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

by Ben Folds

“Benjamin, how old are you?” “I’m six! How old are you, Papa?” “I’m twenty-six. Now, watch me eat this sandwich!”

Papa discovered I could be neutralized by absurdity, frozen in my tracks by distraction with something out of left field. Absurdity comes naturally to Dean Folds, who has an endless supply of crazy shit up his sleeve for any occasion. Before I could ask him to watch me stand on my toes, he’d hit me with, “Benjamin! Come here! Watch me take the trash out!” or “Mr. Ben! Mr. Ben! Come in here and watch this! Watch me brush my teeth!”

I’ve always been an odd combination of polite, irreverent, hardworking, and utterly undisciplined.

If you’re going to be a tourist, be a respectful one. Observe, report, imagine, invent, have fun with, but never write “down” to a character or their point of view, because everyone is the most important person in the world—at least to that one person. And if your tourist photographs suck, maybe it’s because you’re too far away from your subjects, seeing them only as props dotting the scenery. Position yourself upon a bedrock of honesty and self-knowledge, so that your writing comes from your own unique perspective. Know where you stand and what your flaws are. Know thyself. Then you can spin all kinds of shit and all the tall tales you like. It’s art. Finally, empathy and perspective are everything, and neither should be taken for granted. After all, there’s always someone out there who thinks you’re the monster. Remember that the ground beneath your feet can always shift and that it should always be questioned.

From then on, I would space out through much of the school day, imagining music I wanted to play. Somehow I never went through the stage of learning to play my favorite radio music by ear. I didn’t really have the building blocks for that anyway. Playing by ear is about building a vocabulary and connecting dots in a way I was never taught. I just learned through trial and error. When I was finally back at home at the piano, I would hack around in the harmonic darkness, rewarded with just enough discovery to inspire the imagination and more than enough frustration to propel me to improve. It was a cycle of imagining and practicing. The harder I worked at music, the more it sparked the imagination, and the more I imagined, the harder I had to work to keep up with my head. But the frustration of not being able to actually play what I heard in my mind led to terrible tantrums, which continued through high school. In fact, each time our family moved to another house, my main chore was always patching the holes in the walls of my bedroom, where I’d punched, kicked, or thrown things around the room like an idiot. I once punched drywall expecting to put a satisfying hole in it, but I hit a stud instead and broke my hand.

Of course, I also did kid stuff like everyone else. I liked to play sometimes. I wasn’t a total weirdo. I might make a ramp out of plywood and rocks and try some Evel Knievel shit on my bike or find a kid to toss a baseball with. But mostly I walked around in the mud alone, imagining music: naïve, unfettered, unrestrained, and unedited music. When you’re making music in your mind, it’s okay if it’s technically unplayable. It’s even okay to hear instruments that don’t exist. There’s a time and a place for the tools, and the first tool is imagination.

Just laying here in the bed, half-awake, half-asleep Thinking about you I was wondering if you were looking after your most valuable possession— Your mind! That’s from a song called “Your Most Valuable Possession” on the Ben Folds Five album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. The lyrics are just some ramblings that my father, the same Dean Folds who urged me to measure twice, left on my answering machine as we were recording that album. He was on a lot of cough medicine, he says.

Here’s my suggestion to musicians: When you’re about to reach for whatever musical tools you use, virtual or real, guitar or computer, ask yourself if you’re doing so to save time or because you don’t feel like straining your brain. Or, more important, ask yourself if you have anything to say yet. If not, keep working (or playing) upstairs, in your brain. Sure, it’s okay to react to what happens playing with the tools—the way a chord sounds, a loop, or even an accident. But make sure you express what you wanted to say or what you have imagined. Don’t let your tools make you their bitch. Measure twice, cut once. Resist the urge to skip steps. The limitations of the real world will soon impose themselves on your creation. Even the limits of your technique will cut your imagination down to size in time. So imagine wildly first. Or at least try to do so from time to time.

Soon a natural-food store appeared, which attracted pale, thin, unhealthy-looking ladies with long, braided gray hair, oozing of garlic. It was like a self-conscious Southern theme park version of Haight-Ashbury. I never saw these types outside of this particular shop. Did they change back into their street clothes in the bathroom when they left? There were buckets of oats, roots, and little glass tinctures with handwritten scribble. The word “mucus” was used. A lot. And I once heard a friend’s father introduce my friend’s mother to someone in the natural-food store as his “lover.” Were they trying to be gross?

