Ben Folds

00:00:15Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmondson. Hey y'all. We'll be back on our normal schedule next week, dropping new episodes on Tuesday, but we wanted to share with you an episode we didn't get a chance to run last year but still really enjoyed. It's Bruce Headlam speaking to singer, songwriter, pianist nineties alt rocker Ben Folds. Folds is best known for the music he put out with The ben Folds Five in the mid nineties, particularly for the song Brick, which was a bit of a surprise hit in nineteen ninety eight. Who was also known for his onstage antics, like smashing a priceless Steinway piano on national TV in Australia that got him dropped from a Steinway endorsement. Folds talks with Bruce about the genesis of these angsty stage antics, and also about the making of the song Brick, and other anecdotes gleaned from the book he wrote about his life and craft, called A Dream About Lightning Books. Enjoy this episode. It was taped pre pandemic, so Bruce and Folds are on the same studio and we'll see you next week. You mentioned in the book that you are both a hard worker and completely undisciplined. Right now, you've written an enormous number of songs. Your last record also had a piano concerto. You've written different kinds of music. What was it like writing a book as opposed to writing songs? Interestingly, I found discipline writing the book that I hadn't found in writing songs. And I think it actually came down to something I had read Stephen King said about if you want to write a book, sit down in the morning, shut the door and write two or three thousand words that should get chupped about two o'clock, go get lunch and forget about it. And I thought, oh, well, he knows how to write a book. I'll just do that. And I went to my office, shut the door, and I wrote for three or four hours, like Stephen King said. Now, I've never written music that way. So that is discipline that I found. But I think it is a distinction. I work hard, not because I was taught discipline or I have a good knack for discipline. I'm just simply driven. And I think that's a harder way to do it. I think it's better if you have a Sergeant Rock inside guilting the hell out of you if you're not getting up early in the morning and doing your sit ups in your meditation and then going straight into the room right in your morning page. It's not all that stuff. I think that's a that's an enviable thing. But when it comes to music, I'm awful. I have to have the deadline after have people breathing down my knack. That has to be a drama about I'm not going to turn it in on time. And it's the worst thing I've ever written, and you can't make me turn it in on time. And I'm going to take this from my goal. Cold dead fingers and all this. I just you know, but the book everything I got in before time. I drove the project and I was disciplined. Have you tried to apply that to music since or just it does just a different thing doesn't work. I don't know. It's it's hard to it's hard to turn that around. It's hard to turn you know, like not spring Chicken. I've got my drama habits. I have to be late with my projects and all this stuff. It's just the way I seem to roll. I did try. I mean I put in my calendar, I'll put a little music signs. I drew them all over my calendar for this year. These are the days I'm going to write music because I thought I would learn from my book writing that I've done it. Now that done nothing. No, I'm terrible. Okay, yeah, well it's different. It's not terrible. Trying to say terrible. I find it. I judge it terrible, but thank you. I'll take that in Speaking of judging. Uh, you know, I remember when you first came out with a lot of people thought, well, you know, he's like a college guy. Yeah, which was It is never a compliment when it comes to rock music because people somehow think college it's rock music out of you. But you would have really chaotic yeah upbringing, you know, and your family head chaos. Going back, your your and your grandmother were both left at orphanages for a time. Your grandfather threatened to kill your father at some point. What was it like growing up in that kind of atmosphere. Well, you know, the reason that I put a lot of that stuff in was if I was going to say, I would like to teach people about creativity, but I'm not an expert on creativity outside of my own. So it's like, Okay, well, the best way to do this is to tell how I did it. But then it's like you almost kind of want to do a little almost ethnographic study of how did I get there? And so I looked back at the momentum that had propelled me into being a person that that how I was born, what I was born into, and what I see is an incredible firewall that my parents threw up between their abusive upbringings and mine. Incredible. I mean, they say the cycles is impossible to breakers, very difficult break. My parents show that to be wrong, I mean, and they had me very young, and it's the clean slate which is part of the part of the chaos of my upbringing. So the fact that all that stuff happened and was of interest in all this energy of craziness in my parents upbringing and then boom it comes to my brother and I are are born, and they just played it all by ear and cut all that off. And I think that that I felt that like I've felt the upbringings of my father being held up at knife point and gunpoint, and my grandfather killed himself. But I never really met my grandfather, and I wasn't around for those things, but it does by osmosis sink in, and you know that that we moved every years. You know, my father just probably clean slate in it every year, trying to survive, you know. I mean a lot of people don't survive mentally what he went through and he did so, like amazingly. Was it responsible for a bit of your a year drive and be on the other hand, your lack of discipline, Well, I think my lack of discipline was the trade off for my parents being so open minded. So, like, what's today going to be? I don't know, it's no schedule. Did you get to school? You got to school. That's good. Oh, you liked that song on the radio. Well, you don't have to go to school until noon. You can listen to that song. You liked that song. Yeah, you told the story. Your mother let you stay late because you liked the song in the ray Paul Simon song called love Me Like