try not to be too precious about those things. People were like, Jesus, it all has to be like snack bite and stuff. It's like, well, I mean, it could be good for that. Maybe it's good for that. We don't know. You just have to, you have to make it for the medium and do what you feel like is right. But remember, it's communication.

If you can communicate it in two syllables, do it. Yeah. Brevity. Yeah. It's interesting also, as you're saying that, I'm thinking about what's happening in the podcasting world as well, which is there's a really interesting trend to go long form again. And we go for about an hour, but there are plenty of podcasts out there that will go for multiple hours right now. And they have massive global devoted audiences. So it's almost like there's something happening where it's like there are these two things happening simultaneously where people want certain things really fast and instant.

But they also want to luxuriate in something longer and deeper and sort of melod melodious and flowing and and with more texture yeah they don't yeah we don't get as much flow more than likely with all the short form stuff but then people are we re-compartmentalize so now someone might be sitting in their car every day for literally three hours to go to and from work so this gives them some sense of of sanity to to hear something come and go i mean i'm glad that podcasts are going longer. I hope that means that people are bothering to listen to half of Mozart's piano concertos. We'll see. Jump a little bit back into your path. You came out of high school pretty accomplished, and I'm going to use those words with you

whether or not, piano and drums, struggling with school itself, but end up applying to University of Miami. Part of that application process is performing jazz standards, which you didn't have. So you actually created and recorded your own. That's right. I didn't know jazz standards, and I actually felt pretty insecure about that. So I fought that by writing my own. And do you think it was that that actually landed you in that school? It was that and that I played all the instruments to do it. It just, you know, years later and my percussion professor still remembers that tape. And he was like, yeah, I remember that. We got this in the mail. It's like, you played all the instruments.

You wrote the stuff yourself. That's, yeah, I still remember it. I think I got the tape. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was unusual. I don't think I would have understood that it was unusual. I was doing what I thought was necessary to get.

I mean, I was ashamed that I didn't know anyone else that played jazz. So I was ashamed I didn't know someone that could play it. Cause when, when, when, when, you know, an application asks you to do something, you really want to do it the right way. So I was like, well, this is a kind of a warmed over pizza here. I'm just going to have to do it, you know, the way that I know how to do it. And that got me in. Yeah. You end up there. You're there for a relatively short time after the first semester, they have these things called juries where you have to basically step up and play the night before. Yeah. Bit of personal drama, which ends

you in a hospital with a broken hand and you got to show up the next day and play. And your scholarship, which is keeping you there, depends on how you play. So you play. Right. Not well. Yeah. Dropping the stick. I hadn't slept all night. Hung over.

You know, I did what you expect of an idiot teenage boy. I did exactly that. And I lost the scholarship, which was um yeah i was yeah that just destroyed me i was so bummed yeah i mean so you end up back home yeah um working around locally playing around locally a bit but then you also you make decision you're like you know what i gotta take another shot at school at education so you end up um back at it was unc uh greensboro right and it sounds like there was this chance moment where a sub comes in in a piano class that you shouldn't have been in in the first place because

it was so basic right and it's like that sliding doors thing this guy randomly drops into your life and and yeah becomes this incredible person. It made a big difference. I was a substitute teacher. And like you said, a class I shouldn't have been in. It's called class piano. If you've never touched a keyboard before and don't know where middle C is, that is your class. So the reason I was in that class was because I was probably ashamed to take the placement test.

Because I was a relatively decent piano player who couldn't read very well. And it was that not being able to read that I thought was particularly, I was ashamed of. So I just ended up in this class and I was goofing off. And the regular teacher had not caught me at goofing off. He wasn't able to see who's the person playing like Dave Brubeck licks around the class. Cause we're all on a separate piano and we were attached by headphones. So it didn't give you any sense of, of who was where some old dude substitute teacher.

