Ben Folds

Musician Magazine, May 1997

Photo © Alysse Gafkjen

Ben Folds and I were taking a break from our interview in the house he shared with the other two members of his trio, the quizzically named Ben Folds Five, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He had wandered off to another room, to alert bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee that we had completed our one-on-one and it was time for them to join us.

Aside from the Steinway grand piano, their house looked like all the others in their neighborhood, most of them groups of students at the nearby University of North Carolina campus: worn wood floors, thrift shop couch, some posters tacked to the walls. I am probably wrong here, but I think I remember that Ben and I had sat in folding chairs, my recorder between us on one of those industrial spools that substituted for real tables. In any event, that was definitely the vibe.

Despite all that, Ben Folds Five was on a fast-track rise. Their self-titled first album, released in 1995, didn’t quite tear up the charts but it did alert critics and discerning listeners that something quite unusual was afoot in Chapel Hill. Folds’ songs collided serious craftsmanship and post-punk snark; no one else on the scene could have conceived and pulled off “Philosophy,”  which Folds once described as an ode to his own penis, and capped it with a piano solo that was equal parts Jerry Lee Lewis and, with its quote from Rhapsody in Blue, the classical canon.

Their follow-up, Whatever and Ever Amen, was arguably even stronger than the debut. Recorded in the very place we spoke that day, it blended disparate ingredients — irony, sophistication, fury, artfulness — that confirmed that Folds was at the start of a long and ongoing run as a vital American composer and performer. For me, “Brick” remains a milestone in modern songwriting, a true story of his high school girlfriend’s abortion, recounted dispassionately and yet, through the power of the song itself, with suppressed desperation. Randy Newman did it in some of his best songs: “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today,” “Marie.” Folds has achieved that standard many more times than once.

As the band assembled by the Steinway, I walked over to the Baldwin upright piano in the interview room. This was the instrument that Folds played on his wilder tracks. I would see it again decades later, tucked against a wall in the studio he would buy on Nashville’s Music Row. Carefully I played the first nine notes of the Deliverance theme, which had become essential in every bluegrass band’s set list despite the film’s disturbing visuals. After a few seconds, it echoed back to me, from Ben’s Steinway. I answered, he replied, I switched to the chorded part of the tune, which again he sent back to me. And we launched into the full-throttle duet that followed.

The band interview began after that, focusing mainly on the new album. Here, though, I offer my conversation with Ben.

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Before coming back here to your home state in North Carolina, you were building a decent career in New York and Nashville. So you must have reached a point where the security you were building wasn’t worth it anymore.

But it was a very false security. I was on a shoestring publishing deal. I don’t think anybody was being fooled: I wasn’t going to be writing for anybody else. I wasn’t writing stuff anyone would even want to try to work out. Our publisher at the time in Nashville told me, “Bring me what you’ve been working on,” having never heard any of my songs. He signed me on hearing me play “Purple Haze” in a club. It was actually great: “Go hang out between twelve and eight in the morning during down time at a 24-track studio, do what you want and bring it to me in a couple of weeks.” I brought a box, which was like the first record, with all the string parts as vocals. I played that for him, and I knew at that moment there was no security going on because Randy Travis was not gonna come walking in and say [in Southern drawl], “Ah need me a box o’ songs.”

It was that dentist-appointment mentality, the gravity, around the music centers, how dark it gets. You find a good musician, but there’s something jaded about him: “Man, it’s all about the money for me. How much money is this gonna be?” Most musicians are idiots, but these guys have learned how to schedule their time and get money for it, so it’s a drag. After a while, I just didn’t want to play music anymore. I thought it wasn’t worth it. The business was too gross. As much as I might want to change my writing so other people could play it, I couldn’t do it. There I was in New York, going, “Well, I guess I could do the theater.”

I learned a great lesson because I didn’t give a shit whether I got the part or not. Every time I went to an audition where there were professional actors, I kept getting called back and they weren’t. Then I finally put it together: “Wait a minute. It’s because I don’t care if I get the part or not.” So when I got back down here, my attitude was, “I don’t care if this goes onto a record or anything.” That makes a big difference.

It looks like you find the secret formula for doing what you want while also maintaining professional standards for yourself.

The professionalism was like, shit don’t happen when you’ve planned everything out by the moment. If we decide we’re gonna rehearse one day, it’s not just us being cool that maybe we say we’re not gonna rehearse at twelve and we end up rehearsing at eight that night. That approach ends up permeating the music. Robert doesn’t go, “Man, what note are you playing, because I’m playing this?” He might get pissed off because my left hand is too loud, but he’s gonna let things happen because he’s a cosmic musician rather than a paid-by-the-hour guy. So the only way to do it is to work with like-minded people in a band, people who can add to what I do and make it great.

