Alice Childress
"Anna Goodman gave me finished lyrics which were supposed to be a parody of my writing style. I actually liked about six lines and rewrote the rest because it had a neat feel. She got the name from a mental patient she'd worked with who had thrown a bucket of mopwater on her. I later found out that there was an Alice Childress playwrite who coincidentally recentely died. I called Anna and she was happy but not so surprised since she believes in the forces behind coincidences."

"That whole thing is weird because it turns out that Alice Childress was an African woman who was held captive until her death. And people ask me if that's what it's about, and I'm like, nooooo...though its cool that they hear that in there. But Anna helped me with that one, the way that song was written was real weird. I asked all my friends to write a bunch of lyrics, they didn't have to be good, and I would write music to them in five minutes. The lyrics are always a problem, so I thought if someone writes me the lyrics, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to write the music. She gave me these lyrics, and the only thing that I kept was 'try not to think about it/ Alice Childress'...I read these words and it was all kinda poking fun at my style...something about that line just started to do something for me, and I re-wrote all the verses. The idea was that if I had all the lyrics for I could make the album in one day...in the end it took six months!"

Ben Folds

Bad Idea
If you've seen "The Truth About Cats & Dogs", then you know that this song is just a rehashing of the plot. It comes on when Janeane Garafolo's character is having a fit over Ben Chaplin's character coming over (after they had phone sex, which might explain a bit to you who have never seen the movie). I like the song a lot, it's very good at expressing that rush that's felt when she has to make sure Ben/Brian doesn't notice that she's she, and not Uma Thurman's character.

Laura B.
laru@astral.magic.ca

Bad Idea
Bad Idea is really just a nothing song about how much BFF didn't want to write a Soundtrack song. I mean, please. Listen to the lyrics. If it were really about 'Truth About Cats And Dogs', which I bet BFF never even saw, then maybe the lyrics could be more decipherable.

Erica
erica67@ici.net

Boxing
"I was in transit a lot between Nashville and North Carolina. It kind of came from seeing my father's romantic fascination with boxing. All the people over at the house just to watch the Muhammad Ali fight, and I was like four or five years old. You know, he'd quit and he'd come back and he'd quit and he'd come back. So, those [Jackson Cannery and Boxing] are the two quitting songs. It's about quitting and not really wanting to quit."

"I wrote it as a waltz, and instead of it being a love song, which it sounds like its going to be, I built it round that conversation. But it's like 'what if I use that effect...', it's fun to push things. I try to loosen up every once in a while and do something that's just mine."

Ben Folds

Cool Whip
It sounds like it is about a group of guys and one by one they all start to get girlfriends and "Check Out."

Evan
evan@dc.jones.com

Eddie Walker
Before Ben Folds Five, there was a band called Majosha in which Ben played, along with a drummer named Eddie Walker. This song, though, is not about Eddie Walker, but the name is merely borrowed. Eddie Walker is a story about how Eddie's friends visit him and share their pictures, memories, and feelings of the past with Eddie.

Justin C. Roberts

Eddie Walker
Eddie Walker is about one of ben's experiences as a young man. He would visit old-folks homes and they would tell him stories, he's speaking about one man named Eddie Walker, who had a box of photos, and is telling Ben about the photo's stories.

Alex
A_kioto@mac.com

Eddie Walker
Because there are so many references to trees and Eddie falling down, Mr. Walker probably has a drinking problem, and is in some sort of "help center." The fact that he doesn't have a kid or wife and doesn't have a job that requires a coat or tie (symbolic of responsibility) further suggests his booze problem. Face it, drinking is much easier if you don't have other people or a quality job to worry about. Consider the man's last name as well; Johnnie Walker is a popular scotch whisky. I know Eddie Walker is a name borrowed from one of Ben's former band members, but the connection between Walker and the whisky could be intentional.

"This Is Your Life" (I think that was the name) was a reality television show in the 80s. The show involved regular people being reintroduced to folks from their past. Usually, these folks from the past were in the form of disguised voices and shadow figures. In some way, these people were all meaningful in the life of the contestant — much like the people in Eddie Walker's photos: Mary Jo and Aunt Louise. Anyway, Eddie, much like when he was younger, needs to learn to walk again. He is starting over (this time without alcohol). But, he does have the support of all those people who got off the bus. Could they be the "This Is Your Life" audience or just more voices and figures for the show? That part I am undecided on.