a Rock. I love that song. I was waiting for that to come on since six in the morning. I woke up early, had my transistor radio on the ear. I had requested at the radio station. They said they were going to play it. Seven o'clock rolled around, they still hadn't played it. Eight o'clock and then I'm like, they haven't played the song, but they're gonna play it after commercial ms. I find I don't have to go to school. It's wonderful, it's great, but it's not exactly a discipline lifestyle. No, But you were very driven from an early age on the piano. Yeah. Yeah, And as you describe it in the book, you would listen to your radio at night, yeah, and then you would get up and you didn't I don't quite understand. You said you didn't play by ear, but you somehow fumbled through to figure out the song. So what was that? Well, I didn't really get there. That's the problem is that that's not where I arrived. Like I listened to the radio and I would hear these songs like a real simple one, that lou Rawl song that goes you'll never find simple all that is is. But I couldn't find it, you know, because you don't know what you're looking for. As a kid, I never had a vocabulary early on to learn other people's songs. So even though I wanted to, and I mentioned that in the book, that. Yeah, I'm going to play all these songs when I wake up. There is actually a method. I believe you should learn to play by ear. It's not something that just happens out of thin air. And I found it very frustrating. That's why I broke a lot of stuff growing up. I threw a lot of fits when I was a kid. I threw my punched holes in walls, I broke furniture in trouble constantly for it. Because I couldn't play something on the piano. I would listen to it and go, oh, I should be able to play that. Well, where do you start? I never knew, And so what were you playing in those days you weren't playing? I would find that was the song lou roll song. That's right, you're gonna miss my singing. I love that song? Yeah, um yeah, I mean I ended up finding my own songs, you know. I would search for things and try to play. Started off doing a lot of noise, you know, which I would recommend for kids. I actually think it's really good. It's like throwing your food or putting your hands in food when you were like, you know, eighteen months old or something. That's something you should probably do um. And then I would, you know, I would start to find things that I could that I could play it, and I made them up, like I remember one that went that's really it was based around a little theme like that I'm trying to play like a child. And I mean I made that up when I was about eight or nine, and it's got interesting chords in it and it's cool. But I wasn't finding I wasn't able to find, you know, the Elton John song I might want to find. To this day, I can play one of his songs on the pianos because I learned it to play with him, and I had to really work at it. I don't learn other people's stuff very well. I found my own stuff, and I found years later Elton John talked to you how to play one of his songs. Now I learned it myself. I was just like, we're He's like, let's play a tiny dancer together, and so I learned it. I learned a couple other of his songs actually, come to think of it, because I did a couple of gigs with him, but they were always really had to put the time into it, because you know, like someone like Rufus wain Rice is really really confident about his singing. You know, he's such a great singer. And I remember we both did a thing with Elton in a Broadway theater where we were playing Goodbye Yell Brick Road in his entirety and Jake from Scissor Sisters, and there's a couple of things, a really neat little show, and I was to sign two of his songs, and I worked on it for two days, all day long in the hotel, and then when I got there, I realized that all all Rufus was doing it was just reading off the teleprompter. He didn't really know the song. Rufus didn't know the song Goodbye Yell Brick Road. He just kind of didn't know it. He was just reading the words and his melody was coming out as he just kind of thought he should do it. And I remember thinking, God, I worked so hard. They're trying to find that and he's killing it. But he's just doing his own thing. You know, even though I seem cavalier as a musician, when there's something I need to do, i'd really try hard to find it, and I work hard to find it, you know, right, this is the hard worker. The hard work necessarily discipline. If I had been disciplined, I would have learned how to actually learn. But I didn't learn how to learn. I have to like sit down and figure that out. You were also a drummer when you were young. Yea, and you say at some point in the book that you you sort of played the piano like a drummer. Yes. Can you show me what you mean by that? Yeah? Well, there's two things that are really lucky about the way my piano playing developed. Because I was I did have a lot of lessons, and I did study percussion, So my percussion chops pretty real. My piano stuff is really spotty. Think why when I start to talk about my development on the piano, I really kind of go into outer space. I can't really explain it, you know, like we've been talking about it. I'd say I've the least articulate about that. If I'm if I'm explaining percussion drums, Oh yeah, I can do that. What I play and what's common from my eras as a battery percussionist is called left hand lead, and it's left hand lead because people marched, so all of the what they call the rudiments of percussion called funny things like radom accuse and paradiddles. I don't know if you've heard flamma diddles. All this stuff is all military, but it's actually really good for putting you through the paces. But it's a left hand lead when most people aren't left handed. That's because you march left right, left right, and that's why we do that. So I was learning percussion totally left hand lead like I was supposed to, which has really great benefit for the piano. For for instance, you know, just going left or right, it's like just to play rock and roll music, I'm not grounded at the top of the piano. It's always going to happen at the bottom first. And that might seem small, but you know, to me, to hear my groove on the piano, well it's much better than most piano players, just because