by Ben Folds
“Bitches Ain’t Shit” in ballad form was expanding my audiences much like “Brick” had done for Ben Folds Five in the decade before. I can’t say I was completely thrilled with this new demographic, but that’s the way it is with hits. The song brought in more drunken college boys with ironic (I guess?) backward baseball caps. And YouTube was full of children lip-synching along to this vulgar song—something I wasn’t expecting. I can’t say I was comfortable with all of this. In fact, the song never got easier for me to sing. It always felt so very wrong, but, then, that was also part of what made it interesting. At the time of the John Mayer tour, this crude and melancholy tune was undoubtedly my hit. And when you’re on tour with a major recording artist, you must play the hit. Needless to say, “Bitches Ain’t Shit” wasn’t very well received at John Mayer’s general-audiences-rated concerts.
The song, which I sang completely earnestly, got me booed regularly. And in response to that, my inner punk took over and I began flipping off the audience with one hand while playing with the other. Thirty-something parents with respectable jobs had brought their children to this concert for an evening of polite rock, not to hear a foul-mouthed pianist as he gave them the finger. As they hissed and hollered in disgust, covering their children’s ears, I would finish the song, pretending to be flustered by the negative response. “People, I’m sorry. I’m here to have a good time and I don’t understand why all the booing.” (Straight out of Kaufman more than Compton.) “That’s just rude of you. I’m so nervous now—all this bad energy and angry vibes. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry if I upset you. But can you see my children just off the stage there? Do you think they want to witness their father being booed like this?” (Never mind that they just witnessed their father singing about dick-sucking.)
There would be a palpable forgiveness in the air. They weren’t a cruel audience.
“I’m a little lost now….” I would pause and then continue, “Let me look at this set list. I don’t even know where I am now, or what I just played. Hmmm…Okay, I don’t think I played this one—I have to say, your booing has really thrown me off. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, the next song is called ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’!”
The audience groaned.
Then I’d play it again. All the way through. Sometimes even slower, savoring every word. I often told them to sing along or I’d play it yet again, which I did on a couple of occasions. Thrice. Sometimes I’d break their will and the booing would stop, and a few would even indulge in a sing-along. They must have thought if that was what it would take to shut me up, then fine.
“Would you please just not play that song?” Michael McDonald (not the singer, but John’s manager) asked me after having been pummeled with audience complaints.
We had a very earnest long conversation about it on the tour bus. I told Michael that he was asking me not to play something my audience expected me to play. Further, I pointed out that Michael and I had toured together before, and he was surely aware of the kind of language I used at my shows before this tour was booked.
“No, Michael,” I said, “this is censorship.” And I stuck with that line.
I told him that I wouldn’t hold a grudge if he fired me. But he knew John wanted me on the tour, and so I was kept on. It probably was unfair of me to be so stubborn, but I was a child that year, at least onstage.
* * *
—
Offstage I was buried in grown-up problems, many springing from what was shaping up as an awful divorce—if, in fact, there’s such a thing as a good divorce. The legal and financial issues of divorce can certainly take their toll, especially when you’re trying to keep the children safe and stable through the mess you’ve created. I was filled with dread the entire waking day, except when I was onstage. My ears rang from high blood pressure most mornings. I often wished I’d just go to sleep and never wake up. But sleep itself was rare, as I endured bouts of a condition called “Restless Legs Syndrome,” involving a sensation in your legs and lower back that gives you the overwhelming urge to jump out of bed and sprint. It’s awful, and I was in agony. RLS is something I’ve often had during periods of high stress.
Maybe I should have tended to myself rather than going out on tour, but here I was, on the move from city to city, with voicemail and inboxes full of drama—a disaster of my own making, indeed. We all encounter rough patches, and we each find a way to power through. Luckily, I could still have a laugh, something that’s gotten me through my toughest chapters. But these were times that made me wonder how much longer I could even hang on to that.
“How about you work with me on this, Ben,” Michael asked, “and just don’t play that nasty song twice? Can you do that much? Just don’t play it twice? Please?”
I agreed. I would not play it twice. And that night as I passed him going on for my set, he kindly reminded me, “Not twice, right?”
I assured him, “I won’t play it twice, Mike.” And I turned around to him, nearly seated at my piano, and mouthed, “Thrice!” holding up three fingers. He had forgotten to say anything about playing it three times.
These days I’ve stopped playing “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and I ignore requests for it. Music should work to ease social tensions, not throw gasoline on the fire, even inadvertently. I don’t want non-white people in my audience subjected to large numbers of white people gleefully singing a racial slur that had never been the point.
We had our Dre moment. Moving on.
* * *
—
My most childish episode during that tour was in Indianapolis, one of the biggest shows on the tour, and it had nothing to do with Dr. Dre. Before an audience of ten thousand devoted John Mayer fans, I spent my whole forty-five-minute set meticulously developing a huge absurd whopper of a story. In banter between songs, I made myself out to be the son of some mystery famous songwriter whose career had tragically ended on the very stage on which I performed that evening. For much of the set, I didn’t let on whose son I was. I spoke as if they were, of course, supposed to know who my dad was.