Being present and mindful is easier said than done. Sometimes it seems nobody is listening, and it’s tempting to disconnect accordingly. Sometimes there’s one heckler that overshadows the rest of the crowd. It’s easy to be distracted by less-than-perfect situations, especially when you’ve turned your passion into an occupation. It’s hard not to set your soul to “autorepeat” or “autopilot.” I’ve been guilty of focusing on something wrong with my monitors, or some fellow I wish wasn’t beatboxing on the front row in a solo piano show, when I should have been inside the music, appreciating that there were other human beings in the audience giving me their time. It’s always the easy way out, being an existential chicken. Not really being there. It’s harder, it’s riskier, to be present. But we should try like hell to be. And not just in music, but in every action and exchange in our short lives. I can tell you that when I inwardly acknowledge the effect that music and my presence can have on others, even the old songs seem new again. And you don’t have to kiss the audience’s ass. You don’t have to bust a move, tell jokes, or juggle. You don’t even have to speak or smile. It’s an internal thing—an intention that radiates out of you. It’s humility and gratitude. It’s about living inside the notes, and between them, and understanding that each of those notes may mean a completely different thing to each person in an audience. Once it leaves your fingertips or your lips, it’s no lon...

Robert Darnell saw music as dynamic, ever changing, and exciting, and he was always curious and interested. He once asked me if I’d heard of a man named Eric Clapton. He was very interested in Mr. Clapton’s playing but also in his singing, which Darnell described as “speaking on pitches.” “It’s all he needs to do,” Darnell said. “Tell his story by speaking the notes. No ornamental vibrato, no sustain. Very effective.” He asked to hear recordings of music I liked, so he could understand where I was coming from. This informal way of passing on experience, lessons on music and life, exchanging ideas—this accidental mentorship—was as new to him as it was to me. It was his final breaking from tradition before his retirement and a wonderful hand extended to me from another era. We looked at scores and talked about how simple some of the most complex-sounding solutions often were. He knew very little about jazz, in the way that I had come to understand jazz, but he could sight-read a full orchestra score by cobbling a piano part together from all the orchestra parts. And he surprised me by playing back a Bill Evans phrase on the piano after hearing the record only once. I’d always thought classical guys didn’t have ears. Robert Darnell retired at the end of the year and I began to lose interest in the music department altogether. After experiencing proper mentorship, my music classes began to feel a little shallow and impersonal. When I tell people that so much of my success in t...

I still had to find my artistic voice. By artistic voice, I’m referring to one’s artistic thumbprint—the idiosyncratic stuff that makes an artist unique. It’s not a precise science, and finding it is always a painful process. I think it has to be about subtraction. It’s not a matter of cooking up a persona or style so much as it is stripping away what’s covering up the essence, what was already there. Sometimes it’s just growing out of the imitation phase. Most artists have a period where they sound like their favorite musician, and once they’ve learned from that they can shed that effort. Sometimes the subtraction is about casting off a misconception about how music is actually performed, or how art is made. No matter what your particular subtraction is, the artistic voice you will discover will ideally be something you haven’t seen or heard before. Because, miraculously, in a world with billions of people, you’re still the only you. That’s some cringeworthy self-affirmation shit right there, but it’s just the truth. That impossible search for the voice is, in the end, about being yourself. It’s self-honesty. And in those moments that the artistic voice shows its face, it’s hard to imagine what was so difficult about finding it. But it is difficult getting there. Added to the challenge of looking for something for which you have no prior example, once you find it, you’re the only one who will never truly see what’s special about it. What an artist has to offer is obvious ...

It’s like when you ask a little kid why others like her and she says something like, “Because I’m funny! I make farting jokes in class.” Well, if you ask her classmates, they may well tell you that they tolerate that class-clown crap but that actually, “I like Ethel because she’s nice.” They see her in a way her ego will never allow. Ethel never needed to act like the village idiot to make people like her. Being herself was all she needed to do. It can take some time to find the thing that lives in your blind spot. As you get closer to finding your voice, you’ll feel resistance. You’ll want to retreat. It’s scary to just be you. You may notice that criticism from others starts to sting more, because now it’s personal. You’re being seen and addressed directly, not through the sunglasses you finally removed. But once you’ve relaxed, you can apply the effort to the important part—that which projects and amplifies the expression of the real you. That’s technique. And by the way, when it’s said that someone is “trying too hard,” we should take that to mean “trying too hard at the wrong thing.” Once the wrong thing, usually affectation or tension, is stripped away, by all means, please try too hard. Try as hard as you can to express what you feel, and don’t let anyone bully you otherwise.