even if they were drummers, they might be more right handed, but because I was trained that way. So on the piano, for instance, if you're if you're a common right handed drummer, you're working against the left handed lead method, which means a lot of drum set players actually aren't. They're right handed, they're not exactly uh trained or skilled at at sort of stick control. Like most professional drummers I see, even really great ones. If you have them do a buzz role, it's really sketchy. It's not that good. Mine was kind of perfect after the first year of of of playing acause that was really serious about anyway. So so when when they when they go to play a ride pattern, okay, uh, this is all gonna get out of out when this is the stuff we love really Okay, if you're playing a ride pattern, you're a right handed drummer, you know that your right hand is going on the symbol or the high is going and then your left hand is on the snare drunk going to dot and you're let's see, it's your right foot is playing the bass drums. You're leading with your right foot right, left, right, left right, staring kick, staring right left. You're not going left, right, left right. I enjoyed already going left right, left, right because I had that old school stuff in my training, which was kind of unusual for said drummer. Then when you translate that to piano, then my left hand is the ride symbol right. So when I play a left handed kit, which is what I do, I'm a left handed drummer, my left hand is riding, which is very unusual, But for a piano player, it's a dream because I'm going with my left hand and I'm completely grounded that way, and if I wanted to go, I can. I can play syncope because I always have a root in my right hand hitting the downbeat. And most piano players are viewing this as a lot of different events like they're they're they're viewing it. That's one event. To me, just land on my left foot and I'm fine. That's That's easy for me because I've played left hand lead, left hand drums set and when I applied that to piano. With my piano concerto, the hardest things to do in it are just simply drummer things, left right rhythm things. You know, a piano player might find the piece difficult sometimes only because of the left right, left right stuff. For a piano player, they would expect more beautiful runs. Well, I don't really have an articulate beautiful run. I'm a percussive piano player. So my piano concerto starts with this and that, and all that is is just playing drums. I'm just going and it doesn't take much for me, but if I had to go, it's not a good scale. I'm not very good at that. Wow. Now, when you listen to other players, can you hear are there other left handed piano players you can hear and see? There are some piano players that are just more rooted in a drum set and they sound like that to me too. That come hit me from the top of head. Are Stevie Wonder when he plays drums and he plays piano that sounds very similar to me. And he said, and I don't think he probably plays left handed, but I suppose and from what I've heard, I've never seen him play drums that he's all over the shop because he can't see what he's doing. So he don't think he plays like a left or right handed drummer. So the left handed thing wouldn't come in, but the drum set thing definitely like you hear him play piano that sounds like a drum set. And I don't know if Billy Preston played drums or not, but he had a relentless groove at the keyboard, the kind that you don't hear many players these days have. And and I hate to you know I'm a different style and everything, and this is gonna sound very cocky, but I would place myself in that kind of in that small group of keyboard players that can actually play in time. If I would talk to people who played with you, what would they say about your sense of timing. Well, everyone's so damn opinionated. They think their time is perfect, So no one's going to completely agree with me. But I think most musicians would say I have good time as a As a piano player, I probably lean forward a little bit, so you're you're on top of the beating. I think I'm a little bit on top of the beat. But it depends on the song. I mean, I play solo piano so much, I'm allowed to play with the time, and I know that sometimes I choose to really pull it back. There's a song called still Finding It. When I get to the chorus and it's like, it's been about this tempo everybody. Oh, it's gone through this. Sorry, it's gone through that. Everybody established to get to the course. I'm just pulling back, especially on the twos and fours. That's just down right weird. Uh, That that one. I played all the instruments on the record, and I had a very concerned producers like, you're dragging so bad. So we re reprogrammed, you know, the grid to slow it down like five clicks. So it had to be programmed into the computer that I insisted at the computer following me and slow down. I like a time map like that. I think it is smart. We'll be right back with more from Ben Folds. We're back with Bruce Hedland's converse with Ben Folds, So I want to switch a little bit and talk about your lyrics. We haven't exhausted rhythm rhythm, uh, and we'll come back to it. But it's interesting you're We've talked a lot to a lot of singer songwriters on this show who hate the kind of label the confessional singer songwriter. No one's hung that on you, but you've written some incredibly deeply personal lyrics. Yeah. I think maybe part of the reason that hasn't been hung on me is I don't even think until recently, the words songwriter has been hung on me a lot. I think that I started off by treating the songs with almost disrespect, that my band distorted over them. We played too fast, we covered things up, we over arranged kind of because that was exciting to us. Saw that would have been if they were a Barry Manilow song or an Elton Johnson we were very seventies kind of those songs would have been treated with such respect, space for the vocal, you know, proper, proper production treatment. But we just stopped through them because that was the punk rock era and in a way we were maybe ashamed of the of the overthinking of the songs as a result. Kind of, I feel like in my career people didn't. Really my fans did, but in general I never really saw myself mentioned that often kind of as a