Early on in the set I said things like, “This next song was the first record that ever sold as many copies as my father’s biggest hit,” or “I never wanted to be compared to my old man. I wanted to be my own songwriter, but this one is a nod to my father’s style.” Nobody in the audience seemed to know who I was anyway, so I figured I was free to spin tall tales with impunity. I set it all up so that near the last song I could tell a story that went something like this:
“Ladies and gentlemen: This is, as many of you know, a very emotional show for me. I was eight years old the last time I was here. Sitting right over there, just offstage, watching my dad. It was one of those nights, and I knew how he could be when his drinking started. I knew something was going to happen that night. Everyone did. I know some of you are old enough to know what happened, right?”
There was a muted and confused response, but I had their attention. I continued.
“It changed my life. It changed his life and the life of the woman who lost her sight in the incident. It’s painful, but I’ll recount what followed for those who don’t know: My father, of course, was the lead singer of 38 Special”—crowd goes wild—“and that night, the last night he took the stage, ended his career in shame. Someone in the audience, front row, as many of you will remember, had thrown a whisky bottle at my father, who was slur-singing out of tune. Dad picked the bottle up, threw it back as hard as he could, missed the guy who had thrown it at him, but blinded his girlfriend….”
The audience gasped, of course.
“But he’s spent his life being sorry. He’s done wonderful things for those people, and they’ve forgiven him. She has her eyesight back because my dad spent every last penny on that experimental surgery. And she’s here tonight, friends, with my mom. In fact, they’re just offstage together! Hi, Mom! Hi, Lisa!” Applause for Mom. “And my dad: He’s! H
ere! Tonight!”—thunderous applause—“And I talked him into coming out here. Onstage, for everyone to see! It’s about healing! Dad, wanna come on out?”
On cue, my stepmother then rolled my father out in a wheelchair. Why did it need to be a wheelchair? I don’t know. It just seemed comically sadder, as if something about the tragedy had rendered Papa unable to walk. I’d seen the wheelchair sitting unused backstage when I was cooking up this whole scene prior to the show.
Papa hadn’t been sure if he wanted to be involved in this scheme, but my then-seven-year-old daughter had been very excited about seeing her grandfather onstage. She talked him into it—granddaughters have their granddads around their pinkies, you know.
So Papa was rolled out onstage, with a local crew helping lift him over various cables. Those in the seated section rose to their feet at the sight. My band swears there were tears in the audience. I didn’t see that. I was too busy taking in the beauty of my father’s form as he so artfully and painfully struggled to slowly raise one twisted fist in the air. He milked that. When he’d accomplished the feat of nearly extending his quivering arm, the place went nuts. There was no roof to blow off the motherfucker, it was outside. No, Dean Folds blew the sky off the motherfucker. Our last song—God knows or even cares what it was—was massive. It was my first actual positive response of the summer tour.
As we exited the stage, my tour manager anxiously announced, “Everyone’s stuff is on the bus. There’s press that wants to talk to you about this and I can’t let you talk to them!. Move quickly to the bus. Let’s get the fuck out.” And we took off.
The next day in catering, John made a beeline to me.
“Please tell me that at least that was your real father?”
I nodded yes, sinking into my chair like a scolded child.
John shook his head like a disappointed dad and went to the catering line. It seems that at forty I was still getting paid to throw childish tantrums and mitigate my anxiety onstage. Who else gets to do that?
WAY TO NORMAL
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT TIME THAT we just don’t understand. Depending upon our perceptions and moods, time can feel as if it has accelerated or slowed. Sometimes it can feel as though it stands still. I don’t sit around trying to understand Einstein, but I know he sat around trying to understand time. And if that guy had to dedicate his entire life to time, and died uncertain about the whole thing, then what chance do the rest of us have? But time—or, rather, our sense of time—has an important place in music, and I can speak to that from my experience as a musician.
Any musician will know that our perception of tempo, music’s way of keeping time, can be quite elastic. We musicians practice like hell in private with metronomes, but the moment we get excited at a show, our sense of tempo can go out the window and we’re off to the races! And we usually have no idea how badly we rushed until we hear the recording later. Ugh. It takes a lifetime for musicians to get a handle on this. Because humans are time-dumb.
Our time-challenged nature is what music therapists take advantage of to increase the gait of rehabilitation patients, who, by the end of a session, can routinely walk at a clip not thought possible at the beginning. Using music and tempo, the therapist plays with the patient’s sense of time, which fools the mind and the body into doing something it couldn’t previously do. This method is standard practice, proven and effective. Indeed, our shitty inner clock is no match for the mysterious persuasiveness of music. And this gives us a lot of opportunity to have fun with tempo, expression, and even the content of a song.