I screwed with him the entire time and he asked me to come to his office. So I thought I was in trouble and he kind of gave me a little bit of an odd test about my ear and reharmonizing songs and had a little talk with me. And then at the end of it, he said, I'd like to give you a piano scholarship if you'll switch from percussion. And I didn't remain as a piano student after he left. What I did get was proper mentorship, a proper teacher giving me his complete attention the way the best family doctor might. If I'm bummed one day,

let's talk about that and how it affects music. He had had a nervous breakdown when he was younger. He was a promising West Coast composer. When he was a kid, he'd met Aaron Copland. He had taken a boat across to Europe to study with Madame Boulanger. He was very promising. And then he had a nervous breakdown, and this affected his life a lot. And he saw myself, or saw him and myself in me. And whether or not I was going to have a nervous breakdown, I don't think so. But he may have averted a lot of things for me. He was a proper mentor. I don't think that's something that many musicians I know have had is that kind of mentorship. It's not normally afforded at a college, and he just did this.

Yeah. Do you have a sense that had he not dropped in, had he not subbed in that one class, your path would have been very different? Well, I think my path, I mean, that's hard to know. My path, I think it's consistency. Not that you followed a straight line with a lot of stuff. I think that it's, I mean, we just don't know. That's such deep philosophy there. But I think that the straight path, the constant intention, which means a lot of frustration, means a lot of failure, also means a lot of crazy luck like I got, has a lot to do with it. Maybe something else would have come along. I think sometimes we're looking for something we don't know and then it happens. But I think the intention, the will, and the wish to get there combined with the things that will happen. I mean, people have always tried to ask me to pinpoint, like in my professional career, what was your break? I didn't have a break. I had a break every day. And I actually think that the break with this teacher, Bob Darnell, was at least as important as my being signed to a label or getting a chart position or a Rolling Stone piece or anything.

At least as important. But I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know those things. I think that the problem with looking at, the problem with not acknowledging them is to not be adequately thankful for them and appreciative of those moments, but to depend on them is also a problem. So I think you just keep plowing, you know?

It's such an important point. You know, I have, I once went to a mentor of mine So I think you just keep plowing. It's such an important point. I once went to a mentor of mine who basically told me to stop looking for mentors. Right. Exactly. Because then you're looking for the person who's going to show up. It's the guru problem. And give you the flag, the go ahead and point you in a direction. That person may never come.

Look for champions. Look for people who are out there doing what you already seem to have done, it yeah just keep doing what you're doing but don't don't wait don't hold back in any way shape or form for like some magical being to drop into your path which i think a lot of people do yeah i i got good advice uh via podcast and i can't remember who this was his name was tyler and i can't remember he's uh And I can't remember what he does anymore. But he was fascinating. And he said, just get a mentor when you need them. He's like, I'm interested right now in Shakespeare.

So I just called up someone at Shakespeare. I buy him dinner. And we meet for dinner once a week. And I teach him a thing. And he teaches me a thing. I think that's the mentorship. Like you say, you're not looking for a guru or someone to be too much, but just their full attention is even as good as Google. Yeah, 100%.

You end up during that same window of time, spending some time there, but then after Darnell is gone, you also leave there. In this relatively short window of time, months and then a couple of years, you marry on a childhood friend, touring around Europe, forming a band. Things are relatively successful, but nothing's really, really catching. You come back and then have an opportunity to touch down, to jump over to Nashville where you're kind of trying to figure out the scene there and you get a publishing deal. Sounds like fairly quickly there, but like the bend that has been at that moment in time, isn't quite working in Nashville. No, it's, it's, it's, it was, it was constant frustration. You know, I mean, some of it, the youthful frustration of feeling, I write really good songs. I turn on the radio.

I don't hear really good songs. Why are my songs not on the radio? That's kind of where my head was at. Nothing was going to make me happy in that time. And I was always working really hard. I'd worked as a cover band musician playing bass and drums and piano, whatever I could get. And I realized that that was a slippery slope. So I decided not to do that anymore. And I would only accept payment for music that was inspired that I had written. That became a problem for a while because I then had collection agencies at the door avoiding and heat turned off all the time and the regular broke-ass musician stuff. And that was my 20s, was basically just one long decade of frustration. Yeah. You bounced from there then up to New York.

Yeah. I guess technically the deal that you had in Nashville was picked up. Yeah. I was asked to do some stuff for other bands who were becoming successful, who I felt at the time had copied me anyway and um if i would do that because they were published by the same people then i could keep writing my songs and they give me my stipends and stuff and if i refuse to do that then there's really nothing they could do for me anymore which i think is very fair in retrospect like they need to make their money off me or move on. But as it happens, the equal office in New York was full of fans.