songwriter. First usually it was about the showmanship or my piano playing, or the band, the fact that we didn't have a guitar. And then there was you know, a brick as brick as a hit, maybe about the fact that it was about an abortion, but not about the writing of it. Then you'd see someone I don't know, like like ohmy have mine, like Ryan Adams always talking about a songwriting, or Jeff Tweedy and always talking about their songwriting. So I don't really I think maybe some of it is because I was so cavalier about it that no matter what kind of song I wrote, that wasn't front and center of what people have talked about, So that that does make a difference, I think in perception. Also, my instinct was that if you're writing a song, and this is where I do a lot of thinking, if you're writing a song that is against someone like you did this and you did that, it's a real finger pointy song. We all way too often we demonize the person we're pointing the finger at. There are no redeeming qualities that person. And I love Fiona Apple, but like listening to a lot of songs, I mean the person she's singing about half the time that this maybe may as well be satan. I have a feeling if I met the guy, I could have a beer with him and actually find redeeming qualities. So although I think she's amazing at writing that I never personally wanted to do that, I think that that that you will get looked at more as a confessional singer songwriter. If you make a cartoon out of yourself, I should say in the book you explained people though the song Brick that it really was it was based on her. Yes, a real time in your life, your girlfriend and senior year high school was pregnant. Ye, you decided having abortions very troubling time for you, awful. I didn't realize the degree to which a lot of the writing was taken from real life. But I don't know how you came up with it. Musically, that's an interesting one. It goes against and that's why I said, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. When I try to describe myself. It's the opposite of what I've been saying. I mean, brick is is exactly what happened in high school with a rhyme to it. So I just did the opposite with them. But as I say, the couple times i've I've been very sort of literal and more confessional. They have been successful. You know. A song like Brick was about sitting down my my my friend, the drummer Darren Jesse had the chorus, which is a brick and I'm drawn it. He had that and he was like, I think that's a good churuse, what do you think. I'm like, well, I think it's great. What does it mean? Because I have no idea? Huh okay? And I literally heat the lyrics as well. Head lyrics as well. It was just She's a brick and I'm drowned slowly off the coast, headed nowhere. That was four short lines. That's the whole song that he had written, or that's the whole contribution. Happens to be the chorus, happens to have made it a hit, huge contribution. But then I thought, what does this make me feel? Like? I felt like that, you know, slowed down a little bit, and then you know his and so this occurred to me, and then I just felt like telling the story of what happened in high school. It just all came to me really really fast, like the story of what happened. I almost considered an experiment, I think, to to write bone headed about what happened. But I didn't see any other way to do that song. And I had cover now because I had this ambiguous chorus. It's funny that a lot of times I'll have like suddenly i'll see my Twitter blow up and it'll be all these people who have like maybe the topic of the day's abortion, and they're pretty critical of me. They're pretty mean, actually, people I don't know saying ky this guy made a million bucks singing about his girlfriend's abortion. He made her do and he hates her guts, and he's sending her out to the ocean and all this stuff. And they've read all this stuff into the lyrics, and I think about the actual circumstances and how much care there was between the two of us, and what a decision that was, and how not black and white the world is, and I see this come through. But often what seems to bother than the most is the chorus. Well, Darren wrote the chorus in a vacuum, and I just took the feeling of it and went with it. It's actually probably a pretty seemful bad method of throwing a song together. It's very haphazard. I just took that chorus, which I don't still even understand, but it made me feel something, so I went with that. As a songwriter, sometimes where you know, they say, you know, you don't learn how to write a book, You learn how to write the book you're on. So on that song, I'm like, how do you write a song? Well, I don't know. This makes me feel this, and I'll just go with it. It was on the record before I could even really protest the idea that I had written something so personal. I just needed another song for the record, and I felt that out of that and there you go. Luckily, I feel like the song lyrics that are in the verse are so true to what happened that I feel like I don't feel like I'm going to be sent to some some some kind of you know, social movement, hell or anything for that song at this point, just simply because I was just telling the truth. And I feel like at the end of the day that that does weigh something. You have a great quote which I want to read. There's many, many great parts of this book. I encourage everybody to read it. I'm going to read just a couple of lines which I think to me really jumped out. From time to time, we all catch a split second glance of a stranger in a storefront window before realizing it's our own reflection. A songwriter's job is to see that guy, not the one posing straight on in the bathroom mirror. I feel like a song has to have moments that snuck up on you the way that I described it, That's the way I see it. Because you'll see someone in a storefront, you will think, you'll think something about them. You might think Kyle, what's that guy wearing? Or there's a handsome motherfucker there. You'll think something, but you're not placing your own self awareness on to it. And it's so rare. We hear our voices inside our own heads. We never get to get out of that. But a songwriter really needs to have a moment to find that hook or crook. However you can find it, and it's probably brief and you probably have