Everyone in your band plays at a professional level, so it’s a question of attitude.

They’re like artists and writers; that’s their slant. I don’t think these guys were like, “When I grow up, I want to play sessions.” It’s like when you call someone an intellectual. There’s something a little backhanded about it. You can almost put “pseudo” in front of that. It’s the same thing with professionalism. We get paid for what we do; that’s the definition. And we have to be on. We had just one month to record this album. But my idea is that “professionalism” should be in italic. You’re just talking about a different kind of mindset.

Stagnancy and Growth

You started out, I believe, as a drummer. Did that affect how you would later approach playing the piano?

Absolutely. It’s not as literal as it becomes a percussion instrument, but it definitely adds something to it. Actually, I started playing them at the same time when I was nine. Then I started playing guitar after that. I was playing music all the time, not so much that I’m a piano player who plays drums. It’s more like it’s all part of the same concept. Music is music. You get it out on what you can. There’s no rules to it. If you’re playing a drum set and ten minutes later … [We’re interrupted as Sledge and Jesse start playing a video loudly in the Steinway room.] Hey! Would y’all shut that door. I’ve heard that fuckin’ song enough …

Which reminds me: I wanted to ask how, as a relatively new band, do you handle playing the same songs night after night in your shows?

We usually find a different way to do ’em every night. We’re all aware of the presence of the crowd and the spirit that the crowd brings. It’s not like, “This is the kind of song they want, so let’s do it this way,” but you feel that it means different things to different people, so there’s a different shade to the song every time we go through it. That affects my voicings to a certain extent, without me even knowing it. It’s not a chameleon/crowd-pleasing thing as much as it is realizing that if I were talking to you, and you were from Zimbabwe, knowing that you’re getting a totally different experience from a person I talked with two months ago, and it affects the same shade of what you’re saying, since you want to say the same thing because you want to be understood. That’s what keeps me going. If we just get down to rehearsal and it’s like, “Play the fuckin’ song,” I don’t think so.

“I never was interested in learning the rules.”

You’ve described yourself as a rock ’n’ roll piano player. What does that mean to you?

It’s the same thing that makes someone a jazz musician. There’s that famous deal in the Miles Davis book about him being in the back of a cab with some other jazz player. They’re gettin’ a blow job, eatin’ fried chicken and ridin’ down the road. They’re gonna be better jazz players than someone who went to Berklee. It comes down to state of mind and lifestyle; you live that kind of music to a certain extent. I’m not throwin’ TV sets out of windows, but I’ve been playing in bands since I was little, and they’re rock bands.

But you use a lot of jazz-influenced voicings, and you play with chops you don’t often hear from pure rock players.

Well, I guess I’m a literate rock player [laughs]. After all, unlike a lot of kinds of music, pop music is stuff that should be popular. That’s the rule. It has to get the point across – and then I can sneak in what I want to say. There are definitely genre lines: Now you’re playing country, now you’re playing jazz. I don’t dig that too much, but it happens to exist. But rock music, to me, is the most versatile: I can play jazz chords, or I can take bits and pieces from even country music’s play-on-words stuff, and it’s still pop music. In jazz, if I play I-IV-V once, that shit is not jazz; nobody wants to hear that. Jazz has been gilded into the classic American thing that you can’t touch.

Pop or rock can open to other influences more easily.

There’s always a group of people who want to make the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and say, “These are the rules.” But still, it’s a kid’s thing, and it’s always gonna slip away from the people. They wind up repeating themselves and you get the modern-day version of the Jam. Someone would probably argue — and I wouldn’t want to agree with them — that we’re a modern-day version of Elton John or Billy Joel, and that there’s another band out there that’s the new Jimi Hendrix or whoever. It’s not because people are ripping someone else as much as it is that the shit keeps repeating itself and trying to slip out of the hands of the adults.

That’s the cool thing about pop music: It’s always moving, like, rap is still slippery as an art form There was a time when jazz was still moving. I could have been some crazy motherfucker playing in Charlie Parker’s band, and if I was doing what I was supposed to do and I had won their trust, and I was kickin’ ass and rockin’ and all of a sudden I started playing these three-note, I-IV-V chords, they might have been cool with it. It might have been cool if I had started playing fuckin’ “Louie, Louie” behind him. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there, but it feels like there was a certain amount of rebellion in jazz at one time. So that would have been understood. But now it’s like [in a pontifical voice], “The rules of jazz are as follows …” I never was interested in learning the rules.

But rock will never stray too far from its roots …

Yeah, but pop music does change. You wouldn’t notice it without a magnifying glass. All kids are basically the same from one generation to the next, except there’s some kind of shade that distinguishes them from their parents. That’s the energy that keeps moving. It’s like, “I got this down! I’ve figured out exactly how to make a record!” “Sorry, but Alanis Morissette’s got you beat, and she doesn’t know fuckin’ shit about making records.”

