I know it’s cool to be so bored
It sucks me in when you’re aloof
It sucks me in
It sucks it works
I guess it’s cool to be alone
My character in “Battle of Who Could Care Less” felt oppressed by the culture of apathy. It was, after all, cool to be bored in the nineties. Apathy, like the beautiful feathers of an exotic male bird, is what attracted a mate in that era. Back then, we rockers worshipped the slacker above everyone else, except maybe for the suicidal. (Talking about killing yourself would definitely get you laid in the nineties.) So I imagined a battle between two great forces of don’t-give-a-shit-ness: the characters General Apathy and Major Boredom. And though I poked fun at it, I secretly thought all this apathy business was, well…cool. The last line of “Battle of Who Could Care Less” is, after all:
You’re my hero I confess.
But I wasn’t done with the theme. A few years into my solo year, and right before recording William Shatner’s record, I had written a song called “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You.” It’s on my solo album Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP, released in 2006:
Make me feel tiny if it makes you feel tall
But there’s always someone cooler than you
Yeah, you’re the shit but you won’t be it for long
Oh, there’s always someone cooler than you
As it happens, after the night Bill asked, “Benny! What is cool?” my songs didn’t revisit the subject. Having just learned a great lesson in vincibility, did I really want to be spending my limited time and energy worrying about stuff like being cool? I was sitting across the table from an incredibly healthy man in his seventies who didn’t seem to think so. Maybe he’d learned a thing or two. That, for me, was the Death of the Cool.
It’s hard for a man to stay cool
—From “Silver Street,” first released on Ben Folds Live, 2002, but written in 1991
TIME TO GROW UP…WAIT. WHAT? AGAIN?
I’VE NEVER FOUND GROWING UP to be straight and linear. In my case, anyway, it’s been quite a zigzag, fixing one hole and then springing another leak somewhere else. Overcorrecting from the ditch on one side of the road, only to find myself crashed in the opposite. I had dialed back my touring some in 2002 after my pneumonia, but rather than actually slowing down, I had filled my schedule with more work.
I built a studio from the ground up, and by the end of that year, 2003, I had written and recorded four separate studio EPs—three of my own (all of which debuted at number one on iTunes, before iTunes was a big deal), and one with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, called The Bens. As the lesson of my vincibility faded, I got cocky again in 2004 and slipped back into my habit of heavy touring, while maintaining the pace of studio work. There was, of course, Has Been with Shatner, which had been a massive undertaking, writing the music, producing the recording, and flying in new guests every day. Before taking a breath, I undertook a complete reimagining of my catalog for the release of Ben Folds and WASO Live in Perth (the West Australian Orchestra). And I still managed to get another full-length studio album, Songs for Silverman, released by 2005. Unwilling to miss out on the twins’ childhood, I found myself manically running back and forth from the studio to home or school. Or I’d take them with me to the studio, or on tour, the way my parents would drag me to the construction sites. Their presence, despite the challenge of fitting parenthood into a rock career, is probably what kept me sane.
You nodded off in my arms watching T.V.
I won’t move you an inch even though my arm’s asleep
—From “Gracie,” Songs for Silverman, 2005
To add to the mix—just because—I spent an average morning from 5 A.M. to noon in a darkroom, making countless prints, before my late nights in the studio. This is all doable if you just cut sleep in half. The pace continued through 2007, as I unsurprisingly found myself headed for another divorce and hopping on the tour bus that summer to support John Mayer.
I was supposed to be the adult on the John Mayer tour. In terms of years, at least, I was the elder statesman. But as I stretched myself thin with work, my life outside of work paid the price and my typical symptoms once again surfaced. The childish what-the-fuck-is-he-doing-now onstage antics, along with the physical and nervous-system breakdowns. A quick Google search, like I’ve just done at the time of this writing, turns up articles about the Continuum Tour 2007 that pretty well paint the picture: “Folds was profane”; “Folds told tall tales”; he “outraged parents”; he “dropped his pants and flipped off the audience.” Yup, that’s how I remember it too.
I’d first met John in the late nineties, when he was just some kid at Berklee College of Music who was bootlegging Ben Folds Five concerts and selling them online. My manager, Alan, had noticed he was selling these recordings of our shows online and wanted to bust his ass for profiting off our music. Alan often warned of the peril ahead in the new frontier of digital music distribution, and he was ready to make an example of someone. But I told Alan to call off the dogs and leave the kid alone. I didn’t see anything wrong with someone being excited about our music and sharing it with others.
I didn’t think about this John Mayer for a couple years, until he popped up backstage at a solo show in Athens, Georgia, in 2000. Soon after, as Weird Al Yankovic and I filmed the video for the song “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” there was young John Mayer again. Just hanging around, I guess, to see how it was done. Seven years, millions of records, a handful of Grammys, and countless tabloid covers later, he had pretty well figured out how it was done. It turns out this kid was an absolutely brilliant guitarist and songwriter. And so now we were touring together, a newly world-famous John Mayer taking out the old dude he looked up to when he was younger.
John’s tour was much more of a mainstream affair than I was accustomed to, and I was definitely causing problems. But the biggest problem was one particular song, which was becoming a very successful single for me. I don’t mean “Landed,” from the album Songs for Silverman, the single that had been released and highly promoted by Sony. I mean its B side, “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” which had spread by word of mouth and was now doubling my audiences. Its title is the cleanest part of the song. You may know the Dr. Dre original from “The Chronic.” I just added pretty chords and one of my best melodies to it and it became a thing.
Since I was in college I had always wanted to make a melody to “Can’t Do Nuttin’ for Ya Man” by Public Enemy. I loved that song and wanted to hear it on the piano. But when I actually sat down to work on it, I found it too symmetrical for a good melody. It had too much of a Cat in the Hat vibe to sound serious with sad chords. Needing a B side at that moment, I searched my record collection in the studio for another spoken or rapped song that might be less iambic-pentameter driven—so I could experiment with music that might highlight a different side of a lyric. And there, glowing out of my stack of records, was Dr. Dre’s classic.