And I felt the music scene itself was changing quickly in my favor. I’d felt very out of step with the music of the eighties. The polish, the theater, the style and content. But the winds of popular music now seemed solidly behind my sails. Overnight, my boy-next-door musical voice felt relevant. It was as if “my people” had risen from the rubble after Nirvana blew the roof off the music business, and they had infiltrated the mainstream. It wasn’t just grunge that Nirvana ushered in. They introduced a far-less-formal way of looking at things. Music was suddenly less slick, more cerebral, like my music! On my all-night drive down I-95, I was hearing music like “Divorce Song” by Liz Phair, “Low” by Cracker, and “Linger” by the Cranberries. On commercial radio! I felt confident that my years of music-business rejection were solidly in the rearview and that what I had to say would now be granted a listen.

Once, when we were playing in subzero weather in Minnesota, the hammers were so frozen that the piano sounded like a harpsichord for the first half of the show. Steam bellowed out of the instrument like smoke. When the hammers thawed out, they were soaking wet and the piano became incredibly dull. During that same cold spell, on a day when it was forty degrees below zero, we got the piano down the ramp into the middle of a snowy street, panicked from the unfathomable cold, and just left it there in the road, watching downtown Minneapolis traffic avoid a baby grand piano. Not something you see every day. 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.

“Rock this bitch!” someone shouted from the front of the audience as we were recording at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. I told this young man that I didn’t know the song “Rock This Bitch,” and I proceeded to make one up on the spot. The song was good enough to make it onto the album. This excited heckler had unwittingly launched a new tradition, because from that night on, someone always shouted, “Rock this bitch!” at my concerts, a cue for me to improvise a song. The rules developed spontaneously. Each “Rock This Bitch” (RTB) would be completely new, musically and lyrically, as long as somewhere in the song I sang, “Rock this bitch.” I have improvised an RTB at most shows since 2002. I’ve Rocked This Bitch solo; I’ve Rocked This Bitch with various touring bands and even with symphony orchestras. With orchestras I come up with the bones of a song quickly and then dictate some simple orchestration. It usually takes about ten minutes to get it together, but the process itself is of interest to the audience. They like hearing how the different parts of an orchestra function and how they come together. It also humanizes the symphony orchestra for pop audiences, seeing the players work through this unusual exercise. Thanks to that random dude who immortalized himself on my live album, I’ve gotten some unique on-the-job lessons in songwriting. Improvising RTBs at my concerts has given me a healthy new perspective on songs and how they are made, and what music is for. Freestyling i...

An RTB, like any freestyling, is an event, not a final product. Music that is highly crafted, considered, professionally performed and packaged is, of course, the norm—it’s modern music. We love that. But you can hijack this modern apparatus, the musicians, the technology, even a large audience, to celebrate a spontaneous moment and take a detour from the regularly scheduled program, to make up a song on the spot. Now, that’s exciting. It’s off-book, unplanned, unrehearsed, with no guarantees or safety net. It’s breaking the law! Rap musicians understand the power of spontaneous songwriting. Freestyling is still essential to the art form of rap, while classical music has left freestyling behind for the most part. But it used to be the way a classical musician earned his stripes. Nineteenth-century composers regularly dueled with other pianists at what were called “salons.” They created pieces from thin air on the spot, as they tried to outdo one another creatively and technically. The jazzers have taken improvisation to a high art, but I wouldn’t quite call it freestyling. Jazz musicians generally improvise over already existing song structures, which they call “the head.” They might play one pass of “Someday My Prince Will Come” and then continue the chord structure as they take turns improvising over it. But the kind of freestyling that connects Biggie to Beethoven requires creating the whole ball of wax in the moment. When it’s over, poof, it’s gone. Next.

If freestyling onstage teaches us that you can always turn on the faucet and that some kind of music will always flow, then songwriting in solitude confirms that the water can sometimes flow muddy brown. Non-potable melody. You have to let it run for a while, until it begins to run clear. Yes, it hurts to hear the brown ideas coming from the center of your soul, but you don’t have to show them to anybody. Don’t let brown get you down. Here’s a common bit of advice I’ve heard from every songwriter I’ve ever met: Just keep moving. I personally do not believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. It’s just that we don’t like everything that comes out. When our self-judgment takes over, it shames us into submission and we shut off the faucet. We say we have no ideas. No. We have ideas, but we aren’t willing to fess up to how bad they might be. But, really, who gives a damn? Own them. They suck, and they came from you. Fine. That’s not a crime, that’s normal. Take it easy on yourself. Remember that you can always write something, it’s just that sometimes it’s shitty! Let it be so! And then follow that brown until it runs clear.

