Generally speaking, I don't like to mix bands and solo careers within the deep album cuts playlists. I generally turn up my nose when I see, say, a compilation of both Police and solo Sting songs. But there are occasionally situations where neither the band nor the solo artist quite has a catalog to warrant filling out a playlist but they go well enough together, like George Michael and Wham! or Ray Parker Jr. and Raydio. And as much as I love Ben Folds Five, they were only together for 3 albums in the '90s, and reunited for one later, while Folds has released solo records pretty sporadically in the last couple decades, so it makes sense to roll his whole career together here.

Ben Folds and Ben Folds Five deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Best Imitation of Myself
2. Fair
3. Philosophy
4. Narcolepsy
5. The Last Polka
6. Selfless, Cold and Composed
7. Tom And Mary (live)
8. Michael Praytor, Five Years Later
9. Eddie Walker
10. Steven's Last Night in Town
11. Jackson Cannery
12. Mitchell Lane
13. Cigarette
14. Emaline (live)
15. Zak and Sara
16. Effington
17. Trusted
18. The Luckiest
19. Heist
20. Not the Same

Tracks 1, 3, 5 and 11 from Ben Folds Five (1995)
Tracks 2, 6, 10 and 13 from Whatever And Ever Amen (1997)
Track 12 from the "Brick" single (1997)
Track 9 from Naked Baby Photos (1998)
Track 4 from The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999)
Tracks 15, 18 and 20 from Rockin' The Suburbs (2001)
Track 14 from Ben Folds Live (2002)
Track 17 from Songs For Silverman (2005)
Track 19 from Over The Hedge: Music from the Motion Picture (2006)
Track 16 from Way To Normal (2008)
Track 8 from The Sound of the Life of the Mind (2012)
Track 7 from Live (2013)

The first 13 tracks are from Ben Folds Five records and the last 7 tracks are from Ben Folds records. For the most part Ben's solo career has hewed pretty closely to what he did with the band, but I've followed his later stuff a lot less closely, so some of the songs toward the end of the mix were new to me and I found myself really enjoying what I'd missed out on.

It's weird to say this, but playing a piano, the central instrument of western music, almost marked Ben Folds as a novelty in the mid-'90s. Things were so overwhelmingly focused on guitar/bass/drums in the grunge era that when bands with any other instruments started showing up a few years later, it was looked as unusual or even unserious.

I remember reading reviews of the first Ben Folds Five album and being intrigued, back in the days when I'd just pore over Rolling Stone and Alternative Press reviews sections without hearing 90% of the music I was reading about. But I didn't actually hear the band until I went to Lollapalooza '96, the one headlined by Metallica and Soundgarden, where Ben Folds Five stood out even more as one of the side stage bands. I was so blown away by their set that I couldn't bring myself to leave to see more of the Ramones (on their farewell tour) on the main stage -- kind of appropriate given that Folds's famous description of the band was "punk rock for sissies."

Over the next few years I saw Ben Folds Five live 2 or 3 more times and they became one of my favorite live bands, and I'd snap up whatever other songs I could find on singles, including "Mitchell Lane," a b-side to their biggest hit, "Brick." The two tracks I used from live albums, "Tom and Mary" and "Emaline," are both songs originally recorded for the first Ben Folds Five album. I never much liked the studio versions collected on the rarities comp Naked Baby Photos, mainly because I preferred the live versions I first heard on the "Uncle Walter" single. After being a grunge kid I made the usual inroads into indie rock and classic punk/alternative, but I also got pretty heavily into Ben Folds Five, They Might Be Giants, and Soul Coughing, bands that seemed kind of proudly nerdy and unabashedly silly in ways that I identified with a lot. I'm lucky I didn't fall all the way down that rabbit hole and get into, like, Barenaked Ladies or something, but I still really love the Ben Folds Five records.

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner is a classic example of a band really just not being in the mood to capitalize on its newfound success, making a pretty odd and uncommercial album, and then breaking up soon after. And yet "Narcolepsy" still holds up as a pretty incredible look at the band's more experimental rock opera side, and the band was still pretty incredible live in support of that record. I didn't have the heart to really follow what Ben Folds did after that too closely just because I was so attached to the band's chemistry, Robert Sledge's fuzz bass and Darren Jessee's incredible drumming and their buoyant vocal harmonies, they were really a classic power trio.

The solo Folds stuff has held up pretty well, though. Ben Folds has taken a role as an artistic adviser with the National Symphony Orchestra, doing a variety of events at the Kennedy Center. I work at the Kennedy Center fairly often, and a few months ago worked one of the events where he performed, and got to hear a really cool orchestral arrangement of "Not The Same," one of my favorites from his first solo record. I tend not to go out of my way to meet celebrities at work unless it's part of my job to talk to them, but I really geeked out and had to think about whether to say something to this guy that I idolized when I was 15.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 28, 2019 at 8:00 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.