And they were passing my cassette tapes around as if, I mean, to my surprise, as if it was music. Which is crazy because I had come to view music as a demonstration tape, as a portfolio, as a business card. And to hear that people were listening to my music in a car for enjoyment was recalibration and re-inspiration. It was like, this is why you make music? Because you got something to say, not because you need a gig. So I went up there and I softly pursued it. I was doing some theater, like musical theater jobs that I got. Not only when something would come up would I bother to go down and play my music.

It was at least 18 months kind of off of music. I didn't know if I was going to keep playing it or not. Yeah. You reach a point in New York where sort of like a whole bunch of stuff comes to a head. Like your feelings about music, your feelings about the industry, your feelings about New York, your marriage, which is struggling at the time because Anna isn't there with you. You guys have been apart for a while.

And there's a moment where you're grappling with what do you do? She gets a gig at MTV, which is based in New York, and she's literally driving up. And you're sitting, you described this, you know, like sitting on a suitcase trying to figure out, okay, what's my next move here? Yeah, she went up, and as soon as she came up to New York, I went back down south. Just circumstantially, I suddenly had an opportunity with a manager who believed in me and the re-energized publishing thing I had in New York. And I was inspired. Everything I was hearing suddenly was like my people.

I remember hearing a Liz Phair record and going, this is incredible. She's got just as much confidence in her vocals as I do in mine, which is to say none. And all of these, uh, you know, irony in lyrics, self-deprecating, ironic lyrics, you know, it was the nineties thing. Uh, that's the way I always written. So all of a sudden I felt like I was part of it. Anna's coming up to work at MTV and for us to try to make things work. We both know that it wasn't going to, but it pushed me to go, if I don't leave now, I'll get stuck up here and probably, I don't know what, marriage counseling for another 18 months, two years. I'll work maybe at a pizza place or something like that. My opportunity will come and go. No one will be

better served by that. And I won't be happy. I won't be happy. Now's the moment. Go do it. And as it turns out, I was right. I mean, I got back down to, I went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I'm from North Carolina. Met these two guys that were in my band within a week of being down there. I think a week, two weeks, we started rehearsing. Didn't know what it sounded like because we couldn't hear anything. Committed to that band. A year later, we were making our first record with a record deal. A year after that, and everything was happening. Yeah. So those two guys end up becoming, along with you, Ben Folds Five.

That's right. You get signed. You're working on a deal. But the first album doesn't go exactly the way as planned either. No, not at all. You have a very specific way of making music and, and the studios and the engineers want to really clean it up and make it the way that it's quote supposed to sound.

So you produce this thing and then your rep comes and hears it. And she cried. Cause it sucked. Oh, it was bad. And, you know, to be,

to be fair to everyone who, who, who's like, I mean, this is a problem. I don't think I'm particular. I'm good at producing certain records, but not all of them. And people who can produce a record have to know so much. And that guy took all his knowledge of how you make a record that was really good stuff. He taught me so much about record making, about every other record in the world except for the one that we happened to be making. And it just didn't work.

He got us to play in time. That's good. I feel bad. I hope Dave, because I haven't seen Dave in years who made that record. I would want him to understand that I'm grateful for what I learned. And I feel he was probably the recipient of anything, any bad, any, like he was the one,

he just, but that's what happens. A producer is like, the buck kind of stops with them. And he got these three guys that were just the wrong thing to try to make right you know now when i make a record and that's and even for our third record the band's third record is called uh uh the unauthorized biography of reinhold messner a lot of people consider our best record was made with all the things that dave taught us we were ready to do that by that time but at that point that was the wrong thing to tell those young men yeah so you end up going back into the studio and basically in a matter of hours slash days, redoing the whole thing your way. And then when people listen to that, then it's like, wow.

Yeah. There's buzz all over the industry. There's buzz in the stations. And you guys go out and it's like, okay, so Ben Folds 5 is actually a thing now. You start touring, you're on the road, comes time for your second album. And that album is the one that I feel like brings you into sort of like more mainstream,

especially because Brick is on the second album. Yeah, that's why, yeah. Right? And it's fascinating to me that the song off of that album that kind of becomes the big breakout hit is actually about something that happens to you when you're 16 years old, you and your then girlfriend. Everybody's singing the song. Everybody's playing the song. But nobody actually knows what the story is.