I think that manipulation of time, musically and lyrically, is part of what makes songwriting so interesting. Because what four-minute song has ever been about exactly four minutes of someone’s life? Within the structure of a simple four-minute song, you can play with what happens between the beginning and the end and warp the sense of time. A four-minute song might dwell on one special second in our life. And that one second might represent a turning point, something that implies a whole lifetime. Whoa, dude! I know, it may be a fairly pedestrian concept to philosophers and scientists, but it’s worth considering that songwriting, like any time/performance-based art like movies, plays, or symphonies, wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have such gullible inner clocks.
I read somewhere that when teenagers are asked to stand and reel off their life stories in front of an audience, they tend to go on for ages about what seems to them to have been a very long life. But when you ask someone in their forties to step up and recount their life, it’s usually over in a few minutes.
* * *
—
The metaphoric language around time illustrates how much poetic license we’re willing to take with time on a regular basis: It took forever to get my coffee. The summer was over in a second.
I thought it was pretty damn deep when I wrote this line from “Jackson Cannery”:
When seconds pass slowly, and years go flying by
That sentiment feels a little less revelatory to me now, but it’s still true. It ain’t a bad line. I wrote it on a napkin while doing my “side work” waiting tables at the Dogwood Room Restaurant at UNC–G in 1988. A decade later, audiences were singing along with it in places I never dreamed I’d travel. And then a decade after that, Robert, Darren, and I found ourselves together sound-checking that same song for our reunion concert in Chapel Hill in 2008. 2008! Boom, just like that! It had been years since we’d seen one another. But as soon as we hit the first note together, it felt like no time had passed at all. We broke for lunch and the present elastically snapped back into place.
While not in our time machine, playing music as we had done so many times before, it was obvious we were all changed and older. Time had passed after all. And it was striking that we all stepped away to check our cellphones, something that had never been part of our band back in the day. The broadcast of the Ben Folds Five reunion concert that night was for Myspace, which was king of the internet in 2008, (though its days were numbered). I remember it all even more clearly because it was September, right in the middle of the massive bank crisis, and the world was shifting. An historic week.
After our rehearsal, I downloaded the artwork proposals for my soon-to-be-released third studio album, Way to Normal. I was considering using my brain scans for the cover. They had been taken the night I fell offstage and suffered a concussion in Hiroshima a couple years before, the story of which starts the album. (I don’t recall much of the Hiroshima concert, other than bleeding on the piano a lot and joking to the audience that I’d cut myself shaving.)
In the end I decided against the brain scan. Instead, I thought the art should reflect a sense of loneliness and feeling lost. After the reunion show, I went back to Nashville and we shot a series of photos of me wandering what was supposed to be my lonely mansion (I actually lived in a 1,600-square-foot house), pondering my sad life. The cover shows me in silk pajamas, with two butlers (played by my band, Jared Reynolds and Sam Smith) protecting me from the rain with an umbrella as I meditate at my pool. It seemed to capture the time better. At least it made me laugh, which is important to me.
From series of me wandering my imaginary sad mansion with butlers (my bandmates)
Finalizing my third divorce during Way to Normal, I should have taken an opportunity to rethink my life. To slow the tempo down and take a pause. But, instead, I immediately launched into a new relationship, soon to be married once again, soon to become what I now consider the worst version of myself. Of course, everyone around me could see that it was all a fast track to yet another divorce. How many times would I set the needle back to the top or count my life’s repetitive song over again? I was beginning to resemble the character in my decade-old song:
I have made the same mistakes over and over again
—From “Mess,” The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, 1999
I think W
ay to Normal is a fine record. I can’t imagine not having songs like “You Don’t Know Me,” “Cologne,” or “Kylie From Connecticut” in my catalog. And it came in at number 13 on the Billboard album chart, my highest chart position to date. Not bad at all. But something was starting to feel wrong. Something about making Way to Normal seemed overly heavy and effortful. It was like straining to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, as Bill Bryson likes to say. But I think it’s a good thing to get that last bit out. I needed to make that record, and then I needed to move on. After we mixed Way to Normal, it was time to finally toss the old worn-out empty toothpaste tube.
Honesty, humor, and vulnerability are all important to my songwriting. But equally as important is an element of discovery, a sense that time has passed. If the third chorus of a song hasn’t time-traveled and unveiled a subtly changed perspective, or a third album hasn’t evolved from the first, it’s not going to be very damn convincing. In fact, it gets a little boring when a songwriter keeps messing up the same things and tries to sell essentially the same thing over and over again, honest and vulnerable as it all may be. The same goes for the human being behind the song. If he can’t learn from a cheap lesson, or two or three, then what? I was starting to suspect that:
What was bad for the life might actually be bad for the music as well.
At the time, I thought that Way to Normal was a random title with a random album cover. The phrase “way to normal” was snatched from one of the album tracks, “Effington,” which I had freestyled at a show in Normal, Illinois. I just thought it sounded good. But in retrospect I see it as representing my desire to find my way to “normal.” I was trying to find the answers in well-lit and well-traveled corners, when what I really needed to do was muster the courage to head into the unknown. The same mistakes, lived the same way, sung the same way, weren’t going to keep making good songs.