A great musician and producer named Pat Leonard told me that it’s important to know when to send your inner editor away. His advice is another version of my faucet metaphor. Maybe it works better for you. When you’re creating, make a deal with your inner editor—that judgmental but necessary part of your psyche that keeps telling you what sucks. Tell this trigger-happy editor in your mind that you need them to step out of the room while you create. You need to be free to follow all ideas, bad and good. You need to create with impunity—alone. However! The other half of the deal is that the editor gets to come back the next day—with a chain saw. Your editor will get to go to town on what you’ve written. The editor may even throw the whole song in the trash. But not now. Now you must create.

I consider myself a part-time artist. I’m not always all that damn creative, so when I’m not in artist mode I store up observations like a squirrel for the winter. I try and keep my antennae up so that I have a lot of extra pieces with which to complete a song when I’m an artist again. There’s a time to collect data, a time to run on the fuel of inspiration, and then there’s the heavy lifting at the end—the craft. The craft might not seem all that damn sexy, but you need compositional tricks, and some understanding of music theory, formal or informal, to knock a song together. I cannot accept the notion that knowing less about music can be a good thing, though I recognize everyone has their own capacity for the technical stuff. Some of us stick with three chords, while others go full Schoenberg on it. You should learn as much music as you can stand. You’ll know when cramming in one more scale will break your brain. And until your brain is broken, keep cramming, keep learning, keep storing up for winter. Some songwriters

I USED TO TELL PEOPLE that I followed my instinct when making artistic and career decisions. But these days I am more likely to say that I follow my interest. The fine songwriter Dan Wilson once told me he thought interest is what makes the world go ’round, second only to the will to survive. It might seem like semantics, but these language cues make a difference to me. I’m compelled to turn corners and pages out of interest, not because of instinct. Whenever I’ve announced, “I’m going with my instincts on this one,” I’ve felt like I was throwing down a challenge against all advice, facts, or common sense. The pundits said it couldn’t be done, but Folds proved them all wrong! He has instinct! That places too much pressure on my instinct. It’s too results-oriented to feel artistic. I believe an artistic decision should be allowed to feel innocent, unburdened, and uncorrupted by considerations of outcome. Sure, I don’t deny instinct itself exists, or that it drives many of our decisions. But I’d rather leave mine to do its subconscious work in the shadows beneath the slats of my ego. Not on display, with everyone placing bets on it. I used to feel guilty when I strayed from the Script™. Mine, of course, has always been tour-record-tour-record. Yours may be work-sleep-work-sleep, speak-travel-write-speak-travel-write, or even left-right-left-right. Whatever your personal Script™, others become accustomed to, and dependent on, your following it. Veering off to follow interests...

Do you know what Charles Ives, one of the great celebrated American composers of the twentieth century, did in his spare time? He overhauled the insurance industry and laid the foundation for the modern practice of estate planning. Is that cool? Or is that whack? It’s cool in retrospect, but what would the Pitchfork of 1918 have thought? I doubt there’s much indie-cred for a songwriter who works at State Farm. But I say, follow your interests and let your art speak for itself. Business is based on creativity too.

Beware of little things that can erode our creativity as we grow up. One after another. One at a time, small choices eliminated incrementally. Flickers slowly dimmed. It never ends. You have to tune those voices out because your interests, those creative flickers, are truly miraculous. They are what drive us to keep seeing what’s around the next corner. Chase ’em. Life is short. After you’ve put food on the table, if you’re so lucky, then what? You follow your interests, that’s what. I believe deep in my bones that every person is inherently creative. But I also think our creativity has to be recognized, encouraged, cultivated, protected, and sometimes even put on life support. It can’t live without oxygen. But it comes back, if you want it to, like your appetite after an illness. Like the lightning bugs when darkness falls again. So then. What flickers do you see? What beauty glows for you that might have gone unnoticed by others? Remain just innocent enough to keep dreaming. There’s always some motherfucker who would like to fact-check your dreams and convince you there are no flickers, only the Script™, whatever that might be for you. Too often that fact-checking motherfucker is you. It’s your own voice, whispering to yourself and to others that you’re crazy for seeing glowing insects. And maybe you are. Until you bottle and share them.