I taught this song as part of a poetry unit for high school seniors. The above interpretation is the angle I took to help students analyze the song. Then, once I got them believing the song is a poem out of some "boring" poetry anthology, I played the live solo version on the DVD just to show that this poetry stuff is in our daily lives. Or, at least Mr. Stratton's daily life!

Let me know if anybody else has any ideas or if you think I, like Eddie Walker, have had too much to drink.

Just thoughts,

Scott D. Stratton
wjoyner@cnyconnect.net

Eddie Walker
I have a vague memory that this interpretation is supported by something Ben said in concert, but I can't remember it clearly enough to confirm it:

Eddie Walker is about the same guy referred to in Jackson Cannery, who became schizophrenic and ended up in a halfway house. The lyrics describe Ben visiting him, perhaps in a hospital or the halfway house ("nametag on your smock"), as they flip through a photo album together. Ben is both reminiscing and filling him in on things that have happened since he went away. The part about Mary Jo also makes sense in this context - maybe an old girlfriend of Eddie's? - freaked out when he was taken away.

The phrase: "this is your life" comes from Eddie Walker  "quitting life" (see Ben's statements on Jackson Cannery); the photo album represents his "real" life before the schizophrenic break.

The references to falling down are drawing a parallel between the physical falling down when one is a baby learning to walk and the figurative falling down Eddie Walker did when he fell out of normal life. Ben uses a similar comparison in "Carrying Cathy" with the term "carrying" meaning figuratively supporting someone and, in the end, literally carrying her body as pall bearers.

I always took the line about all the people getting off the bus to be ironically sad, because in fact no one comes to visit him.  It's the kind of thing you say to someone to make them feel good when you know that they won't ever realize it's not true. Presumably, Eddie is psychotic enough to not realize that people don't visit him.

Jonathan Mates
jonathanmates@yahoo.com

Emaline
I have a friend, who firmly believes that Emaline is about a horse. I have my doubts, but she said to me, "You know, horses don't walk in time, and the one line, 'Emaline, don't walk in time.'" I still have my doubts, but we are two of the most hardcore BFF fans in my area, so she's most likely right.

Michelle
faeriebell@hotmail.com

Emaline
I was reading about the idea that emaline is about a horse, and I listened to the version of emaline on "the beginnings" and theres a horse trotting sound given out by the drums. A *clip* *clop* type thing. "there's talking now, does she know what they're saying?"... also would suggest an animal. I don't know, I thought this was relevant.

Chad
rainking@twwn.com

Emaline
"Emaline. About a very strange girlfriend I had. We were a weird couple and she was misunderstood. I spent a lot of time explaining for her."

Ben Folds

Evaporated
"It's about loss."

Ben Folds

Fair
"That's fun to me, finding a way to say those kinds of things and making them work. Sometimes [that approach] doesn't get as much credit as a techno record with farting noises all over it, but what can you do?"

"It's a 'dig-me-and-all-my-pain' type of song. Definitely for the self-destructive romantic person. It came from a newspaper article concerning a domestic dispute which wound up in a death."

Ben Folds

For Those of Ya'll Who Wear Fanny Packs
"For those of y'all who wear Fanny Packs" cracks me up everytime I hear it. Ben himself says on the album jacket to "Naked Baby Pictures" that they were just "screwing around", but I think it's also a light-hearted parody of rap. Most of us 20-somethings listed to hip-hop in high school, and this is just probably something that every white boy has wanted to do in a recording studio, but never had the guts. "I wanna borrow an Allan Wrench!!! I wanna borrow some duct tape!!! I wanna borrow a mike cord..... God D*mn that's some funky shit!!!!"

Larry F.
FutureLaw@hotmail.com

Girl
"...a horrible thing that's supposed to be uncomfortably close to a boy-band song. You're not supposed to know if it's a joke or not, and that's why it's funny to me."

Ben Folds

Jackson Cannery
"Well, someone I knew - I guess you'd call him a friend of mine, but I didn't spend that much time with him - he kind of slowly. . . I don't know if you can be stricken with schizophrenia, but he certainly changed. Something flipped over, and he's in a halfway house now. One of the first really big things he did was, he was on the bus on the way to this summer job and he just told the driver to stop it, like, right in the middle of the street. So he got off the bus, and he somehow finagled his way to Ireland looking for U2. His mother didn't know where he was. No one knew where he was and he's out trying to find U2 in restaurants in Dublin. I thought it was a pretty dramatic way of quitting life."

"Everyone has to see you stop everything, and everybody has to stop with you and they let you off. I pulled the name Jackson from someone I knew who I thought worked too hard and the Cannery was a hosiery mill in North Carolina. So I just mixed the names up and I think the defining line in that song would be, 'When seconds pass slowly and years go flying by.' You know, just that every moment's a fucking drag and you look back and everything passed just in a second."

Ben Folds

Kalamazoo
I've been reading the lyrics, and I've come up with this idea: It's about two people (probably a girl and a guy) who get so stoned, that they think they're in Kalamazoo. ex: "On my way back home, I was surely stoned, Now I'm sober in my yard" Also the joke about screwing up..."How many of me would it take to screw up your life?" He's guilty; he got the other one into drugs perhaps, and it apparently resulted in their death. "seems like you'd be frozen, frozen there in time" (he can't believe it, or doesn't want to), "Your place on the map has faded away" = dead. However, I don't fully understand the last few lines:

Don't you know that I've been there too
And it'd put your mind more at ease
If you'd say these words of release
All the way back home

I think he's just saying, he's felt the same way, done the same thing...I just don't understand his advice. I have this idea that maybe he died there too, and that he was making it up that he lived on, to make him feel better. I really think that's possible, it creates a sort of irony. Also, I find it interesting that he never really says "sorry" for being responsible for the other life lost.

my_magical_armchair@hotmail.com

Magic
"That song is kind of a composite of people that I've known that have died. It's also a love song. It's not very complex."

Darren Jessee

Missing the War
"This is a song left over from the first album. It's really the sister song to 'Last Polka' on the first album."

Ben Folds

One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces
"That's about a guy who gets treated like shit when he's a little kid and then becomes successful and everyone kisses his ass, so he takes his money and invests it in getting all the people from his childhood into a basement so he can preach to them. That, of course, is not something that actually happened to me."

"Yeah, in 'Dwarf', I go [plays fast alternate-hand octave passage], and the Clavinet part comes in. At that point, the guy who directed our video came in with a bunch of space sound keyboards, like old vintage Moog stuff, and put down eight tracks of crazy shit. The idea was to freak out; Beck does that great. But by the time we got to mix, we were back in the headspace of, "Let's make the band sound like a band."

Ben Folds

One Down
"The truth is, I had 4.6 songs left as my "requirement" in my old publishing deal. So I wrote 4.6 songs to finish that out. It was kind of an absurd thing in my contract, which I won't get into, but that's where it came from. The first song I wrote was "One Down, 3.6 to Go." Then I put in a song called "Girl," a horrible thing that's supposed to be uncomfortably close to a boy-band song; you're not supposed to know if it's a joke or not, and that's why it's funny to me."

Ben Folds

Rockin' The Suburbs
"I wanted [Rockin' the Suburbs] to sound as much like an American modern rock single as I could, so I just used the instruments one normally uses to get on the radio in America."

"Are you making fun of anyone in particular?"

"Well, Ben, I'm really not making fun of anyone in particular, but there are are a lot of bands whose sort of job it is to be pissed off, and if you think about it that's a really weird job like 24hrs a day to bottle your anger and play that kind of music just because it sells. So I guess I'm making fun of that. But at the same time there's some really great music made in that genre."

Ben Folds (in an interview with himself)

Rocky
To me it's a great and MEANINGFUL song about someone who has lost a very good friend, in something that seems to be somekind of disease, very touching when you actually listen and reflect...

Phil
aplauri@customnet.net

The Secret Life of Morgan Davis
OK, where to start?  Morgan is an old friend of mine that I haven't been in touch with in years.  Then again, I went to college with Darren Jessee, so the stories might get more involved than anyone really wants to hear. But, since you asked...Morgan is/was a drummer from North Carolina who played with a band by the name of Mr. Potatohead.  People in those parts may remember them from the late 80's/early 90's.  Morgan moved to Nashville around '91 (give or take a year), hooked up with Ben and was a member of Ben's band of that time, Jody's Power Bill. [Tangent: The other 3 original members of Mr. Potatohead formed Dag.] Morgan had a house here in Nashville, and when Darren moved to town in either '93 or '94 the two of them lived there.  I've always assumed that Morgan introduced Darren and Ben, but I don't know that for sure.

I won't go into much more detail about anyone involved, except to say that knowing Morgan makes the lyrics all that much funnier. Not much of a scoop, I admit, but I hope it gives a little insight.

Michael Robertson (from the bff news group)

The Secret Life of Morgan Davis
"...Then there's a song called "The Secret Life of Morgan Davis," [which is] a polka about this guy who runs around trading crack..."

Ben Folds

Smoke
"I co-wrote this song with someone else [Anna Goodman], so I wouldn't want to speak for her, but what it means to me is that you can't escape from your memories or your past."

Ben Folds

Song for the Dumped
"Darren, our drummer, just got dumped and scratched out some angry lyrics and gave them to me. It was a joke, but it was coming from a real place. I put the music to it in minutes. It's a satire on the obtuse male anger of being dumped, but still caring about the girl who dumped you."

Ben Folds

Steven's Last Night in Town
"The idea came from an English guy, Steven Stuart Short, who's produced and engineered records by The Cult. He came to stay and basically wouldn't leave. He'd be going, 'I'm gonna leave tonight,' and then he wouldn't. We kept on throwing these parties 'cause he was leaving and then he never did. So one night I said, 'Every night now is Steven's last night in town,' 'cause it was. I played it on piano and gave him the tape and he got the idea." At New York City, Ben said Steven never really left because he is currently living in America. "I'm not sure if it's legal."

"The Klezmatics played a kind of a -believe it or not- they did kind of a klezmar bit on one song. It kind of sounds like a big band with 'Hava Nagila' over it: Steven's Last Night in Town. It could just be Steven, or Steven's Last Night, maybe."

Ben Folds

Tom and Mary
"Tom and Mary are Tom Rowan and Mary Lyon. They have a studio and sequenced the [Bus Stop] cd ["A Little Faster"] for us. The Ben Folds song is not about Tom and Mary although he wrote that song after somebody said, "...for the benefit of Tom and Mary." I remember when it happened."

Evan Olson

Tom and Mary, Emaline
In Tempe, Arizona, at Gibson's Club I got to talk to Ben Folds and I asked him why he hasn't put Tom and Mary (one of the best rockin' songs by Folds) on a CD yet, and he told me it was cut from the first CD by Caroline along with Emaline and that the record company kept the rights, so when he moved to Sony he couldn't use it. He told me it never should have been cut, and that Eddie Walker should have been on the first CD also.

Alec
dvma61a@Prodigy.com

Tom & Mary
"I went to a studio and the name of the people who owned it were Tom and Mary. I remember talking to someone and remember this sentence coming out, 'For the benefit of Tom and Mary.' So I started piecing this story together in my head about people who go to a party. Everyone's talking about them but the listener doesn't know exactly what happened. There was a scandal or something. This is a subtext song. I just felt that with that sentence it would be all about the subtext. I don't even know what really happened in that song. I just thought it was funny. I liked the idea of everyone talking shit about Tom and Mary, about whatever this horrible thing was--and they don't even know that everyone knows, and they walk up and everyone gets quiet--I just like situations like that."

Ben Folds

Uncle Walter
"It's a friend's actual Uncle's name but written from my experience with many a clueless dumbass 50 year old, particularly one mother of an old garage bandmate."

Ben Folds

Underground
"The 'Underground' thing is just an observation that if you don't have any friends and you're kind of a geek, there's something you can do about it. You can just put a nose ring in and you have instant friends. It's its own culture. There are rules to the subculture and alternative cultures, and if you abide by them, they'll let you in. It's a good thing. When the rock scene was so fucking serious-it's not quite that way anymore, but when it was-I just felt it was fun to make the little punk kids dance and smile. It was a fun thing. It's a very unbitter song."

Ben Folds

Video
Video was written when I was in high school (I turn 30 in September). I had been getting fed up with hearing about the fucking sixties on VH-1 and everywhere else, kissing the baby boomers' asses. In fact, what later became the whole generation x thing was brewing in all our heads at that time probably and it seemed that every generation before had had alot of pride in themselves for what they were. Even the fucking Micky Mouse Club seemed more valid than anything we had, and everything new seemed to be a throwback or revival. Anyway, it dawned on me that what we did have was "the video". And that was even more depressing. And most videos were bleak and listless and projected this boring faceless future. These were the things to aspire to : frowning, in fact not just frowning but deadpanning, breaking things in slow motion over and over again, watching yourself on TV. So I thought, so that's what its like when you grow up...I can't wait until the future gets here. Then I added another side of what it was feeling like to grow up and assume responsibilty. Then again, I was just 17 (and you know what I mean).

Ben Folds