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

by Ben Folds

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.