Right. And I didn't say. I mean, in interviews, I just didn't I was not, I just didn't want to talk about it, you know? And that's hard when you've sold a million records over the course of six months or whatever, and it's on the base, based on the strength of a single that you won't talk about. Not that I was really pride heavily about it, but I just made sure I didn't talk about the song. I said, it's not something I talk about. Yeah. And I think the song was just muddied enough by a slightly disconnected from the story chorus. It's probably the only way that song could

have worked. If you sang a song about a teenage abortion in any era and the chorus were to reflect that and appear to celebrate it, yeah, that's a good way to get everyone folding their arms. As it is, the feeling, I think, sunk in. People heard it and felt, I think they felt what my girlfriend and I felt when we were teenagers and this happened. I think the song got that across. But I think to try to take it literally and to analyze it, it's very difficult. It becomes increasingly so over the decades, I think, just because of politics. Yeah.

It's interesting, too, because the song was lyrically, it threaded this really fascinating need where it was lyrically precise enough to create a context for anyone listening to transfer their own circumstance into it. Their own moment of sorrow, of suffering, of struggle, and ambiguous enough to allow that to happen also so that I think I feel like you know like that that was part of the beauty beyond like the melody and everything else that went into the actual music of it lyrically there was kind of genius to allow like create the space for people to step in and say huh I'm feeling this feeling that maybe Ben and his then girlfriend felt but I don't know that that's what I'm actually feeling and I'm putting whatever I'm going through into it. That's the beauty of music and songs is if you can sit down and explain to someone completely and know that that person is going to walk off from the bar where you had your talk, I don't know why you'd write the song.

You sit down and you talk with your friend about it and you would get that across. But there are things that fall between the cracks of our regular communication, and those can be stumbled upon when you write a song. And I say stumbled upon because the way the song came about was Darren, my drummer in that band, it's one third of Ben Folds Five. He had this chorus for a long time, and he did not know what it meant. And it felt like something to me. It evoked something. And I was like, what is that evocative of? Oh, that kind of feels like 11th grade.

And then as I just started to fill in the verses, the story, the whole thing felt right together. Now, if I just look at it on face value, like a lot of people have kind of angrily before and said, you know what? She's a brick, and she's weighing you down. It's like, no, I don't even know if I ever thought about those words. It's just everyone sang it. And it wasn't a song like it carried emotion with it and i don't know why and then the rest of it i filled in with just exactly what happened 6 a.m day after christmas that exactly what happened like a folk song like i always i always love these folk songs that are just like boom there's a story yeah and there's something really powerful about that. You combine that with the poetic ambiguity of a hit song chorus, and it's an interesting thing.

You know, I think a lot of it's an accident. Yeah. Interesting also, so Ben Folds 5 is when you actually step up to the microphone. Because up until this point, you write compose you play you know like all these different instruments but you're always the guy who's like no somebody else needs to sing like that that's not that's not me yeah yet at the same time the people who are stepping up to the mic to sing your work aren't doing it the way you want so you start to create demo tapes well i wanted singers that could sing of course. I wanted people that were good

at singing. And I would just sing it to them on a cassette tape. And I was not particularly good at the things that you think you should be good at with singing, like some soul riffs and some added stuff. And these guys were. And they'd sing it back, but it wasn't satisfying. And then I would hear the tapes and I would be like, yeah, but the way that I did it is the right way. It didn't have any vibrato. It was just in tune enough and it got through. And I guess after a while, I just started to realize, you know, this is probably what I should do because it sounds more like the song, but it took a while. I mean, I was looking for singers since I was 14 years old. I didn't want to sing it myself.

