Ben Folds recently dropped the lead-single for his first new album in 8 years, What Matters Most, and boy has that conjured up a whole host of complex emotions.
Some context: my Mom taught me to play piano, and what every little boy who played piano in the ’90s remembers only too well, is how absolutely everyone insisted that you must therefore like Ben Folds Five, too. I didn’t, mainly because being told I seemed like a natural Ben Folds fan came off as a really back-handed compliment–especially since Folds described himself as “Punk rock for sissies”. (Not helping things was that the only other piano-based rockers of note at the time were Elton John and Billy Joel–fun musicians both! But hardly models of masculinity for a painfully self-conscious boy already feeling insecure about being asked to play prelude in Priesthood every week.)
Part of it too was that every time someone learned I wasn’t already a Ben Folds fan, they tried to get me into him by exclusively playing Whatever and Ever Amen, which holds the dubious distinction of being the only disc of his most people seem to own, as well as hands-down his weakest album. There, I said it: Whatever and Ever Amen sucks. Opener “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” features exactly the sort of immature, petulant nerd-complex that continues to bedevil his personal life to this day (I believe he’s now on divorce number four–i.e. the number when you really gotta ask yourself, “Hey, maybe it’s me!”). He is about the only person I know of who can make swearing sound as dorky in real life as our seminary teachers tried to claim it was. Also, “Brick” is bland, boring, and overplayed; the fact that everyone just has to point out that it’s about an abortion makes me like it even less–especially since he only whines about how the abortion effected him, not the poor girl he knocked up. To this day, I skip more tracks on Whatever than any other album of his (yes, even that crappy Nick Hornby album).
Ah, but I just gave away the fact that I do in fact listen to all his albums, and that quite regularly! For the fact of the matter is this: when Ben Folds is off, he’s rather off-putting; but when he’s on, oh my, is he ever on!
In one of those memories that only ever seem to happen in your early-20s, I still remember working a construction job in college, commuting an hour between Rexburg and Island Park near Yellowstone; my foreman (who just so happened to be Jake Clayson, owner and proprietor of this very site!) was a much bigger Indie aficionado than myself at the time, and had just picked up Ben Folds Fives’ The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner at a local library fire-sale. He insisted we give it a listen on the drive home; I assented only begrudgingly. But what can I say? What happened next? For 40 straight minutes, I sat there behind the steering-wheel, transfixed; “Narcolepsy” waded me into the waters before plunging me into the depths; “Don’t Change Your Plans” warmly welcomed me to the other side; “Mess” sent in the storm; “Magic” was the clear night sky after the storm has cleansed the air; “Hospital Song” forced me to account for how one dies; and then “Army” forced me to account for how one lives! “Army” is the high-point of the album, the kind of song you turn to when you’ve likewise “been thinkin’ a lot today,” and the turmoil in your soul needs something to resonate to.
The album then keeps the hot streak alive with the anxious “Your Redneck Past,” the haunting voice-mail of an institutionalized father in “You’re Most Valuable Possession,” and the even more haunting Calypso of “Regrets”; if you’ve ever wondered why I’ve done so much traveling so young and so irresponsibly, well, it’s because “Regrets” contains the frightening line: “I thought I’d do some traveling/never did…”
I had never heard anything like it before or since, and when the album ended I didn’t want it to end–the mark of a great record. True, this was also the album that killed the band’s commercial momentum and precipitated their early break-up–but that’s just another way of saying it was too good for them or this world. Am I overselling it a bit? Then you clearly haven’t listened to it yet.
I said I’d never heard anything like Reinhold Messner before or since, but that’s not quite true; two years after Reinhold Messner crashed and burned commercially, Ben Folds went solo for 2001’s Rockin’ The Suburbs, and it is these two albums together that mark the artistic high point of Fold’s career. It’s frankly a shame that Folds went with what is by far the weakest track on the disc as the album title (my goodness man, “Not the Same” was RIGHT THERE!), and if I could travel back to 2001, I would…well, first I would stop 9/11. But after that, I would try to convince Folds to leave the jokey, whiny title-track off altogether, for it is the one blemish on an otherwise flawless CD.
Opener “Annie Waits” is the peppiest song ever about your crush waiting for someone else; “Zak and Sara” makes it sound like so much fun to be a psychic no one believes (it’s basically a modern-day retelling of Cassandra); “Still Fighting It” sounds like the sort of new-fatherhood ballad you’ve always known, like it’s always existed, so it’s always a shock to remember its only from the turn of the 21st century; the album’s middle-trio of “Losing Lisa,” “Carrying Cathy,” and “Not the Same”–the latter of which I will insist till my dying day is about a Mormon missionary–work like gangbusters (which, again, is why it’s such a shame for that momentum to be ruined by the title track, as though Folds lost his nerve at the last second and had to throw on a novelty song before anyone started to take him too seriously); and of course closer “The Luckiest” is his all-time most perfect love song—the one I played my wife at our wedding reception—and that finally, mercifully, succeeded “Brick” as his defining track in the public consciousness.
