The Shaped by Sound podcast is made possible through support from Come Hear NC, a program of the North Carolina Arts Council within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Ben Folds from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, right?

Yes.

Thank you so much for being here on Shaped by Sound.

Yeah, good to be here.

Can you talk to us a little bit about growing up here in North Carolina?

Gosh, where to start?

I was born in Greensboro, but I didn't live there for very long, a couple of years.

And then most of the time, grew up in Winston-Salem.

Winston-Salem, for anyone who hasn't been there, you know, it has this history of R.J.

Reynolds Tobacco Company, which is definitely part of things.

And other sort of entrepreneurial moments there, Krispy Kreme.

We had Hanes Hosiery, which made, I guess, that made Fruit of the Loom.

Is that what they made?

Or just Hanes underwear?

I think they were just doing Hanes.

Hanes underwear?

Yeah.

But also, I mean, what about, you got Tabasco, or known as Texas Pete.

Texas Pete is from- Winston-Salem.

Why don't they call him Winston-Salem Pete?

Well, I think it was a branding thing.

They're like, "How do we make this sound and look cool?"

And for some reason, they said, "Well, let's make people think it's from Texas."

Right.

Well, I'm offended.

But yeah, so I think that that hung over things.

In my version of the town, that is what brought a lot of money in that was kind of, became old money, and was sort of invested in arts locally.

So there was, I feel like, from what I've compared of my adult friends from other parts of the country, that we had a really exceptional access to art and music.

Then I couldn't wait to get out, because that's what we did.

I had a nice little scholarship to University of Miami to study jazz.

When I came back to North Carolina, after sort of living in Nashville, Tennessee, and doing a semester abroad in Vienna, Austria I was over there.

Before the wall came down, I was in all the commie countries, getting an eyeful of what authoritarianism looks like.

I'm feeling a little deja vu at the moment.

And so when I came back, it was really easy to find great musicians to start a band.

We played our first gig within a month, and we had our first album out within a year.

We were living in Chapel Hill at that time.

I would like to know, in your opinion, do you think that place influences identity?

Place influences identity.

Gosh, I mean, I think that'd be kind of complicated, because also part of the psychology of a kid growing up, well, while it influences it, I don't think it necessarily influences it the way we might think.

Sometimes I was going to make sure that I was sort of other.

That's just the way I was.

I was going to walk against the grain to a degree.

If everyone was doing it that way, I was very likely to see what happens if I don't.

I climbed out of windows of classes when I was a kid and went running off down the railroad track, skipped school, went up to see Phil Donahue's show in New York City when I was in 11th grade with my friend.

We were afraid we were going to be on camera.

So yeah, I mean, so if the identity was a bit jock at the school, which it probably was, sort of upper-middle class kind of vibe, I sort of pushed against it.

I mean, I mowed two or three lawns a day, worked two jobs, got home at two or three in the morning from Hardee's, got up in the morning at seven and went back to school.

But I do think that the identity of the place, if everything had been completely about musicians at our school and had been sort of a poorer school, maybe I would have tried to act fancier.

I don't know.

I'm not sure.

Well, I'm kind of curious, if we're thinking about place and how it affects our identity, how did that affect you as a musician, maybe more specifically?

Well, North Carolina in general, when I was growing up, had a really healthy, homegrown music scene.

For a kid, I thought these bands were worldwide famous.

I thought the Connells were famous everywhere.

I thought a band from Greensboro called the Other Mothers was huge.

So I think because of that consuming stuff that you are proud of, I saw Mitch Easter in a grocery store that I was working at one time.

He's the producer from Winston-Salem or Kerns Village.

And I was nervous.

I mean, it could have been at that time, Larry Bird could have walked into place and I would have felt about the same way.

I'd be like, "Oh, that's that guy."

So having that be from your neck of the woods, I think generates the idea that you can be extremely independent about your music, that you don't need anybody else.

And North Carolina, excuse my ignorance, but it may be roughly the same size as England, right?

Right, yeah.

So if you think about all the amazing music that came from England from the '60s, '70s, '80s, even '90s, really a lot for the size of the place they come from.

And I feel like some of that is because when you feel a place is a little smaller and you know you can get to it, you're like, "Oh, there's a little kid.

He's 16.

His name is Stevie Winwood and he's got a song on the radio."

Or these Rolling Stones, they're starting to write their own songs and we see them in a pub every once in a while.

That makes a difference, as opposed to it being like some pie in the sky thing that has to come from Los Angeles or somewhere else.

I don't believe that all of the other states in the country have that, have that sense of homegrown, independent music.

And I think that what that does to the psyche of a kid is it's encouraging.

It's like, "Oh, I see that.

I can do that.

I met that guy.

He's just a guy."

As opposed to seeing something on TV and poof, it's gone.

Yeah.

You were talking earlier about how growing up in North Carolina, you felt like you wanted to do the opposite of what everybody else was.

I was just thinking when you asked, "Does it affect your identity?"

My mind went to, "Oh, so does that make you like everyone else?"

I kind of think that's hard to... But an overall identity, I'm proud of being from here.

I've lived in a lot of places.

I don't tend to want to say I'm from them, although I could.

I've spent more time in them.

For whatever reason, I do identify with this place, and I'm proud of my peers who grew up and did things that I think are amazing, too.

We punch above our weight, is what I would say.

So you started out on the drums, right?

Kind of.

Yeah, yeah.

Drums was what I took seriously first.

Percussion, actually, specifically.

Right.

I liked the orchestra, and I liked percussion.

You've said that your songs taught you to play piano.

Yes.

Can you kind of unpack that a little bit for us?

I was doing fine in my first year of piano learning, the basics of it.

I played a recital.

It was pretty much something a five-year student would have done as opposed to one, so I think I was doing good.

But I don't think I was playing the instrument until I really started to find the songs that were in my head.

When I was little, I would walk through the cafeteria line at school, and I'd have a song in my head.

I would go, "That sounds like it.

That sounds good.

I think that's mine.

I think that's mine."

I would think about it.

I would dream it during the day.

When I realized I could find that on the piano, then you're swinging in the dark, and that's the best way to learn, or a lot of the best way to learn an instrument is to continue to go where you can't quite see where you are.

And so that was constantly it.

And I've stayed that way until now.

I don't write really from the piano.

I write from what's in my head, and I find it on the piano.

And of course, the repetition of my own music has meant that a lot of what I imagine is now influenced by myself, so I know where those things are.

But almost every single song, I have to poke around and find these things.

So I'm continuing to learn things about the piano that way.

So music is not something we learn that way.

Music we normally learn by aping others.

Like we have to go through the motions.

Here's how Mozart did it, or here's how, I don't know, what Del's piano player did it, or whatever.

Here's how you do it.

Do that over and over again and come back.

And I think that it's not done as often to imagine and then to find it.

So it teaches me how to play piano even to today.

It's an unfortunate thing for me when I realize I've sort of dreamed a song and it's in a difficult key.

I'm screwed.

I have to stay with that key because I don't feel it otherwise.

And I also have to find things that aren't in my voice.

It's like, I'm not a singer.

I can't do that.

And then I have to explain to myself that I just have to hit it and I have to mean the lyric when I do it.

And if I move it to another key, it doesn't mean anything to me.

So you kind of mentioned this a little bit, but your journey kind of takes you to the University of Miami, and then from there you went back to Greensboro for a bit, and then Nashville, New York.

But it seems like Chapel Hill in the '90s was really where it started to click on a different level for you.

Absolutely.

Why was that?

Chapel Hill was a hotbed of indie music along with maybe Seattle, Portland, oddly places like Omaha, Lawrence, Kansas maybe.

There were all these little scenes, and because Nirvana had blown the door open, and it really was them, it just was.

It's like there had been this independent music scene that was great coming up, bubbling beneath the surface at one of the lowest points in popular music history in America, which was the late '80s and the early '90s, was I still think I can name a few things from that era that moved me at all, and they're exceptional, but the rest of it remained indie music, like the Replacements or something.

So that stuff was happening, but then when Nirvana came along, all of a sudden all the record labels went, "Ooh, this is going to save the industry," because they had already sold every copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Eagles' Greatest Hits on CD again to save the industry.

Before that, MTV had saved the industry, but there had been less and less in terms of, in my opinion, ideas.

So once this blew open, there were all these kids making this really, they called it grunge because it is, it's grungy.

Even our music was a little grungy.

It just is like so not by any kind of book.

And so when that happened, A&R people were frequenting these places.

Quite honestly, I was living in New York.

I knew I had a lot better chance being in Chapel Hill than I did in New York, because that's where everyone was flying in to see if there was new music.

So I went back there, met Robert and Darren in December of '93, and we had our first gig in February of '94.

And we had our first album out at the beginning of '95.

That's crazy that it happened that quickly.

Flying.

I mean, that doesn't count all the gigging I had done solo prior to that, struggling with my songs for almost a decade.

No one interested in hearing them during the abysmal times of the music industry where you had to sound like God knows what.

I don't know what the, I don't even remember what was popular.

Guns N' Roses came out then, that was good.

REM was making good records.

So some R&B things.

Anyway, just the point is that it was opportunistic.

I was like, "Oh, okay, Chapel Hill, this is happening."

So we went there, started playing gigs, and then just went off and toured the world after that.

To me, it's just such an interesting idea that you're like in New York and saying, "You know what?

I'm not making it here.

Instead, I'm going to this tiny town in North Carolina, and this is where it's all going to happen."

Well, as they said in New York back in the day, "Chapel Hill, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."

Well, yeah, I mean, obviously.

The neon lights are burning bright on Franklin, on Franklin.

It's just legendary.

It's right next to the Target, really, now on Franklin Street.

Don't tell me about that.

That is the weirdest sight.

It's like when you walk down Franklin now, it's like this massive building pushing in your face.

You can see the sky before.

It's crazy.

Yeah, there used to be sky there.

What was it like for you to make and create Ben Folds Five in that moment, in the '90s?

It was so exciting, all of it, because it's like anything goes for a moment.

We walked in the door when there was utter chaos.

The industry didn't know what was next.

They were open suddenly to anything because there was no formula.

But boy, they found one in about five minutes, and we were already through the door.

But making our first album was like everything we played in the studio when we made this album was a revelatory moment and was like just every note was a rebellion.

That's the way we felt.

We played one one time, and we heard it through the speakers, and it could be more of that.

We were like, "Whoa," and we'd go in and do it again.

We recorded the whole album and mixed it in four days.

Yeah, I didn't even sleep for 24 hours on the last one.

I wasn't even sleepy in the morning.

We were cleaning up the studio at 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'd been there since 8 o'clock the morning before.

And so it was super exciting.

This grunge era was yielding guitar bands, not piano bands.

So again, we were walking against the grain of that.

Indie music itself was already established as walking against the grain of what had existed before.

So we were almost rebelling against the rebellion.

Like it was everything we got to make up.

We moved a baby grand piano, ourselves, the three of us, and then we had a fourth person, and we would have help with that.

But we would load it in and play with five other punk rock bands and get it out of the way, whether it was New York or wherever.

And then, gosh, within six months of touring, even the album hadn't come out yet, the buzz on it was like there was always lines around the street of these clubs.

You don't even know how that's happening.

There's no internet at the moment.

To wrap it up in one word, it was just exciting.

I don't think you see that much.

I know that happens for people.

They wake up and they see lots of likes on their video, and that's got to be exciting, too.

You've got to get away from that.

But there's something about driving across a desert in the US, barely getting there, getting your stuff on stage, going check, check, check, and then you walk out to go get a sandwich, and you're just walking past a block line of people to see your music, where they come from.

It was great.

Yeah.

Was it also sort of scary?

I didn't think it was scary.

I think that during that time, I had been playing around with working and trying to get my music up for some of the songs that had been sitting with me for ten years.

It had been 100% rejection.

I had already decided I would never make it in the music biz.

By the time I reset with Robert and Darren, although it was an ambitious endeavor, I had this part of my psyche that I didn't care.

I didn't think it could fail, but I didn't think it would succeed.

It's hard to explain what it is.

It's absolutely neutral and focused.

I could not be rocked at that moment.

That's something that, ever since then, I've been absolutely rockable.

Our second and third record, from the first moment, all kinds of psychological freakouts trying to refocus in that way.

I've found other bands and other artists that have "made it" have felt that way.

Some of it's expectation, and some of it, it's like you know that what made the first one amazing for you is that you'd never heard it, you'd never felt it, you'd never done it, you didn't know.

The second one, it's like everyone's waiting for, "Yeah, we want more of the first."

We're like, "We don't think that's how we got the first, was wanting more of the first.

We did the first because we were just doing us."

Right.

You were making art and just being spontaneous and just feeling what you wanted to do, right?

And so you have to wade through a lot of murky waters of that stuff, and you don't want to go too far and start to insist that maybe you do feel like repeating yourself.

You need to be able to hear that.

But the first signal was, I mean, the second album yielded a hit with "Brick."

They were out of luck on the third album if they thought we were going to repeat that because we weren't even trying to repeat that.

Nothing about it.

And it wasn't, it didn't even occur to us.

I think the producer, and he was our friend, Caleb Southern, he was pulling his hair out because he didn't want to say that to us, like, "You guys need to relive the magic."

But the label was telling him all the time, and then he'd come in and he's like, "Maybe you guys could do this or this."

And we're like, "Yeah, right.

Okay, we're doing this."

And that's, yeah.

You've spoken about using creative visualization.

Were you doing that?

Was that kind of what you were talking about earlier is that you were just locking into this thing that you had thought, like, "If I do this and I believe in it enough, then I will get it."

Yeah.

I mean, what it is for me, when I think of creative visualization, I imagine that moment that it is inevitable, it has happened.

It's not even in the future.

It's happened.

It's locked in.

Now, all I have to do is get on the treadmill, and the treadmill's set to a little faster than I can run.

Right.

But that's all I have to do.

That I find easier than all the doubt, all the worry, all the imagination of what could be, what this could be, how I could change it, and stuff like that.

I wasn't going to change anything, because I couldn't.

I wasn't that delusional.

And time said, one good example of creative visualization is when you want to do something really that sucks, like fire somebody.

I want to divest myself and disabuse myself of the responsibility of firing them.

I need to know that it's already been done.

He's gone.

Yeah.

And he knows it, and I know it, and he's gone.

And now he can't live his life if I'm going to hold onto him, because I'm too scared to say that he needs to go.

And I hate doing that more than anything, but you have to do it sometime along the way.

And so creative visualization, he's gone.

He's now in a much better job with a way better person to work with.

I have the correct person in the slot.

It's done.

What do you have to do?

You have to sit with him for 45 minutes of really uncomfortable time, and then it's done.

Then, yeah.

So it's sort of like getting out of the way of something that's inevitable to happen.

It puts you on the treadmill.

It's like, tonight you will achieve such and such, right?

It's done.

So after this roller coaster ride of Ben Folds Five, right, and that sort of coming to an end, how are you applying that to a solo career?

I knew when I went off on my own, and this was a mutual decision, but I knew when I went off on my own, I could now do anything I wanted.

But that was exciting, because I didn't know what it was going to sound like.

We were always, I don't think you would call us a terribly polished sounding band.

When it came to production, for instance, we made records on the cheap, and we did things very live.

Never heard of a click track.

We did overdubs.

We had sort of rules about them that sort of reminds me of like dogma movies in Europe.

But when I was out by myself, first thing is like, I'm going to get a producer that makes hits, and I'm just going to go in and do the shameful business of doing what you do exactly, not ahead of his time.

What do you do in the year 2000, 2001, in order to sound just like everyone else?

That's not something I've done before.

So for me, that was murky, untested waters.

So I dipped into it, and I went in there.

And it was scary, and I hated it every day.

I wanted to quit every day.

And then I wasn't sure what I thought of it.

But I heard the record maybe two, three years ago from front to back.

This is Rockin' the Suburbs.

Rockin' the Suburbs.

It's good.

I didn't think it was good then.

I know it's good now.

There's not any records like it.

This head game happens with older artists where everyone wants them to, quote, "return to form."

And return to form means sound young.

But sounding young was being no idea what was next.

So you'd lunge into these things.

I lunged into work with the orchestra.

I've lunged into things with authors and all kinds of things that would seem like, "Oh, that's grown up.

He's finished."

It's like, "Great.

That's what everyone thinks.

I'm going off and doing that and making sure I make a record that's just scared enough about what it is or uncertain, I should say."

Yeah.

So you sort of lunged into a solo piano tour, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, that must have been a pretty difficult thing to do, right?

I had never played solo piano before.

And so it was a bit circumstantial in that 9/11 had just happened and my record was released on that day.

And pretty much all the budgets for that and all hope for it ever being a successful record was just sort of an unspoken dead end.

So I was sort of out there hanging out in the North Pole with a t-shirt on, surviving.

And some of that meant going solo.

But I was also specifically told that if I went out piano solo, that I was going to disappoint all of the promoters, much less the fans, that it wouldn't work and sure, we'll book you into 200 or 300 cap venues.

And I did that for a few months.

And then the same thing that happened with Ben Fold's Five happened.

Word of mouth started building and I went from one coast to the other and back.

When I played in New York, I played for 500 people.

I went to the West Coast and I came back and by the end of 2002, early 2003, I was now playing 6,000 in New York.

And the record had really no label support.

When I came back and played two nights at the Beacon, which I think is about 3,000 people a night, I don't believe, sorry Sony, you were there for me a lot of times, but there was nobody from my record label at the gig.

It was utterly invisible.

But something was happening.

And it was, again, I look at that as everything was just uncertain enough for me to continue to grow.

Ben Fold's live record was completely self-funded.

Me and the sound man and I threw away all crew and bus and everything.

And we just got in either a Cadillac, because that's what Chuck Berry did, with the briefcase and everything.

Or we drove a van and we drove up to the place.

I helped load the recording equipment, got up on a rental piano, and every night we just recorded the stuff and then put it out.

It didn't count as an album because they didn't want that album.

So I just stayed at Sony indefinitely while I put album after album out.

To be fair, that's what was in the contract.

And to be fair, they liked the album and they helped me with it, but it didn't get me closer to my three albums or whatever I owed them.

It sounds like the way that you were able to tap into that solo piano tour, or the energy that you were able to tap into that solo piano tour, that rawness of it, was what you were doing early day Ben Fold's Five.

It was.

It was the same thing.

And if someone had said, when we started, "Oh, you guys are going to split up and then Ben's going to go make a record with a big fancy producer on a computer, and then he's going to turn around and do a solo evening with piano thing," they'd be like, "He's done."

That sounds like, for a '90s rock band, that sounds like washed up.

But it was a whole new thing.

By the time I finished all that touring, people weren't asking for Brick anymore.

A few years into my solo touring, the only people that assumed that Brick was the only thing I had were old people.

So we had a whole new audience of people, and I played colleges solo and with a little band here and there.

Up until I was like 45, they seemed to still think I was in college.

I mean, I obviously wasn't in college, but there was a feeling to it that it was still a little raw.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting to me that you have this just incredible moment where you're out on the road just doing this on your own, tapping into this raw, live energy again.

And then you kind of go back the other direction, and you're like, "You know what?

Maybe it's time to work with an orchestra."

Well, I grew up playing in youth orchestras, school orchestras, loved it.

And the two things I was being pursued about at that point were musical theater.

From about 2000 on, I was getting a lot of that from big Broadway producers.

And the other was to play with orchestras.

And I was kind of saying no to both.

And then it occurred to me with the orchestra thing that I could do it without a rock band.

What I had been allergic to watching orchestras with pop artists was I felt the presence of the rock band.

And that took the scoring out of the orchestra and placed it in the rock band and used them as an accessory.

When I started that, I only could do it if I thought I was going to be doing it for decades.

That was something that I had to commit to.

So what I told myself is, "I'm not part-time in this one.

This is going to be..." The first scores I knew would still be probably being revised years later.

Some of them are still being revised because the orchestra is a hard thing to learn and master.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Especially, I feel like after you've kind of had this career up to that point that was with a band in clubs, right?

You're playing in a totally different venue too, right?

If you're in this chamber orchestra space, it must feel different on stage in a whole different way.

It feels way different.

It's not as physical.

You hear a wash of rhythm around you and it's like a massive oil barge that to turn it around means getting closer to the beat, closer to the beat, closer to the beat, and then putting it where you need to.

And eventually the orchestra can catch up to that.

They're on their own time.

And it's something I've learned to love.

I like that big breathing.

It's like a whale.

And whales are so intelligent.

It's kind of like they're a whale.

They're old and intelligent and you just have to turn them around.

You can't turn them around in the canal somewhere.

You got to get out there and do it.

I love that.

And that was one of the things that I followed.

I know it's a story that artists like to tell about, "I knew the right thing and they didn't know.

And they said no.

And I said yeah.

And I did."

But really the truth is in my career it has been the things that have not excited anyone really that I could see around me or anything, even the people that cared about me, normally wasn't exciting to them.

And almost a bad idea.

Those have been the things.

Many of those fail.

But those have been the things that have led somewhere.

And the orchestra was one of those.

And my involvement with a cappella was the same way.

Absolutely not prescribed.

But I'd been playing all these colleges and then I realized that they were all doing my songs.

I mean I only found that someone said, "Look, someone's just done a cover of one of your songs."

And I watched the video of it and I was like, "I always wanted someone to cover my music.

Never except for Bette Midler has anyone covered my songs."

And then so I was like, "Wow.

This is great."

And then I realized, because I didn't know YouTube very well then, they had all this other little thumbnails of videos and it was all my songs by all these.

It was the most exciting thing.

And I clicked on them and I'm like, "Well, this is better than mine."

So I talked to my, at that point, my management at the time and my record label, I was like, "I got to go record them doing this."

And then we make an album and they're like, "Oh, are you sure?

You've got a tour to do and stuff."

I'm like, "No, this really seems exciting."

They're like, "Jesus.

All right.

Fine."

And the next thing I see is they've made a contest, like cover Ben's song contest, which I had to have them pull down.

So then I went on YouTube and I instant messaged all these groups, said the best versions of my song and me and an engineer got in on my own dime.

And we drove a van around to all these places and recorded them in their natural habitat, like a National Geographic album.

Like it's out in the wild.

That's where they, like their cafeteria.

Let's do it.

That was exciting.

Met with Crickets, but then like a few weeks after it was released, I get a call from NBC.

They're doing an a capella show called Sing Off.

And not something everyone knows about now, but it was a really highly rated show for half seasons for about four years.

We put the voice into place and then they gave us the boot.

But I mean, it was a big, it was a career saver at that point.

If I had been doing exactly what they wanted and just doing packages with my 90 homies and going out on the road and reliving that magic, then I wouldn't have done that.

So almost everything has been like that.

And the other reason I tell these stories, not so much to be right, because I can tell you lots of times that it's very unsexy where I've just gotten it dead wrong, but I do want kids coming up that might listen to someone my age just for a second to remember to take swings at those things.

You feel it, you know it in your bones, everyone else is casting doubt on it.

You will have doubt very soon.

Right at that moment, visualize it.

So get on the treadmill and go.

Everyone can roll their eyes while you're on the treadmill.

And at the end of the day, you're doing something different.

Yeah.

I'm curious too, because it seems like you, at that time, so I guess when you were doing the a capella work, that was, I guess, what, 2008?

Yeah, it was around, yeah, 2008 to 2012, I think.

Yeah.

So that's sort of like the beginnings of YouTube, right?

Kind of when you were finding that.

What's sort of been the influence on you with this new upcoming media?

You're sort of experiencing, well, I guess YouTube, I guess maybe more visual digital media.

It seems like with YouTube, you're able to really tap into an audience that was ready for something that was new, fresh, exciting, they hadn't seen before.

When the internet was, you know, becoming, it was taking over, was about the time that Rockin' the Suburbs came out, right?

And that was about the time that my label left me at the North Pole with a t-shirt on.

And so what that meant for me is like sudden freedom.

I couldn't get the label on the phone.

There was not going to really be much in the way of videos unless I paid for them, directed them myself.

There was a couple of exceptions, Rockin' the Suburbs, Weird Al produced that video, and the rest of it was like friends of friends who did me favors.

But the point is, is during that time, I didn't have to ask permission.

It was direct to audience.

So I did all kinds of stupid things.

Like whatever occurred to me, I would do it.

I had a period of time where I had people, you know, join in with me on a conspiracy theory like, or a conspiracy, like I was levitating at my shows.

And I would explain to the audience that of course that was BS last time, but now you're in the club, play along with it, fight somebody over it.

It happened, you know, and just stuff like that.

I mean, we did like terribly just inappropriate things and boring things and crazy things.

And I did one of the first MySpace live streams from my studio in Nashville, massive truck behind the place, satellite dishes, people calling from all over the world.

It was a thing.

That revolution wasn't televised, but a lot of people saw that.

And so we were staging fake injuries, people falling off of balconies and trauma surgeons were calling my manager and the label and stuff saying that they had someone that they could take care of that guy that fell off of the, through the banister.

You know, like kind of old school TV, like Andy Kaufman or something.

That's what I enjoyed about it.

- War of the Worlds sort of.

- Exactly, yeah, yeah, War of the Worlds.

It's very similar because, and in the same way for I think both of those things, a burgeoning media is chaos.

And you can get in the door of chaos.

Now the algorithm's got us.

We know exactly what kind of vocal fry to do, how to pout into the camera, where to make the controversy, who to know.

The kids have that down.

Chaos is coming soon and some kids are gonna bust right through that door and do something exciting if it's not happening now and I'm not aware of it.

But what I saw last I looked was they had everything mapped out, they had all the algorithms set, they knew who's gonna like what, everything was gonna go viral if you had enough money to do that.

And so not for me.

- Right.

This is a sort of a random question, but one of my favorite YouTube videos of you and one of your performances is the chat roulette stuff that you used to do.

Where did that come from?

- Well, I went in the studio one day and everybody was buzzing about chat roulette.

- Yeah, which was, I mean, it was a phenomenon when it came out.

- It was a phenomenon.

And these things were, this was some Russian teenage kid and his father developing this in Russia, right?

And it just went nuts.

Same thing as like, this was, rock and roll in and of itself was incredibly dangerous and it was chaos.

And then that smoothed out.

It never really got back to that.

Might sound funny to us like, hey, hey, hey, it's rock and roll, rock and roll and rock and roll like the dust.

But it was, the context of that was it was scary.

Now there's nothing really much since then that has quite been so popular and dangerous, you know, post the Beatles.

So the rock and roll went to comedy in my opinion, like then Richard Pryor and George Carlin and their rock and roll was in comedy.

Rock and roll, then punk rock, whatever you want to call it, we got it back a little bit for punk rock time.

But it had to be so crappy in order to truly be offensive.

Then I think what happened was digital technology became rock and roll.

And so, you know, the hit of the moment was Chat roulette and kids.

What it was, if you don't know about it, is, and this is nothing new now, but at the time, you mean you can go on the internet and they'll pair you with a random person on video to talk to.

- Yeah.

- And if you don't like them, you can swipe or whatever and move on to the next person.

When I saw this Chat roulette thing was happening, then someone said, "I love what you've done with it."

And I was like, "What do you mean?

I didn't do anything with it."

And they're like, "Yeah, there's this guy and he looks just like you and everyone thinks it's you.

And he is doing, his name was Merton."

And he had the first Chat roulette sensation.

So the revolution had spawned, another revolution had spawned more chaos.

And this guy was like singing songs to people.

But he looked, he had my glasses and he was like, everyone thought that was me, which was part of the, he had a hood on his head to disguise himself.

I don't even know if he'd ever heard of me, but by chance it happened to be very much like me.

So I thought, well, I'm going to make it a little more confusing.

I'm going to take it to the stage, put a hood on my head and make up songs.

So we did three shows.

Yeah.

We just edited it all together.

I woke up in the morning off the bus and we had 6 million views, which is, I think was approaching a record for YouTube at the time.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

That was also a phenomenon.

Yeah.

It was a thing.

And I didn't know how it happened, but like my phone was blowing up and everything was blowing up.

Like, yay.

And they invited me out to Cupertino for a big thing with Apple and YouTube and all the other kids that had had viral YouTube videos.

And I was the only one that didn't ask for a limousine and a deli tray and valet stuff because they all came out of their bedroom and thought they were stars.

I mean, I just thought it was another day at work, but that's when I realized this is a new thing because these kids are acting like they're the new Beatles.

This was around the era that Justin Bieber was launched on YouTube.

So they were significant, but they'd never played a gig.

Their mom had filmed them at a talent show or something.

Gucci.

I want to also kind of tap into this idea of improv.

I feel like on the stage you do a lot of improvisation.

It's all about uncertainty.

Yeah.

So how does that fill up your bucket, I guess, when you're playing live?

Well, sometimes you get sick of the songs that you've been playing.

Anyone does who plays.

So having a song that you're playing on stage be one that you've never heard before is as refreshing as it can get.

That gets stale after a while when it becomes a shtick.

I've kind of avoided it, to be honest, but I've probably done thousands of them.

Improvisation, again, it comes from the last time I think we saw rock and roll before digital, which is comedy.

Comedy has remained more on the pulse than music has, in my opinion.

In what ways did the comedy sort of influence you and your music as you were making it as a solo artist, or even before that?

Well, comedy has to thrive a little bit on saying stuff that maybe you shouldn't.

That's its own art, because one of the things that I think all comedians that are worth their salt would agree that you shouldn't punch down to someone who's vulnerable or weak.

There's no reason to.

So that's not the kind of inappropriateness we're talking about.

There's the art to being inappropriate, and it has to do with tapping into taboos that everyone thinks and hasn't allowed themselves to formulate enough.

That's what comedy is great at, is pinpointing that stuff.

People are surprised by good comedy.

A good comedy, you think you just heard a punchline.

With someone like Dave Chappelle, you thought you heard the punchline, everyone laughs, and then he talks for a second, and then he realizes he hits you with the actual moment of actual thinking that is an explosion.

And he's a genius at that.

In music, it's very difficult, because we have three and a half minutes, generally four minutes to do it.

You know the first chorus is going to hit roughly a minute.

Surprise, really?

That wasn't a surprise.

How did you know they were coming to the chorus?

♪ Ah, aaah, aaah, aaah, ♪ chorus, and then we're going to the chorus.

So the next time you hit the chorus, you have to find a way to surprise someone.

So what comedy did for me, especially Andy Kaufman, who I brought up before, was be able to time and again and time and again surprise some part of you with something.

If a piece of music or performance or something doesn't do that for me, then I just, you know, it's not for me.

Right.

What are you sort of visualizing for this next chapter of your career, or where you are as a musician?

Art is nothing but contradiction, and that's why people have a hard time with it.

It's like, you're not supposed to care what anyone thinks, and yet what everyone thinks changes everything about your life and future and livelihood.

So do you care what everyone thinks?

Of course you do.

Being creative means going into the unknown, but it also means having a moment where you see it and it's inevitable and it happens before you start it.

I think that's kind of normal.

Right now, I'm in the phase where I don't want to know what I'm going to do next.

And I do that a lot.

Like, I've done that my whole career.

I don't know what I want to do.

I never had a bucket list, and I think that's probably - I was too lazy to have one - but I think that probably the other part of the wisdom was, it didn't eliminate my choices.

If I think, "I'm going to go this way, and I've got to work with this person.

I've got to make this kind of album.

I've got to do these things," I might walk by someone on the street that's busking that's my next partner, that's my next creative thing.

And I'm not the kind of person that would want to abandon a plan, so I just don't have one.

Something comes along.

But I want to work on - I know I'm working on chipping away at multiple musicals.

One, God knows, crazy.

Another one with my friend Lindsay, Lindsay Craft, who's an actor and a writer.

And then I'm helping her, and sort of by way of that learning, as almost an apprentice by musically directing it, but kind of understanding from an experienced theatrical person what makes it and what makes it work.

And so she's making her thing, and we're going to get that up and going.

And then I'm making some of this collaboration, and I'm doing something that's based on a really obscure movie that everyone said, "Please don't do it."

I'm very interested in that.

Everyone.

And as I was talking about the other stuff, that popped in my mind a couple times.

It involves no other actors.

There's just one actor on stage in a car.

He never leaves the car.

All dialogue is through a telephone.

And so I talked to Josh Groban about this.

Would you like to do - he was like, "I'd love to do something with you, because we've talked about doing things before."

So he was all excited about it.

Then I sent him off to see the movie, and he came back and he goes, "Wait a minute.

Nothing happened.

That can't be.

That can't be."

I was like, "All right.

Well, I don't know.

Maybe I'm crazy."

I still feel it.

It could be fun.

Very quickly, if we could go through the set list that you played for us today.

So the first one is "So There."

"So There."

"So There," I thought I was finished writing breakup songs.

But I realized that there was a breakup song that I hadn't heard.

And what I love about breakup songs, as much as any kind of pop song, is it's a new beginning.

Disguised as an ending.

That's what works about it for me.

And this one was, "It's the End."

You've split up.

You've moved out of the place that you're in.

It's sad.

You're alone.

The walls have nothing on them.

It still smells like it's been shut for a long time.

There's boxes around the place, and you're sitting on one of them.

But I set the stereo up first.

So it's like a mattress and a stereo, just like I started.

And it's about the joy of being able to put your stuff anywhere you want.

And it's like, you know, I'm doing it.

So there.

It's a little bit like, I'll survive.

Right.

Can you talk to us about "Jesus Land?"

"Jesus Land" is, you know, I've toured so much.

I've seen every corner of the country.

Unfortunately, a lot of the ugliest places are the most religious.

That's understandable from the perspective of having more religion be in a poorer, more desperate place.

I think even though that may offend some people, I think that that is true.

And, you know, maybe when you have less, we are closer to being spiritual.

Who knows why that is?

But it seems to be true.

And the sad part of it is, is that those poor places are exploited by the ugliest chains and highway strip malls, riverboat casinos I mentioned in there, the McMansions.

So I thought, what if, you know, this is the typical, what if Jesus were here?

I imagine this walk from the middle of a broken down downtown somewhere in America, and you're walking past, you always see a wig shop and some kind of crazy out of date places, a lot of boarded up stuff.

You know, I said a quarter and a cup for every block.

You know, I need to make sure you got a little change to put in every one.

So it's not, you know, not doing well there.

And as you walk out past the inevitable bridges that surround 140 or I-440 or whatever it happens to be, you get through there, then you're in another section of town.

Now you're seeing, you know, some chains and all the chain restaurants and stuff, and churches, crosses flying above your malls.

Like so, so much tide.

And you see billboards that say, literally quoting things that Jesus never even thought about saying, even in the scripture.

You know, like, I don't know what, just stuff that's just so out of context.

Then you keep going, you get to the suburbs.

The grass is green, these houses are spread out.

Oh, this is God's land.

I'm going to lay down.

And he lays down, and all of the security lights come on because it's not his.

It's not the Lord's land.

Why aren't all the churches and all the Jesus, why isn't that as much there?

So the point was is that, you know, it's kind of like, thank you, God, for what you've given us.

Have some fast food and some crap and some music that sucks.

We love you.

We love you, God.

Bite off this song.

This sucks.

- Christine from seventh grade.

- Christine from Seventh Grade.

- Is this a real person?

- No.

- Okay.

- Christine from Seventh Grade is an amalgamation of things I experienced and other people have experienced.

And it's just about the radicalization of our politics and misinformation, disinformation, all rolled up into one thing.

And people can't speak to each other anymore because in order to do that, they would have to agree on something that didn't happen.

So, you know, emails you get with, you click on them and it's just some weirdo crap.

And it drives people apart.

We used to be like, "Oh, don't discuss religion and politics at Thanksgiving or something."

And that was to be polite, but now it's because you'll never speak to those people again.

- Yeah, because you're afraid.

- Yeah, you can't do it.

You can't talk to the uncle about that.

They can't talk to you about it.

Everyone's saying stuff in code.

It's very, very split up.

Christine from Seventh Grade is that person who you knew to be a happy person you got along.

You might've had different life views, but it worked.

Now they won't be your friend.

- Right.

Can you talk to us about Effington?

Now I'm curious, was this a jam that was on stage?

- It was a freestyle song.

- It was a freestyle.

- Most of it.

- Yeah.

- Almost all of it.

- And it made it to the album.

- I know.

- It took us a while because I was doing, I'd done hundreds and hundreds of them by then.

Like every night I was making up another one.

Most of them at that time had choruses and verses and form.

I felt it coming out and just was going with it.

That was just a moment.

But yeah, so that one was, we'd barely gotten to Normal, Illinois where the school I was playing was.

And I guess we'd flown into Detroit if I remember, and we were flying up the road to get there in time.

And we passed this Effingham.

And I was like, "Oh, that's kind of funny."

Because everyone was saying Effing this, Effing that at the time.

And so when I freestyle a song, I just started singing about that because it was on my mind.

But I'd forgotten that it was Effingham and I'd made it Effington.

There's probably not an Effington.

- Yeah, not yet.

- But yeah, maybe there will be one day.

So yeah.

And I think what came out of my head there was there's something in me that still, when I see a sign in a town I'm touring through, I don't live there, new place even, and it says help wanted, I think I could get a job.

They're hiring.

Because when I first was out to get a job when I was 16, it was very difficult to get a decent job.

And it's like, "Wow, that cafe's hiring.

That could be me."

And then I think, "You know, I'll just, this place is okay.

I'll just stay here.

I'll stay here in Effington.

I bet I'll meet my wife and I'll have kids here and I'll live someplace I've never seen before and I'll work at that cafe."

Boom.

That happens in my mind.

So that's what that song was doing for me.

- Yeah.

Can you talk to us about "Landed"?

- "Landed."

"Landed" is a funny story.

It could be very long, so watch it.

I'll try to keep it short.

If I was going to be brief about it, it's a song that I thought was about someone else and it ended up being about me.

And there was a songwriter who told me that when they heard it first time.

And I said, "No, no, no, no, no.

That's about this other guy very specifically.

In fact, the West Coast isn't even America.

It's Australia.

I know who I'm talking about.

And it's specifically him."

And then I lived "Landed" right after in that I had a big split and I found that people I had been sort of estranged from because sometimes people are in relationships and they're not, they don't have access anymore to their old friends.

I don't know.

I don't think that's necessarily because it's a controlling partner.

I think it's just circumstances change.

But that's sort of the song.

It's sort of like, "I've landed.

I'm back."

So when this guy split with his wife, it was like suddenly he was accessible again.

And so that's what it was about.

And I thought he was in a circumstance where it was a little bit, not bad abusive, but just it wasn't good for him.

She was extremely controlling.

And so that's what it was.

It's like, you used to call and she'd say, "I wasn't here."

That's what the whole telephone, since the telephones are.

Like, "No, he's not there."

"Really?

He's not there?"

And then I find out he was there.

So it's like, he's come back, he's flown in, he's landed his personal plane, he's there, he's got nothing.

I've got nothing.

Come pick me up.

I've landed.

I'm yours.

I'm broken down.

Yeah.

Now you snuck in The Last Polka for us.

Yeah.

That was fun.

Oh yeah.

That's an old, old song for me.

And yeah, that was, that's another, you know, that's almost just an exercise, I think, to tell you the truth.

I hate to say, I think I was just writing a song, but it's good.

I mean, it's like, you know, there are these moments, Anna Goodman wrote some of the lyrics and probably wrote the good ones.

You know, I think she wrote the bit about which made me want to make the song, which was this little verse that she'd written of words on music that said, "If you really love me, I wouldn't have to be so mean."

And I thought, that's cool.

That's actually really, wow, there's a lot of truth in that.

That's, you know, so that's an imbalance in that relationship.

And then I thought, this is a song about a creative visualization of a breakup.

That's what it is.

It's because the end's growing near.

You know it.

I know it.

It's coming near.

It's coming.

There's nothing we can do about it.

It's already happened.

And you just don't know how to make it happen.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

And Don't Change Your Plans.

Don't Change Your Plans.

I think that's another, that's a very esoteric song that I would have said at the time, I didn't know what it was about.

A video maker, it wasn't a video maker.

He was a big movie maker of gangster movies.

I don't know if he's, he's not this guy.

I don't know if he's still alive.

Quentin Tarantino said, "I make movies.

This guy is the real thing."

It was his big influence.

I cannot remember his name right now.

It's awful.

But in all fairness, I only knew him for two days.

He never made a video and he heard the song.

And he called the label up and then talked to me.

And he said, "I've got a vision for that song."

And I was like, "Okay, well, I'll follow it because I don't like videos anyway.

So I'll just do what you tell me."

And anyway, the point is, is that he knew what the song was about.

And when he talked to me, I said, "I don't know what the song is about."

And he goes, "Well, I know what it's about.

It's about, it's about the, what has been the same about three of your breakups.

That's what you have to learn from this song is you broke up three times."

He didn't know this.

This is what he told me he got from the song.

It was true.

I'd had three major breakups at that point in my life.

And he cast these people.

And the two that he mainly cast, these two girls, looked exactly like two of the main, like they would play them in a movie.

So I don't know what this guy was on.

But he would come in, film for a moment, throw a fit, kick things all over the place.

It was nuts.

And then he'd leave, throw a tantrum, come back, kick things around the place.

And then we had this video and the label turned it down and we spent a half a million dollars on the video.

But what I learned for a half a million dollars was it was apparently about three of my relationships.

I still can't tell you how.

When I sing it, I don't see that.

I just see my favorite part is the leaves are falling back east because I love when the leaves fall back east.

I don't know what I mean by don't change your plans for me.

I really don't.

I guess that just means I can't, don't commit on my part, I guess.

I put a part in there that was just a picture, a slice of once before a breakup, I couldn't decide what to do.

And I just sat on a, I moved into a place she was moving in and she was going to be there at night.

And I plopped down my suitcase.

I flew in early and I sat there from sunup to sundown.

I don't think I left.

I had to get up and pee a couple of times, probably walked around.

I didn't do anything.

And then I left and that was that.

And so I thought that maybe counts as a verse.

Don't know.

I don't know.

Well, the video sounds pretty wild and a not so cheap lesson, I guess.

Well, not so cheap for my label.

That's the thing.

You get to talk smack about your label and they spend all this money on your videos.

That's the thing.

Yeah.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for being here.

We really appreciate it.

It's been a pleasure to have you on.

Thanks.

Good to be here.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Shaped by Sound podcast.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs we discussed today, you can find them on our website, pbsnc.org/shapedbysound.