I'd find one guy that could sing at school, and I'd have him sing stuff. And it wasn't the right one. Yeah. First time you get up on stage. So you had toured a lot by then, playing the music, playing all the different instruments. First time you get up on stage and you actually step up to the mic to sing, do you remember feeling any more nervous or anxious? they're playing all the different instruments. First time you get up on stage and you're actually step up to the mic to sing,

do you remember feeling any more nervous or anxious when it was actually you on the microphone? I was so nervous every time that there was a time that I had to sing. And sometimes it would happen in cover band where they'd say, okay, let's see, it's a medley. Ben, but you sing Rawhide. Rolling, rolling, rolling. Oh, man, I'm so nervous nervous i would get so incredibly nervous it never wore off for me for television even through my professional career the same just debilitating nerves that were so much so that the issue was am i going to be sick

in front of people no confidence in that at all um yeah it was rough yeah i mean so when the second album comes out and uh and brick hits big you also end up on snl yeah performing live which in theory is this magical moment which launches people it's a giant giant especially back then you know like everybody watched there weren't the moment channels but it doesn't turn into the moment that you thought it would be no it was not good It's a giant, giant, especially back then. You know, like everybody watched. There weren't a million different channels. But it doesn't turn into the moment that you thought it would be. No, it was not good. I mean, I even, I reviewed it as I was writing the book just to see if maybe my perspective was wrong.

No, it was bad. But it was bad for very specific reasons at the end of the day. And again, it's kind of like, you know, a little mentorship, a little help. You know, you think about the Beatles and they had Brian Epstein there to be like, you're not dressed right. You're rushed. You're dragged. You know, we're going to do this way. And then George Martin is there the whole, the whole way. Not many bands actually have that. In the nineties, you weren't supposed to prepare. So we dragged. It's as simple as that.

I was out of tune and was dragging. That's the simple fix of the thing. Underneath it, the way I was paddling ferociously to stay, to not pass out from nerves, just miserable. And I thought I would channel that by doubling down on the melancholy of the song. That's not back to formats and medium. That's not the medium to look like you're going to die or you're suicidal. That's not the medium. I mean, people would call. I mean, we had phone machines in that era and I had voicemails on cassette. The next day, I had like 10, 12 friends and family call up and say, saw you on TV last night. Are you okay?

That's awful. So I thought we were done. I thought we'd, I'd say, well, I've come this far and that moment ruined it all. No one moment ruins it all unless, unless it's Twitter. The Apple watch series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming or sleeping.

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you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk so that that doesn't ruin it all no but that that also sort of like starts the next, you continue to tour, you move into, you create the third album. Like you said, what you feel is maybe sort of like the best album, but it doesn't get the radio play that you need. It was a disaster. So when you go on tour, like the tour doesn't get the support that it needs. So everything kind of goes south.

Personally, you're struggling also. And the band comes apart, at least for a long time yeah yeah and you're kind of forced to grapple with okay so uh who am i like what is my voice and what is my future but both as a person and also as an artist like what do i want this next season to look like and feel like and that's a that's the thing it's like we assume when you're younger you look ahead at people who have quote made it and you don't realize that's the thing. It's like we assume when you're younger, you look ahead at people who have, quote, made it. And you don't realize that all the problems that you're having at this moment about identity, what do I sound like, what's my sound, who am I, all those things, they come up over and over and over again. Just as soon as you think you've got the number, then you get thrown off and you have to figure it out again.

And that was one of my moments. I mean, my instinct was let me get a producer that does something that I'm very uncomfortable with. I didn't say it like that, but that's what it was. So I got a producer who made the slickest pop albums, the things that I was disgusted with. I couldn't name one album the man had made that I liked. And that was kind of concerning for people around me. Like, you sure you want to use this guy? You don't actually like what he does. But my thing was, okay, look, I knew what my identity was then. Now I feel like maybe I ought to have no identity. Maybe I ought to just, my songs ought to just sound like everyone else's. And so Rock in the Suburbs was an attempt for me

to let the guy use computers like they were using now, fix everything, make it drum machine if he needs to, say it in the language of Britney Spears of that moment, and just let it go. And that was my theory. Now the record to me just sounds like another one of my records. With the benefit of hindsight. I mean, but at the same time, you're sort of like in a new wave of personal stuff while this is all being recorded. Because dating, then I guess your girlfriend, you learn you're going to be actually a dad. This was during that same window, right? Yeah, yeah. Of twins.

Yeah. Come the later part of that pregnancy, there's also a really big concern that she might actually lose the baby. Oh, absolutely, yeah. You're back in New York, I guess, or LA? We were in New York finishing the Reinhold Messner record. And things moved pretty fast that time. It's hard to delineate these things.