to remember that. Like to me, it feels like sometimes it's in a chill hair standing up that I get while building a song and it never comes back. It's not like that line does it to me anymore? But I have to remember that happened, you know, because as you start to craft a song, especially when you're crafting the extent that I do, you have to hang on to that little innocent moment that you weren't self aware, that you didn't know that was you, because now you're putting the microscope on it. So watch those edits, you know, watch the ones where you're trying to make yourself look better, or the ones where you're you know, aiming your head into the mirror just perfect so you get that perfect angle on your chin like you don't don't do that, Like you can't do that in a song and have it survive with honesty. Can you think of example songs that where you think you've had that moment you were able to hang onto it. I think every song that I've written has has them. That's why I that's why they have survived. Um. And it's not like you can say it's one line. It's something that it's a it's like an environment that is created by the song, where that that it seeps into the rest of the song. It's in its attitude, it's in the way the chords move. You may decide on a on a lilt or something that you don't know why you're doing that, like it's it's a cadence. I wish I could say. I mean sometimes they can be lines. There's a line that lines can surprise you with what was there that you didn't know and you can discover them later. Um. Very simple one was the song Phone in a Pool, which I use a lot in the book. It's not really that well known song of mine. It's in the later part of my catalog, which, um, you know, record sell fewer and fewer each time. I'm so probably fewer people know the song, but it's a moment where I said, what's what's been good for the music hasn't always been so good for the life. Kind of rhyme to kind of fit seemed right, gave me the little chill. Didn't think about it. When I was writing the book. It kept coming up. I could have used that like every other every other chapter pretty easily. Can you can you just play those lines from Phone in the Pool? Yeah, because it's, by the way, it was based on you actually throwing your phone in a pool. That's right, Yeah, I mean nothing nothing to the experience of the song. Really, that what what what inspired the song is really in there and would have been probably a good journal entry. You know, I was. I had so many competing phone calls. I was in the middle of one of those terrible texting shit shows with three parties, and I just walked off stage. I mean, I felt like, you know, I'm the least important person at this moment in this texting when I'm getting my ass kicked by three direct But I mean I have some respect. It's got awful work. Like I just kind of felt like, ah, sick of this. I hate phones and I was walking by the pool at the sunset Marquee in Los Angeles, and I just reflexively, no one else was there. I thought I threw it in the pool and it went then under the bottom. And then this voice comes out of the shadows. Ben is that you like? Looked over and it was Kesha and she was pulling off a hoodie. She's just been chased by paparazzi and came through the bush. So she goes, what did you just do? And I was like, I threw my phone in the pool. Why did you do that? I don't know. I'm sick of it. And she's like, don't do that, and she jumped in with all her clothes on and she went under the bottom of the pool and got my phone. She's like, you know, you should put this in rice. That's you know, mine fell on the toilet and I looked on the internet. You put it in rice and then don't turn it on until it's dry and it'll fix the phone. That's where the song came from. Nothing about that in the actual song, because of course it's just like throw my phone in again. So that's the course of it. Uh, let's see what's what's been good for always been so good for the life. I guess I was kind of like, you know, throwing a phone in the pool. That has consequences, you know, like an I I have to go down to Verizon or whatever and staying in line with people and get a phone. It costs money. Someone built the phone. People can't get in touch with me anymore, you know, like like like in real life. I was thinking, you know, being a kamakage in your music, what's good for the music? Yeah? Sure, but you don't just walk by the pool and throw your phone in. That's not what grown ups do. So that's what I meant by the line. Well before you threw the phone in the pool, long before you used to throw your piano stool. Yeah, at your piano. You know you're sitting at a beautiful Yamaha. I think it's a having foot Yeah, um you we. I should mention you used to have a deal with Steinway. I did until you broke one of their pianos throwing her. Yeah I didn't. I I threw a stool as show biz on a television show. Um it was our debut on television in Australia, and um it very much, very much upset the host of the show, um whose piano it was go to figure. We thought it was a rental. We were always prepared to pay if I mess something up. But I really didn't break many pianos. I I told about the two times I did break pianos, I felt horrible. One was his grandmother's family heirloom stein away from the eight nineteenth century. And I was a jerk and I should have though I didn't think you got a lot of You acted out a lot on stage. I was a piano player totally, a lot of flipping off the audience, a lot of plants down, flip off the audience. I played. I remember playing a show we just started promoting Brick, and we were playing a pretty big sold out show in Princeton, and this was getting exciting. And I started playing Brick and some people were talking. So I could play that with one hand, play with one hand, and I sang the song and just with my middle finger in the air while while I did it. It's crazy, it's silly stuff like that. I remember playing the introduction to Brick one time for maybe twenty minutes till they cut the power off. I didn't even start the song. I just did the introduction. I don't know why. I just come from I just you know, some of probably my let's say that I would say that that was the rest of the steam control of my parents. If I had to say my parents upbringing, you know, like that was my angry Yeah, I mean I was not that