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The following eighteen months are a blur, and what I remember mostly makes me sad. But there are a few things that stick out that make me smile. Like Mama co-hosting a Mother’s Day MTV show called “Mother’s Cut” with Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s mom. The two moms got on amazingly, and Mama was a natural! She said she thought I “sounded like Elvis.” Classic! I also have fond memories of touring with Beck and Elliott Smith. Once I asked Elliott if he could play his song “Angeles” at some point on the tour. I loved that song—I still get goosebumps just hearing the title. Elliott said he was sorry, but his band hadn’t learned that one for this tour. A couple hours later, in our shared dressing room separated by only a thin curtain, Elliott played the whole thing for me solo, so I could hear on the other side.
I also have a fond memory of reading our first really bad review in the U.K. It was of a live show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Most of the piece was dedicated to personal jabs at me. The way I talked, what I wore, how the audience and I deserved each other for being such twats, my sagging weak chin and wimpy shoulders. This reviewer didn’t let up on me for two pages. After Robert got through the brutal review, getting more and more upset with each word, completely steamed and ready to fight, he exploded, “What an asshole! He never mentioned me once!” There was a pause in the airport and then the three of us laughed until tears came. Maybe we were just tired.
In all honesty, the chart-climbing, platinum-collecting, famous-people-meeting, and world-seeing blur of 1998–1999 doesn’t go in my “good times” file. Now, with a bit more experience, it’s easy for me to understand why this was. And the reason is not that damn sexy. In fact, it’s downright elementary: I was just tired and I needed some sleep and good advice. I needed to slow down and even probably get some help. It’s something you need sometimes in a world that moves so quickly. Self-actualization is a bitch, and so is jet lag—two years of perpetual internal clock abuse. There are some things that can’t be solved with a notebook on a cliff.
I don’t want to sound like a little whiny bitch. I can certainly appreciate how amazing all this was. How fortunate we were. It was a trip of a lifetime. But the success felt like a detour, oddly. A fluke. When I first sat down to write this book and reflected on this peak time of Ben Folds Five, it was difficult to identify what lessons, if any, could be gleaned and passed on. Hmmmm, I learned how to do interviews with wacky morning DJs, how recoupable budgets work, and where to do my laundry in Paris. I wasn’t so sure I learned much more. I was mostly on autopilot, in survival mode.
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By mid-1998, Frally had come from Australia to join me on tour with Beck. By the end of 1998, as Whatever and Ever Amen was winding down, an exhausted Ben Folds Five had a stack of awards waiting in various cardboard boxes back home. We attended the MTV awards, and our nomination was announced while I was in the bathroom trying to stuff toilet paper into my fancy new shoes, which were making my heel bleed. So it’s probably best that we lost that one to Green Day, because security wasn’t going to let me back in while the cameras were rolling anyway. On that trip to L.A., we found out Frally was pregnant. I guess this is what I’d asked for, brooding on those cliffs, the way I’d asked to be a rock star when I was fifteen. This package was definitely on its way, due to arrive in nine months, in July 1999. Would it be a boy or a girl, we wondered? Well, as it turns out, it would be both! Twins! A triple anchor, an instant family to keep the piano-playing robot from floating into space. And then, of course, there was another important due date: our next album.
With an immovable, already announced release date for early 1999—and not a single song written—we headed to L.A., grew mustaches, and got to work.
REINHOLD
AS WE EMBARKED ON OUR third studio album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, I arrived at Sound City in Burbank with a notebook full of song fragments. There’s a world of difference between fragments, good ideas, and actual songs. It’s called craft, and I’d brought little of it to the session. I was tired of crafting typical verse/chorus kinds of songs, so I did what songwriters typically do when trying to avoid being typical. I went prog (for the uninitiated, this refers to progressive rock, a genre of awesome self-indulgence that dates back to the mid-1960s). I began gluing these fragments together as one long song, loosely connected by a few common melodic and lyrical themes that weaved in and out. It was a revolutionary approach, except of course that the Beatles had done the same thing on Abbey Road thirty years before. Still, the fragments themselves had loads of soul.
The long string of fragments had its moments, but the band and Caleb were right when, after a few weeks of this expensive experimentation, they urged me to consider dividing the material into normal songs. You know, the usual four-minute ones with beginnings, middles, and ends. As I struggled to have new material to record each day, coming in hours before the band, tearing things down and rebuilding, rewriting, and adding new stuff, Robert and Darren became understandably frustrated. Most of these fragments had no words and no titles, so I referred to them by time signature and key. Like, “Let’s go back and work on that 6/8 dirge in C.”
But Darren gave us the shot in the arm we needed when he brought in a finished beautiful soft guitar song he’d written for our friend Stacy, a great musician who’d recently died of an accidental overdose. It was called “Magic.” It was a completed melody with words that I could sink my teeth into, rearranging it for synth, timpani, and upright piano. The proper way around! Oh! But of course! Writing the song first, and then arranging it. I needed to be reminded of what it was like to just sing a simple great song, without faffing around with bits and pieces, composing and orchestrating it like it was an unfinished symphony. We recorded “Magic” mostly live, vocal and all, in the studio, and as we went on Christmas break, I knew that I needed to get back to the business of actual songwriting.
In the two weeks of holiday break I wrote “Mess,” “Jane,” and “Your Redneck Past” from scratch. I started another song called “Carrying Cathy,” which I couldn’t quite finish in time for our deadline, as well as two others, “Zak and Sara” and “Jesusland,” both of which I finished later for solo albums. Those new songs that I finished over Christmas, plus Darren’s brilliant “Magic,” and the various reworkings of my abandoned frag-prog symphony got us to the thirty-eight minutes of music we needed for an album. Just under the wire. It was a short but somehow heartfelt and interesting album. The record is a snapshot that evokes the insanity of it all, my struggle not to be a robot, and how it felt when the three of us finally got to escape back into pure music. I’m proud of it, and however we got there, my fragments ended up being real songs.
As we were mixing our record in New York, Frally fell dangerously ill in her first trimester and ended up in the hospital on the Upper East Side. Being an Australian citizen who had booked a spontaneous ticket to the United States to hang out with a piano player, she was now within days of her visa deadline. She was half conscious, living on a drip, and in grave danger of losing the twins. I was never so despondent in my life as the night a nurse flippantly mentioned that “Yeah, you’ll probably lose the babies.” But in the morning, their little hearts were still beating. My nights during the Reinhold mix and mastering sessions were spent sleeping in a chair next to Frally’s hospital bed and cabbing back down to the session when the sun came up. Those two weeks in the hospital cost us both our life’s savings. Dear reader, always get traveler’s insurance. Really.