And it appeared that she was going to, I mean, the nurse just said over the phone, well, you're losing them for sure. We just got to make sure that your wife's okay. So just get to the hospital as soon as you can. You can forget about the children. And then they ended up being fine. But yeah, shortly after that, the band broke up because the album didn't work out. And we were tired of each other at that moment.

And I immediately launched in to Rock in the Suburbs, which was recorded and written, having just moved to the other side of the world, to Adelaide, Australia. So yeah, that's basically the scene. Right. So you're in this moment again where you're sort of, everything is up in the air. You're a new dad, again married, trying to figure out like, what does my musical life look like from this moment forward now doing it on your own um you know with the support of other people but without the band anymore and you do find your way you know like the personal stuff stays hard that that relationship comes to an end now you're a dad so you've got kids um musically even though you know

like we have gotten the benefit of hindsight now. We know you found your way and you started doing all sorts of other things. You got involved in all sorts of different projects, not just solo albums and solo touring. You kind of went back to your roots to a certain extent. But then you went the complete opposite direction. You're doing symphonic collaborations. You're doing really cool, different stuff. Was there any window in that early sort of like, okay,

what's happening here where you thought maybe this whole thing just isn't right for me? Well, I thought it was, I assumed it was all over upon waking every day. And if I had the opportunity to do something before access was cut off, I was going to do it. I didn't assume that it was going to last. I thought, coming from the 90s, married dude with kids is not cool. Being solo is not cool. Playing piano is not cool.

I'm cooked. Being solo is not cool. Playing piano is not cool. I'm cooked. I, at 33 years old, had my midlife crisis because I saw my life is over. And when you see that a half or more of your life is over, you re-evaluate. And the trauma of re-evaluating has you doing a lot of very selfish things. And, and, uh, one of the selfish things was just not getting sleep. Like I didn't sleep that selfish. I did everything. Like I made so many EPs and records and the orchestra stuff you're talking about solo, solo, uh, things where I go out and play piano, 12 shows in a row, one night off, 12 shows in a row, sometimes two in a day. Drove the van and everything just to fit more stuff in.

Crazy. Eventually, though, it feels like that both brings you to your knees to sort of like windows. It sounds like multiple windows of reckoning, but also brings you back to yourself eventually. And here's the thing, like we love, and I mentioned this in the book, we all loved, whoever has seen this, Behind the Music by VH1.

We love to see the trajectory of someone doing this exact thing, which is being tested, being confused, forest for trees, alone in the dark, go to your knees, rise up from it. All these things happen to every person on the planet. And as an artist, you find yourself being seen more. And therefore, your life can become symbolic for what other people who you don't know are. And I like to mention that because these patterns in our life and the one that you're describing that I had is what we all experience. And that, for me, probably happened younger because as a rock musician, you're basically like an athlete or a dancer. Your career's done. You're done. You're 35 years old. You are baked.

We're not. Statistically, it's true. But it's freeing to feel that you've lost everything. And any kind of bottom, I hit things that were bottom for me. For some people, they wouldn't have gone that far. For some people, they would have gone further. Maybe they would have become addicted to drugs or they would have gotten sick or something else. But I did all those things, which I'm thankful for. I want people to know about them in the book, but I don't want them to feel special because they're not unique. We do love a redemption story.

We do, but we all do it. Yeah. Who has not done that? Right. And it's just a matter of how the circumstances differ. Yeah. And I love talking about it. And I love hearing other people's.

And every song and movie that does that for me is reaffirming because it's like, okay, I'm not doing it wrong. Yeah. And I love talking about it. I love hearing other people's. And every song and movie that does that for me is reaffirming because it's like, okay, I'm not doing it wrong. of things that are giving you what you need like collaborations forms of expression like creative opportunities and possibilities that are it it seems like you've kind of like figured out okay so this is a place that feels good to me for this moment of my life it's interesting um we had liz fair on the podcast recently also and she we're all similar age and she's sort of like stepping back into this space of creativity and touring again. She got a new album out. And literally just last week, I saw Dylan at the Beacon. Yeah, right. And just looking at it, I'm like, okay, if he can do this, there's no end to how long you can keep kind of rolling.