unusual for young men to be angry. I don't guess a angry young man like it's a cliche. That was me, you know when that was I was so fortunate to be able to do. I took it out in two ways, comically by acting like a complete clown and doing things that were totally self destructive. Remember doing a big interview on MTV where you can't see this over the radio or over a podcast, but I stuck the bottom of my jaw out. You know, I don't know why I did that. I couldn't tell you. I just I guess I didn't want to be on MTV that day, or I thought it was funny, or there was something self destructive about it. That kind of It's like pushing on a sore tooth, like he has sore tooth, and you just feel like, howd of curiosity you'll press on it? I think that makes for an attractive rock star, especially if you're playing piano. I mean, I can see the marketability in it too. Everyone likes the you know, we like that. And then I think at the point that those things snowball, you know, like if you start into a temper and then it just takes over. Needs to stop. You needed to stop it. Was there a point you thought, yeah, this needs to stop. Yes, I realized that many things about my life from my career weren't going my way, and I found myself in circumstances which were much more grown up, you know, like I'm really became concerned about music education for kids, Like, Wow, what I gained so much for having music in my class? Can I give back a little bit? Well, the more you do that, it's just kind of like not nice for me to walk on stage at the Kennedy Center and talk about music therapy, curate a night of symphonic music, and then go to the rock club next door and smash a bunch of shit, flip off the audience, and cuss all night. I just doesn't seem like the same person. I felt like I needed to grow up. I'm not precious about it. I'm quite happy to do any of that stuff. I thought it was funny, but it can become it's like a gag reflex. It's like once you start gagging, you know, like you need to kind of stop yourself. We'll be back with ben Folds after the break. We're back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with ben Folds. There's another theme in your book, which is about being cool. You never felt cool, and I think you always wrestled with what was cool, what wasn't cool? Should we be cool? I think you mentioned you mentioned some of your early albums you really almost played over the songs because you wanted to kind of and you wanted a punk rock attitude even though you were doing these kind of songs. And then, incredibly, the lesson is kind of crystallized by William Shatner. Yeah, can you just tell a little bit of that story because it's a great story. So in the studio it was Shatner and me and Joe Jackson for a lot of it. We're talking about Joe Jackson, the British singer. Jackson, the British sing not Michael's father. Right, that's great. Yeah, I didn't get anything from that guy. Um, I won't even make a joke there. Um, listen to ord Joe said. You know, I wasn't allowing myself to have a mentor. But here's another guy, you know, William Shatnell. He's not a musician, so it's not a threat. He in a He's in an industry where it's okay to be older as an actor, so maybe I was more open for whatever reason. He told me something I needed to hear, which he said, Benny, what is cool? And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you have said the word cool? Oh the day long? Like he just like was pounding me about this cool thing. And I was like, well, why should explain? You were producing his record? Yeah, yeah, it's back up. I was producing William Shatner's record and writing a lot of the music for it and bringing the songs of his life to music. I think it's a great record. I say in the book, it's one of my proudest moments. You don't get the chance to make a record that's never been made. That record was never made before or after a beautiful record. And that's because of that's because of Shatner's willingness to be vulnerable and willingness to be for real and not worry about what was cool and what was not. You know if someone said was that take good? And said, yeah, cool, you want to go to dinner? Cool? I think that vocal was cooler than the other. Would it be cool if we did this? And it's like he's like, there's a lot of words in the English language, Benny, because you don't have to use that one for you. What's your what's your hang up with it? What is cool? I was like, you know, cools this or cools that? Because no, no, no, no, I need you to define the word that is so so such a wide net that it can mean everything that you made it mean today. Can you do that? No? I can't, because we'll think about using other words then and think about what your hang up with that word is? Why are you so hung up with that word? And I thought about It's like, well, I didn't realize that I was, but I guess I am. But I started noticing my my my peers were all the same. They're staying cool all day long too. I started to think that cool itself probably damn near ruined music. In my era, people were so much more concerned with being cool than they were like good music sometimes that you know, they often made music, good music despite it, No one talks about how incredibly I would say, I'm trying to choose a better word than cool, because honestly I just about say cool, How incredibly cool. Kirk Cobain's chords were, They're so interesting. His voice leading is very interesting. Well, no one ever talked about that. You know, he did the ultimate cool thing you could do in The Knights, which is he killed himself. What cooler? He put his money where his mouth was. We were also fucking miserable in the Nyes and he like did it. I think it's terrible. It's a terrible thing to celebrate the man for, to celebrate him for that. You know, I remember talking Dalliot Smith and he was horrified that people were celebrating the depressive part of his songs. He didn't seem as depressive. He was offended by that. It's like, these are songs that are getting me through. There's positivity in them. I'm going somewhere. I've written this song. It's a beautiful song. Why is that depressing? Hating when people call my songs depressing? Is That was his take on it. One day, and so I think we were so caught up with this being cool that it did get in the way sometimes of just judging