A Dream about Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons

by Ben Folds

I highly recommend enforced boredom as a way to develop your imagination.

Maestros, rockers, rappers, pickers, and grinners—where would all us dumbheads be without the right teacher at the right time? If you were lucky enough to have experiences like mine, go substitute-teach for one day and get your ass kicked. Then let schools know how much you appreciate their music programs and teachers. Tell your representatives while you’re at it. Nobody ever did it alone.

The piano’s place in rock and roll has always been interesting to me. Its associations with being middle-class living room furniture, church-choir accompaniment, a classical or jazz instrument, make the instrument nearly antithetical to rock and roll itself. The music and culture that the piano symbolized was the very thing that the rockers were rocking against. Anyone who’s ever rocked the piano has had to be somewhat irreverent and even violent toward their instrument in order to be accepted in the world of rock and roll. You must sacrifice your piano to prove your rock-ness.

But, yes, the cartilage in my left thumb turned out to be trashed from beating the crap out of pianos, and although I can play piano just fine (for now), there are days when getting my hand into my pocket or turning a key is a nearly insurmountable challenge. In fact, I had a laundry list of injuries that suddenly made themselves known—mostly occupational from my style of piano-playing. All ignored as they developed. It turns out pianos hit back.