He has been the beacon for so many things. Bob Dylan has done so many things really so that we don't have to do them. You know, like just going electric. I was describing to an audience at the Kennedy Center, a show that I run for the National Symphony Orchestra, and you've got people who are there for pop music, and you've got people there at our concerts that are for classical music. And the divide is quite a cultural divide. And so I'm explaining to them, here's our problem. Pop music is essentially folk music. And in the 20th century, folk music went electric.

And when folk music went electric, it made it very difficult, pragmatically speaking, to make it work with the symphony orchestra. Because the symphony orchestra is essentially a 19th century well-oiled machine that doesn't do that. And then immediately, Bob Dylan comes to mind. I'm like, he did that. Like, he was in all these, like even being booed. Like that whole era of him being booed is incredible for a musician. I find that so inspiring to watch footage of him getting in the car time and time again with like the band, with Robert Robertson. And he's like, they're still booing me. They're still booing. And he kept doing what he believed. Thank you, Bob. I mean, even if I didn't like his music, I would

be so, and I saw him playing about five years ago. I was standing on side stage watching from behind as he played piano. He has no idea what he's doing. And it's amazing. And he was so happy. He just looked so happy about it. He'd start playing some really irresponsible synthetic diatonic mode out of nowhere, changing the keys.

And the band would just go, oh, okay, we're going to discover this with you, Bob. And you just hear them all shifting and morphing around until they just – and then everyone was happy. I love that guy. Yeah. It was amazing. And look, it was a packed house. Yeah. People were bopping and shaking their heads.

It was everyone from like nine-year-olds to people with walkers in theirers in their like late 70s and 80s i was like you know so great keep bringing it um you tell a story which is sort of like the opening of your book and we'll come full circle here about um really it's about firefly but what it is is fundamentally it is about finding the thing that is luminous to you as an individual and then sharing it with others. And it sounds like that you have kind of come to this place where you're realizing that's kind of what it's always been about for you. That, I think, is what an artist does, which is you see something that is not the thing that everyone else sees because everyone else sees a different thing. In my dream, I was a two-year-old who was identifying fireflies, lightning bugs when no one else was paying attention.

I bottled them and made them happy. Now, if I think back on that dream, some of those kids might've been, you know, looking at stars instead. That's not more or less important than the fireflies. One might have been looking at the blades of grass or looking at traffic or the parents. All kinds of things were happening with all those kids. It's not to say that, hey, I'm a genius. I'm the only one that saw the fireflies.

Everyone sees a different thing. The artist is the one that learns the technique above all reason, takes all the time tearing the hair out to bottle it right without killing it, and then passing it to others. Because when something lights up in the sky like that, the inspiration is so fast. You don't get to see that again. I write a song. I'm moved when I think of the song. I'm no longer moved after I've applied the light of intellect and technique in order

to do it. I don't get to be moved by that song anymore. On TV, we see a made-for-TV musician who feels weepy playing a song about something he remembers. That's not my experience. My experience is that I feel it, and then I have to go with no oxygen for the longest time and keep that idea alive. And then other people get to enjoy it. Meanwhile, if someone else bottled the stars for me, I get to live that moment twice because I only lived it once before.

Now I live it twice. And I just think that the artists are the ones that see it and then bottle it. And everyone sees a different thing. If you see spaces out of lumber, you build houses. And if you see a clean cut or a crazy man with a haircut, then you cut hair. And for me, I hear little melodies. Some people see dead people. Whatever it is that you see. That's, and that's what I feel that the dream was about. And when I identified that in the book, I realized I had a title. Yeah. So coming full circle, just with us, um, we're sitting here in this container of good life project.

So if I offer up this phrase to live a good life, what comes up I think give just enough attention to yourself I missed all your other projects and ambitions world we live in I think just taking 20 minutes even a day for yourself that's all that's and this is you know I'm gonna be that guy that guy. That's what Transcendental Meditation did for me was made me realize that if I didn't water myself just a little bit, that I couldn't enjoy any of the things that I was winning. You can win all you need to, but it's really hard to get up in the morning and say, today I'm going to give myself in the middle of traffic, in the middle of all the things that are in the middle of feeling sorry for myself, in the middle of high-fiving myself for the song I just wrote, whatever. If I don't give myself just a little bit of time and take care of myself, there's nothing that can be done. So I would put that in the mix, among other things. Great.

Thank you. Right on. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's

S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

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