something his music. But you know, my use of the word cool in songs probably a little more interesting because I think what I realized was what I didn't feel cool. But then I realized, no one does. No one feels like the cool one. Maybe one motherfucker does, but mostly mostly people don't feel like they're the cool one. Right, So if you write a song where you admit, like the song Underground, which starts one of the first songs in my career, which goes, I was never cool in school, I'm sure you don't remember me. It's a little bit of a also a nod to Jesus Christ Superstar, which is quoting a musical in the nineties. Really, that's uncool. What was the part of Jesus Christ Superstar you acquitting? Oh, okay, fast, we have a problem here. Yeah, okay, don't don't get me started, because I think I can sing the whole Pharisee scene in the original voices, So don't get me going awesome. See, but this is that's where it's from, and it breaks into the what is it what miracle one ro fools. Yeah, that's right. It's no armies fighting, no slogans, totally. One thing I'll say for him, Jesus is cool at that we because I love that album. But that's OKAYO fans, we have a problem here. Yeah. I was never cool in school. I'm sure you don't remember me. That was where I was coming from. The reason that song did so well, especially in places like you know in the UK where it charted in the top forty, the top ten or something like that has a radio hit. Um it is because no one felt cool. That was my discovery. You know, like all the rock stars before my era came along, most of them were really really cool, Like they just seemed like the person you wanted to be, but you weren't that person. So there needed to be some balance. Who is the who is the me up there on the stage that can say that they're not cool and struggle with it publicly, with what they're gonna wear, not feel like they know what to say at the party, feel like they're not invited at the party. They're not cool. Those were big themes in the in the ben Folds five records, and then we played piano living room furniture. Piano's living room furniture was not a rock instrument. It's been a rock instrument one or two times. The guys had to light it on fire to prove that they were cool. I'd throw piano stools at to prove that I was cool. I mean, you've actually now had a long career. Did you always know it was going to work? You went through a lot of jobs. Yeah, you work in a grocery store, so did I? So I watch that part. I didn't work at a Hearty's. But you did a lot of stuff. You played. You were a solo polka band in a German restaurant. You did a lot of stuff. Did you know through all that that your songs were going to one day succeed? I think I did on some level. I was terminally frustrated and insulted by the universe that most of my twenties went by the radio played NonStop through the decade, and not a note of my music came out of it. I thought people were idiots for not putting my music there. That was my young man, you know, cockiness about it, And so I became pretty pretty bitter. I mean, I was that guy. I was like, you know, working these jobs like you know, waiting tables or something, or playing like a polka band like you said, and feeling like, you know, I deserved way more and my songs are the best songs ever written. And I thought all that stuff what happened. When it happened, then you know, I felt like, yeah, I probably, you know, I probably need to be here that so I feel more like myself now. I felt like I needed to have a voice at the table as it were, or whatever it is that they say, and you need to be on the same page or I need to come on board whatever pirate ship business language. I need to be at the party. But once I was, I found and I think I mentioned this briefly in the book because I've found that it's it's not satisfying ever because you become popular like you think that you should be, which as I remember sitting with a hero of mine from the Archers of Loaf Did you know that band? They were a punk band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The probably sold about forty thousand records. I think Kurt Cobain was a big fan of them back in the day, and they lived in my neighborhood, you know, And I was sitting in the van with Eric, who was the main guy. I was like, how many records do you sell? Because I never even made a record before he goes we sold forty thousand records, like Jesus, forty thousand records. That's huge. I can't imagine doing that. Of course, when we were selling seventy thousand records a week in a couple of years and that wasn't enough, I thought, oh man, that's that's not enough. Because you can see these guys they got a commercial with that the Verve song. They got a Nike commercial. Damn we needed a Nike commercial. They just creamed us. Now they're selling two hundred thousand records a week and we're selling seventy. And my song is just as good as Sarah say. You go through that crap, and you know you have to best to admit it, best to admit that your ego was duped and you should get out of the business of that. So I try try not to really worry about it as much anymore. You're going to sometimes it's a business that is. Your life is affected by approval. You know, if people approve and they give me money, or they applaud my life is better, and I'm supposed to not read what's written about me, or I'm supposed to not notice what the sales are on something. It's hard to do. I think you candy couple of them. But I think it's best to admit instead of being so cool and saying, oh, I don't pay attention to my reviews. I don't care what anybody thinks. It's like, boy, you need to go some therapy. You do care what people think seriously, but you have to admit that first. I do want to ask you about one more thing speaking of being cocky, which is E've done this for years in concerts, even on it with orchestras, and I'm incurred everybody to go to YouTube and watch this. Uh you call it RTB yes, which is rock this bitch? You composed something on the spot? Is it? Is it from audience members? How do you? It can come in different forms? Basically the history of it is it was we were making a live piano solo piano record, one of my favorites. I think it's I don't know, I haven't done more of that, but um an audience guy, an audience yelled rock this Bitch. I think he meant he wanted me to play louder and faster. Maybe I was playing too slow, played too many ballads. The kid wanted to rock. And it's like, well, I don't, um, I don't know that one. UM. Let me see if I can make one up. And so I made up a song and it ended up on the live record called rock this Bitch. I was that was freestyle completely and it was kind of the revelation was it held up with other stuff on the record disturbingly well and people ask for it every night then, because then it became a thing. They say rock this Bitch, and I would have to make up a new one, and a new one, and a new one, a new one. All of them I think are probably different. They may overlap in some way, not on purpose. The idea is that when someone says rock this Bitch, then I have to do it. Let's start making up a song. I've learned so much about songwriting that way, and I tried to impart some of that the best I could. It's very difficult to articulate what I learned about songwriting, but one of the things I've learned is that a song is so wonderful If it sounds as though the singer and the audience are all discovering it together. It doesn't sound like it was there before. It sounds like it's coming out of the earth, which is a very Beethoven idea. You know that that it is there already, and it's just it's you're a font and it's coming out. When we d and paste form the first versus, let's say, is eight bars and has particular cadence. If we cut and paste that idea across the next two verses, that's normal. That's a normal form when you are rt being if you're a freestyle in a song, you can't really remember exactly what you did in the first verse, and you try to approximate it. But you're a new person and you're discovering a new thing, so you're it's a new take on that verse, and so it is unfolding in a way that songs normally don't unfold. And I find it very effective and I learned a lot from that all because you know, a song really could be seen if it's a three and a half minute song could be seen to have only taken three and a half minutes to actually invent the rest of it was all an editing process, stuff that you didn't use and thinking about it and stuff. But the actual song is three and a half minutes. It should sound like a discovery. And when you teach, you say it's a very effective thing to teach to make people do it. Very effective because one it keeps you from being precious also you want. The other thing you learn about it is that you know, like life, it's hills and valleys. It's not all like up up up up up, like like an American musical. It's like it doesn't all have to be better, better, better, better better. It can be like oops, snore, amazing snore. That's life. It works that way. Or mistakes. You make a mistake while you're writing a song, it's like, I really wish I hadn't gone here? How are you going to get out of this? In real time? Is actually of interest to the audience. It's also energy that that is compelling a song. I learn a lot. I think the songwriters ought to have to freestyle a song every night, I really do. I think they don't think they can do it. But something comes out. Something will always come out. And when you find yourself in the lull. Like I say in the book, the beauty of this exercise is you have to write yourself out of it. We edit those things out when you write a song, and we're crafting a song, and there's nothing really wrong with that. It's just that when you're more in control about it, that you want it all to be all killer or no filler. But that's not really what a good song is. You know, you ask someone like, what's what's two or three songs that you love. We're gonna listen to them tonight. You have a beer, listen to some great songs, and then you listen to him the guys going, I love this song. I love a song too. Why do you like it? I like it because of well, wait a minute, oh there was what we'll run it back. It was just a little moment sometimes and it was the getting there. They think it's the whole song that they liked, but it's like, what do you like about those words? Actually? I don't like the verse verse. I just like that part where he says this, I like this thing. It's like, well, those first words that he didn't care for got you there. And I think it's important not to write everyone like they have to be a punchline, not to write everyone, And so they have to mean anything. They have to be real, and they have to be getting you to the next moment and those moments in life where it's like, if you had a moment in your day, you had a good day. That's the way it should be in a song. But you can't have the moment in a vacuum. You have to get to the moment. And so when you learn freestyling, a song is all these things that you just don't put your mind to when you're really thinking about proper songwriting. And it has I don't know if it's improved my songwriting, but I've learned a lot by it. Okay, so before you go, yes, can I ask one more favorite? Sure? Can you rock this bitch? Oh? I guess so. I mean the first thing, it's just something comes out and you don't know where it's going. I didn't think then I would have to write a song in a podcast. That's okay, Well, I see there's a mistake, so I'll go with it. Five. I didn't know i'd have to see And now my voice is crusting. I just woke up. It's a day off. There are no days off when you're rocking this bitch in a podcast, rocking this Bitch with Bruce, I am rocking this bitch. They're gonna edit out the stupid ship and make me sound like I'm smart rockness. But it's a minor chord. We don't know what's going to go from there. Fabulous, Thank you, you rocked it. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful all right. Thanks to Ben Folds for sharing some incredible insights into his life in the world. You can hear all of our favorite Benfold songs on my playlist at Broken record podcast dot com, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast. There you can find extended cuts of our new and old episodes. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler in our new intern Jennifer Sanchez, and as executive producer find Me a Little Bit. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries, and if you like Broken Record, please remember to share, rate, and review our show on your podcast. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond Bass