Demos and Other Evils

When you were in Nashville and New York, did you have a conscious strategy in trying to connect with the music industry?

No. I had an allergic reaction to making demo tapes while I was in Nashville. I couldn’t do it now without throwing up. So when we got together as a band, the thing was, no … demo … tapes. The thing is, you play music, so play music! You can sell if you want to, but you play it as an offering for people to listen to, not to further yourself necessarily. It may further your career, and that may be a whole long discussion about why you do music. Is doing somebody a favor selfish because it helps you out? The energy behind making a demo tape is, to me, so obviously musically wrong that the band should just make a tape that they’re planning on selling or giving away.

All these books are evil that tell you how to get your fucking demo tape together. That’s why I stopped reading music magazines: I never could make the connection between the musician practicing in his room and then becoming successful. They would say things like, “Well, we made our first album and then …” How the hell did you make your first album? How does that even happen? Now I realize there’s no way you can tell anyone how that happens.

So maybe I should just go home now?

Look, I’m not saying the press doesn’t serve a function. But you think you can get the answer in one article, which is impossible. You have to take things one at a time. The thing is, you have to make music with the delusion that you’re making something important for people to listen to, not that you’re trying to get their approval. The bands around here you might not regard as successful outside of North Carolina, but they are successful because their mentality is making records and that’s it. The first thing bands around here do is to press out the single. I do kind of resent that there’s a whole industry that makes its money off of people to not succeed in music. You’ve got books out there, all this music store shit.

“The idea of making a demo to get your stuff across is … not musical.”

Yeah, but practically speaking, can’t a demo and media coverage plug you into a bigger audience? I mean, didn’t Caroline Records have to discover you before they could put out your first album?

We made a single, which served as a demo. For me, the distinction is real subtle. The idea of making a demo to get your stuff across is, at least to me, not musical. It feels like a résumé, like you’re looking for someone’s approval, whereas if I go, “It’d be really cool if I did this, and you could play that, and we could make a record,” that’s different. It’s like telling someone they’ve got 48 takes: “Oh, you’ve got all day. We’ll get it by 48.” Well, the first 47 are gonna suck, but if you know you’ve only got one or two, you’re gonna do it.

Even though that single was functionally no different from a demo.

It was definitely a demo, but I’m talking about the energy behind making it. There’s a certain amount of karmic energy behind the feeling that the freedom of when we made that, we didn’t care if anyone approved at all. You go out and play gigs; that’s how you generate interest. It’s much more exciting to discover a band that way than to just get something in the mail.

Escaping the Past

A lot of kids today seem to feel that the coolest musicians belong to their parents’ generation.

That’s strong in the psyche of pop music right now. In a way, I fall into some division where I’m almost in either camp. I grew up watching VH1 and it was like, “Fuck this if I have to see that Jimi Hendrix was amazing and we have nobody!” It starts even with The Mickey Mouse Club, all this cool stuff, and then it’s like, “So … we got Madonna. Anything else?” And we begin to trash things: “We’ve got this beautiful lamp. Maybe we’ll put it over there — but first I’ll beat the fuck out of it! Yeah, now it’s lookin’ really good.”

That’s what we do. We take the classic song form and bash it around in a way that, if we made that record in 1975, which everyone says we’re ripping off, it wouldn’t have even gotten onto the charts. The producer would have been like, “First of all, you’re rushing. The bass is way too busy. And the song! Think about the song!”

On the first album, what we found interesting is, if you take the song and you bash its brains out, and it’s still breathing, that’s a cool effect. We’re not doing that so much now. But four years ago, bands started putting the vocals just under the mix because there’s something about people caring to hear that, so they turn it up and it gives this kind of energy like somebody’s dying.

You respect the work that was done by artists who came before you, but in the climate of cultural tyranny by the boomers, you have to fight that too.

Definitely, yes. There has to be a balance. When we play to a crowd that expects to feel like they know what’s coming because there’s a piano player there … When we were playing punk clubs, we weren’t playing, like, the Iron Horse in Massachusetts, where there was a piano and so everybody expected us to be a piano band. My intention, in that case, was to fuckin’ break the piano. It's psychological: I know that Blind Motherfucker So-and-So was here last night, and he played really nice chords and voicings. But that’s not what we do. It’s like trying to be understood for what you do and everybody is like, “I’d rather be at home listening to my Billy Joel record. But this is louder.”

Yeah, but some of that audience will go home thinking, “When Ben Folds trashed that piano, it reminded me of Jimi at Monterey.”

Yeah, you can’t win [laughs]. You can’t get away from that. But then at least you know you’re at the source.

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