YOUNG ADULT ME: “Always be present, because your actions affect others, and being on autopilot is being an existential chicken!”
[A few in the class chuckle. They think the word “chicken” is funny.]
BEARDED NOW ME: “Now, settle! Okay, my class of various-aged young Bens, there is one concept above all that has made your songs better. That bedrock we spoke about? What is that?”
ROOM FULL OF ME: “SELF-HONESTY, SIR!”
BEARDED NOW ME: “Right!” [The classroom door opens slowly, interrupting the lesson.] “Oh, wait, what do we have here? Sir, you’re very late today!”
2008 ME: [In suit and tie, sheepishly puts away cellphone and takes seat.] “Sorry, sir. Meeting with my lawyer went late.”
BEARDED NOW ME: “We’re all telling what we learned. What’s yours?”
2008 ME: “Uh…discovery?”
BEARDED NOW ME: “Well played! All the honesty in the world is great, but a life, like a song, needs to have a sense of discovery! People, can you see how all of these musical lessons, if they’d just sink in a little, might help you in your life, right?…All right, all you little shits, think about that as you go out into the world for the next forty years or so and fuck up a lot. Then write me a book about it. On my desk, 2019! Class dismissed—except you, 2008! We need to speak after class!”
All of those musically philosophical tidbits I worked so hard to learn for my musicianship actually did seem to apply to my life. Artistically, I knew not to always head for comfort. Maybe in other facets of my life I should try lurching toward things that made me terribly uncomfortable, that broke my habits and patterns? If it was a food I never wanted before—what the hell, I’d make myself try it. I’d never been social—ugh—so I’d do that too. I did stuff I wasn’t coordinated at, even if it was just Pilates. I would say things aloud in therapy that were embarrassing and true, things I’d never said before. And I consciously attached those thoughts and feelings to all the physical therapy that felt equally awkward. Like an Alexander Technique session, for instance. Or basketball and volleyball. As I experienced how foreign and awkward an activity or physical movement could be, rather than fight it or avoid going into a weird physical position I would relax into it and laugh at myself. Who cares? It’s like letting the water run brown and writing a few shitty verses.
I just let it all go. I embraced the cringe. I decided to associate new awkward thoughts with new awkward physical activities. Let’s say I was afraid of telling friends “I love you.” I’d chunk that with a yoga pose that I was equally self-conscious about—call it the “I love ya, man” pose. The pose didn’t kill me, so neither would expressing the thought to which it was now connected.
As much as anything, I made myself slow down and experience some silence.
I also wrote for hours a day. About everything. It was a lot of god-awful embarrassing journaling. The reunion record I made in 2013 with Ben Folds Five, The Sound of the Life of the Mind, is basically the distilling of these thoughts into music with rhyme. “On Being Frank” is about having spent my life always needing to have a partner and suddenly deciding to take the steps to learn what it is I really want for myself, so that I can be a solid half of a partnership. The character in that song is an imaginary version of Frank Sinatra’s tour manager, suffering from an identity crisis after Frank’s death. The funny thing is that I ended up sitting next to this very man in real life in Las Vegas. I played him the song and he said it had a nice melody but he didn’t think it sounded like him. Of course not; it was about me.
Home, for me, was always someone else, you know
And shadows always fall when the sun goes down
“Away When You Were Here” was about the death of my father—but not really, because he’s still alive. It’s another song on this album where I’m working out the cold harsh truth that there is only me, my decisions, and my own direction. No one else’s stamp of approval can make things okay. That’s up to us. Many lines came straight from my diary:
This morning I wake to be older than you were
Fresh white snow for miles—every footstep will be mine
The process of tending to myself, after years of refusal, was unbelievably time-consuming. Every day I woke up wanting to just abandon all of it and get back to work. Avoid! But I muscled through with a routine that started the minute I opened my eyes. The very carving out of time to do these things for myself was, for me, radical. And maybe that was all I needed to do. Just make the time. Maybe I could have done all of this stuff earlier along the way, in small doses, and avoided the crash I experienced, who knows? But here I am.
* * *
—
While taking the uncomfortable route and facing the scary stuff was foreign to me in my personal life, it was very familiar to my artistic self. The willingness to be brutally self-honest and to go somewhere unlit and awkward is the way I’d always written songs. That’s not impulsiveness, as it turns out. That’s courage. My bad impersonation of courage in my personal life was to jump off the deep end, belly flopping over and over again.
I dived into crazy shit regularly, not to discover something new, but to fill silence. The deep-end jumping became routine, and so did the punishment: “Thank you, sir, may I have another? Thank you, sir, may I have another?” That’s not courage, that’s running in a loop, like a scared child. And with each loop, the drama becomes less interesting. Loss of interest is, of course, a death blow to creativity.
So, I consider these years as ones of serious personal rehabilitation. I was still working and touring, but I took longer, and more frequent, breaks to stay healthy. And of course, like at any rehab, I was eventually discharged and began my transition back into the real world, knowing full well that I would need to keep an eye on my life and my choices every single day. I might relapse from time to time, but that was okay. As I got stronger personally, I had broader shoulders to rest my art upon. Soon, my artistic appetite began to return—and along with it, my interest. In fact, I became insatiably interested.
FOLLOWING INTEREST
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.