The one-two punch of Messner and Suburbs is what caused me to finally embrace my destiny and become a Ben Folds fan. I spent hard-earned money during the Great Recession to see him perform with the Utah Symphony Orchestra in Park City, and it remains one of my all-time favorite concerts. I gave in and picked up Whatever solely to be a completionist, and snagged Ben Folds Fives’ self-titled debut too, which just has this refreshing, propulsive energy about it, one that even today, nearly 30 years later, is wonderfully bereft of all the simpering nerd-rage and sentimentality that would bog down so much of his later releases.
Which is exactly what happened. I would say that on Songs for Silverman (2005), Supersunnyspeedgraphic (2006), Way to Normal (2008), Lonely Avenue (2010), and the Ben Folds Five reunion album The Sound of the Life of the Mind (2012), only about a third of the tracks are genuinely inspired–just strong enough to keep me coming back–while the rest are utterly skippable. If you were to combine the best tracks off his last two decade’s worth of work, I’d say you’d end up with one really solid CD, as opposed to this long trail of mediocre LPs trailing in his wake.
So There (2015) seemed to signal a return to form, as he at last transformed into the sort of chamber-pop/classical maestro he had always felt destined to become. The running violas and flute-runs of the opener “Capable of Anything” immediately set my soul aflutter. Now, had all these Sufjan-Stevens-esque musical moves become Indie-rock cliches by that point? Oh, but Ben Folds has always played the cliches–he just played them so much better than everyone else (at least, when he felt like it). It’s cheese, but it’s good cheese. (This is a man who unironically loves college a capalla groups, after all). In any case, I was excited to see where he would go next.
Which turned out to be nowhere. After recording at a steady, prolific clip for 20 straight years, he took the rest of the 2010s off. Which was just as well: he was clearly never going to match his high-water mark of the turn-of-the-millennium anyways, and besides, the rest of the decade spilling into the 2020s all gave us much more dire things to obsess about.
But now he has a new album coming out–one he is marketing as a “generous” album, one that he hopes, when you finish it, leaves you “with something you didn’t have when you started”, that has “a lifetime of craft and experience all focused into this one record,” and that “Sonically, lyrically, emotionally, I don’t think it’s an album I could have made at any other point in my career.” Now, naturally he’s going to go for the hard-sell when marketing his first new album in near a decade, I don’t fault him for risking hyperbole and exaggeration; and I would certainly love to hear what a Ben Folds who has finally, at long last, matured out of his nerd-rage stage sounds like. But I also still love Reinhold Messner and Rockin’ the Suburbs more than is probably healthy, and don’t want them to get any further buried and forgotten under yet another unremarkable record.
I am of course being a little dramatic here. Great music isn’t forgotten just because the later releases are forgettable (if that were true, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan would’ve been forgotten decades ago). But this is an artist I have been quietly wrestling with for damn near my entire life, and I suppose I’m not just concerned over whether Ben Folds has finally grown up, but whether I have, too.
Ours, after all, is a religion that believes in Eternal Progression, in constant self-improvement. But it is also one of repentance, because the Gospel (accurately) pre-supposes that we all backslide and regress constantly; hence the great and eternal need of the Atonement. We are endlessly trying to recover where we were before, let alone move beyond ourselves.
Yet I think (or at least hope) that Folds has his heart in the right place when he advertises his new album as “generous”–primarily because the Atonement is also “generous,” liberal, magnanimous, freely offering what we can never attain for ourselves, that likewise gives us something that we didn’t have when we started. Indeed, God commands us all to be generous with each other precisely because he is so generous with us; which is just another way of saying (as John first formulated it) we must love each other because he first loved us. Such is the moral of the parable of the debtor and the 10,000 talents, and of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, and of his command to the rich young man to “sell all that you have and give to the poor,” to forgive “seventy times seven,” and every other teaching of Christ: to always be as radically generous as you can.
It is why the gleaners in the Law of Moses are instructed to leave behind in the fields all they failed to harvest the first time through, for the maintenance of the poor. It’s why Christ rewards those who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the imprisoned, took in the stranger—that is, were generous with others. It’s why we sing in hymn “Because I have been given much, I too must give.” It is why Jacob admonished the Nephites with:
“17 Think of your brethren like unto yourselves, and be familiar with all and free with your substance, that they may be rich like unto you.
18 But before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God.
19 And after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them; and ye will seek them for the intent to do good—to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted.”
Generosity is the overriding theme and thrust of the Atonement and the Gospel of Christ. Even for a self-professed agnostic rightfully suspicious of Jesusland like Ben Folds, there is gospel truth in that impulse towards generosity, perhaps the most important truth of all.
So I guess the question actually hanging around the back of my mind isn’t whether Ben Folds has finally become truly generous after all this time, but whether I have. For of such is the kingdom of God–and is indeed What Matters Most.