Ben Folds is the kind of artist who can spend 20 years making you laugh, cry, and question your own teenage choices — all with a piano and a smirk. And then, just when you think he's done, he writes a best-selling autobiography and somehow makes that feel like a rock show too.
“A Dream About Lightning Bugs” is what he called it. The book, not the dream. Though Folds seems like the type who dreams in key changes and awkward silences. It’s less a collection of anecdotes than a full-body memory scan — with detours into philosophy, neuroscience, abortion politics, prog rock, and scotch.
“You know, like your first day at school, or the first time a bully pushes you — there’s no training for that,” he says. “Same thing with getting dropped into the goddamn music business.”
That’s also the name of one of the chapters: “Welcome to the Goddamn Music Business.” And he means it. Because unlike your usual major-label coddling story, Folds made it in a rock scene that didn’t know what to do with a piano. “They’d book us on full jazz night,” he says. “We’d be like, no, no — we want to play a real night.” So they muscled their baby grand into punk clubs, surrounded by nose rings and mosh pits, and just leaned in. “We weren’t welcome,” he says. “Which made us punk as hell.”
That outsider lane became the whole strategy. “I always felt like, if everyone’s in one lane, I’ll go find another. Even if it’s harder. Especially if it’s harder.”
Cue the late ’90s, post-grunge, pre-boy band era — not exactly the golden hour for nerdy Southern piano trios. Yet Brick managed to wedge its way into the cultural bloodstream anyway, like a beautiful little parasite. But even Folds didn’t want to talk about it at the time.
“There was great risk politically,” he says now. “I mean, it’s bad enough to write a song about teenage abortion from your point of view. But for a guy to do it? That’s social tightrope territory.”
He remembers the backlash. Or the potential for one. And the added pressure that his girlfriend’s parents weren’t thrilled he might profit from a deeply personal experience in their daughter’s life. So he kept it vague. “I tried to make it about the feeling of what had happened. Not the details.”
Years later, Brick would end up on two lists: one calling it a top pro-choice anthem. The other calling it pro-life. “That’s probably the moment I let it go,” he shrugs. “If both sides can claim it, maybe I did my job.”
Folds has always played the long game. He can take a small moment — sitting on a suitcase, for instance — and stretch it into a three-act symphony of emotional clarity. “If that’s what I’ve got to work with, then that’s what I use,” he says. “You don’t have to run over your grandmother like Randy Newman. But you might have to use the feeling of that.”
Then again, he would run over Randy Newman’s grandmother for a great song. He said so himself.
These days, Ben's just as likely to be onstage with a symphony as he is in a dive bar or drinking scotch with his Patreon fans, helping them write songs live on stream. “We hijacked it,” he says of the platform. “It’s not really crowdfunding. It’s me playing records and talking production with a few hundred people. It’s like a weird, private club where I do lectures in my socks.”
He’s still making albums, but don’t expect them to sound like anything else out there — or to be funded like they used to. “You used to need someone to take a risk to make an album,” he says. “Now you can do it in your bedroom, 164 tracks on Pro Tools, reverb that doesn’t exist.”
He doesn’t hate that he just misses the humanity. “I used to be able to tell which band it was just by the rhythm section,” he says. “You’d hear a Squeeze record? That’s Squeeze. Now? Bruno Mars has an amazing voice — but I couldn’t tell you who’s behind him. It’s all pasteurized.”
Still, he’s not bitter. More amused. “Making a record now is like being a silent film director suddenly told to make talkies,” he jokes. “I don’t know what any of this is supposed to look like.”
Yet somehow, the guy who wrote The Best Imitation of Myself keeps finding ways to do just that — and still make it original. Whether he’s writing orchestral suites (So There), unearthing Ben Folds Five (Sound of the Life of the Mind), or making fear-of-pop experimental instrumentals about “love and evil strippers” for Jeff Garlin Netflix movies, the man just won’t sit still.
In fact, his next Fear of Pop record might just skip Volume 2 and go straight to Volume 3. “Because that’s funnier,” he jokes. “And more in the spirit of the project.”
Folds has now survived long enough to see himself become a genre all his own — a little bit Elton, a little bit Everyman, with a touch of PBS music nerd and chaotic good Gonzo energy. The kind of guy who plays the White House without swearing. Barely.
So what’s next? More scotch. More songs. And probably another handshake with Tony Bennett in a Nashville studio before quietly backing away.
“I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years,” Folds said in an old promo video. “That’s a stupid question.”
It might be. But wherever he ends up, he’ll probably write a waltz about it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below:
