A musician, a memoir, and a connection to home
I’ve always been drawn to the sound of a piano. That’s not to say that I can play it—after watching both of my siblings gnash their teeth, throw themselves from the piano bench, and burst into tears countless times, I decided piano lessons weren’t for me.
Years later, though, I decided to try teaching myself. I’d sit at my father’s piano and study my siblings’ instruction books. When I’d encounter a note or symbol I couldn’t decipher, I’d call over my father—an accomplished pianist since he was a child—to clarify. He was the one to introduce me to some of my favorite artists, including Billy Joel, ELO, the Beatles, and Ben Folds, a perhaps lesser known, but highly accomplished pianist, singer-songwriter, composer, and record producer. And so, through my father, I gained an appreciation for the piano and some basic skills, though I never really mastered the building blocks, the scales and the keys.
I eventually took up the drums, which I still play to this day. I never got very good; I’m too formulaic and methodical, whereas a naturally talented drummer is more improvisational. I tell people that I’m like Ringo: I just keep the rhythm and avoid doing anything too fancy. So long as I’m enjoying myself, I’m content with being pretty mediocre—and considering my dad is just stoked to have someone to jam with, I feel decent about my skill.
Music is something I experience more than play. When I was 13, my dad took me to a Paul McCartney concert and it blew my mind. Since that night, I have basically lived my life from one concert experience to the next. Concerts make me feel alive. Any time spent outside of a concert is still living, sure, but it’s not living living.
I’m far too concerned with life’s day-to-day noise. There’s the unimportant noise, like taking out the trash and making a grocery list. Then there’s the important noise, like checking in on my friends and family and maintaining my physical, emotional, and mental health. The noise builds to a crescendo as I add tasks to my list and grow unnecessarily anxious about things I can’t control.
But at a concert, all that day-to-day noise is drowned out. I can actually feel like myself and be present and take it all in. It’s a relief and an escape, and it’s just fun.
I’ve become a concert junkie, chasing this need to feel alive and happy and whole beyond my normal life. In doing so, I’ve become rather obsessed with learning about bands and artists—how they think, where they came from, their road to making music into a career. And I discuss all of this with my dad, who equally relishes this background knowledge, whether he knows who I’m talking about or not.
This fascination ultimately led me to learn those keys and scales on the piano, too; I became a music minor in college. I finally took a music theory (er, pre-music theory) course that helped me play more successfully, or perhaps just more intentionally. I got to learn about music that I hadn’t engaged with before, from the classical fugues of Bach to Javanese gamelan ageng of Indonesia.
But I’m still far from being a music expert. I’ve learned some things. I’m maybe marginally better at the drums and the piano than I once was. I have more of an appreciation for true musicians’ creative process, and I’m always hungry to learn more.
I was delighted to receive a book from my brother called “A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons” by Ben Folds. As I stared at the cover, I recalled my dad playing Folds’ music for us for the first time, and me just falling in love with his irreverence, his snarky, sarcastic lyrics, his willingness to drop an improbable swear word at any given moment. He rocked, but unlike traditional rock songs, his melodies were highly intricate, complex, and wholeheartedly piano-driven. And he sang about real life in a real voice, told you about characters you believed could really exist.
Over the years, my entire family had jumped on board the Ben Folds train. To this day, we still reference various lyrics from his 2001 album, “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” which I dare say we all know by heart. When I’m stuck working on a group project, I’ll find myself singing—
“You see, this is why I’d rather be alone—” from “Annie Waits.”
Or after a particularly emotionally taxing experience (such as visiting our extended family), we’ll chant—
“You were not the same after that—” from the chorus of “Not the Same.”
Perhaps the lyric that I find myself recalling most often is from “Still Fighting It”—
“Everybody knows it sucks to grow up and everybody does. It's so weird to be back here. Let me tell you what, the years go on, and we're still fighting it.”
I know that if I called my dad right now and simply sang, “It sucks to grow up,” he’d understand the reference and know precisely how my day went. In fact, he’d probably respond by singing, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” referencing the Beatles’ “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” It’s these little musical responses to life that connect us as a family, despite being physically disconnected most of the time. Spread across New York, Georgia, and Colorado, we can share our experiences with these lyrics and understand each other instantly.
Though I don’t know Ben Folds’ work beyond a couple of albums and various singles, I have such a deep love and respect for what he does. I got a little choked up as I read my brother’s note accompanying the book— he was congratulating me on my new job, explaining how he bought the book for me and my dad “just because,” hoping we could read it simultaneously and enjoy it together.
Folds writes this memoir in the same way that he writes music: poetically, with a touch of comedy. He’s relatable, honest, and brilliant. Amid the hilarious stories of his unsavory classmates in middle school, his shitty high school jobs, his accumulation of musical knowledge, and the trials and tribulations of his relationships, he reveals a lot of larger truths.
I’ve always liked to think that I’d be great friends with the musicians I listen to, especially Ben Folds, Andrew McMahon, and Billy Joel—all piano players with a certain cynicism and realness that I admire and try (probably unsuccessfully) to emulate. And so I was hopeful that Ben Folds would speak to me, in a way. I wasn’t disappointed.
He writes, “I was a kid who couldn’t bear standing still, silence, being alone, and, most of all, uncertainty.” Like, damn. When I consider my day-to-day life, this rings enormously true. I still feel like a kid (even six years later, I can’t consider myself older than 17); I am so restless that I get hungry every couple of hours from ceaseless fidgeting; I can’t even begin to drive my car until the Billy Joel channel is blaring; I grow hopelessly lonely when I’m not around other people; and most of all, ambiguity is my living hell.
He later writes, “Cultivating my vulnerability, nerdiness, and weakness, all in the key of awkward, is what eventually felt right for me.” Yep, that’s how college felt. Arriving at a place senior year where I fully admitted my shortcomings, social ineptitudes, and idiosyncrasies—and just hoped that people would accept me for who I was, because I wasn’t going to change—was perhaps the most important feat I have accomplished.
But when I consider the here and now, this piece of Folds’ wisdom really gets me: “The twenties, for anyone with the luxury of time to brood, can be laced with a constant low-grade sadness, always humming beneath it all. Biological clocks, coming of age, wondering, Is this it? Have I missed my calling? Why are the hangovers worse? Have I passed the love of my life in a crowd somewhere on lunch break—like two ships in the day?”
No one tells you how hard your twenties can be. Everyone talks about how fun college is, how you can be anything, do anything, after you graduate. The world is your oyster, whatever the hell that means. No one references the humming, low-grade sadness that so precisely captures what it has been for me. Folds was the first one who managed to capture my sentiments exactly, in a mere paragraph.
At 23, I do have the luxury of time to brood, to an overwhelming degree. Not only do I ask myself the same existential questions as Folds—what path am I on? Am I living my best life? Will I ever find someone who truly understands me?—I find myself worried sick about other people. Is my grandfather still stressing about selling his house? How is my sister doing socially at college? Have I checked in recently on that friend who’s been struggling?
This is the aforementioned noise that takes over my life. Anxiety builds as I try to answer profound, personal questions while simultaneously trying to balance the needs of those around me. And these anxieties are so hard to control, precisely because there’s nothing I can do about them.
Folds’ words are vindicating, but they leave me wondering what—if anything—I should do about this unnerving humming. I suppose that he, like most people, is living evidence that the humming is surmountable, even if the questions are left unanswered. And it’s possible to overcome it beyond just escaping it for a few hours at a live show now and then.
If anything, I can take solace in the fact that 30 years ago, Ben Folds felt just the same as I do now. I somewhat relish that I actually relate to the thoughts and sentiments of a fellow pianist and drummer, though one older and infinitely more skilled. And I marvel at how it all came to be this way.
I love the sound of a piano. It began with my dad playing in the house my entire life, starting with the Teletubbies theme song. I began to play the piano and drums myself, to enjoy pianists like Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Andrew McMahon, to attend their concerts and those of similar artists. My obsession led me to learn more about piano, music, and the background behind my beloved artists and bands. And so, receiving a memoir by a musician who my dad and I love, who also plays piano, who knows a great deal about music and composition—I think it was inevitable that Ben Folds would speak to me, in a cosmic sort of way.
I’ve been stewing over this book for a long time, trying to articulate exactly why it means so much to me. I think it just gets at so much of my being; not only my insufferable ruminating, but why music affects me in the way that it does, and how music ties me to my family and childhood.
Folds says, “Surrounding myself with people I find interesting, and who share the same interests, keeps my inner robot at bay.” By not only physically surrounding myself with these people, but indirectly connecting with them—via memoirs like Folds’—I find that it’s not just my inner robot kept at bay, it’s also the humming.
By Sarah Laico
Art By Jessie Sheldon
Childhood Issue | May 2020