Folds - Dream About Lightning Bugs, A: a Life of Music and Cheap Lessons

Praise for A Dream About Lightning Bugs

A Dream About Lightning Bugs reads like its author: intelligent, curious, unapologetically punk, and funny as hell. This intimate look at his life from his own unique perspective is a rare and unforgettable gift that does what Ben Folds always has done for me as an artist and a friend: encourages me to be more myself, with a lot of swear words

Sara Bareilles

A masterfully written memoir, and so much more. Folds imbues this literary work with keen insight and humour to create an elegant and moving tribute to art and life itself

Daniel Levitin, author of #1 New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind

Besides being super talented, and an incredibly poignant and multifaceted musician, Ben Folds is a fantastic author.

I couldnt put this book down and not just because I taped it to my hand. Ben takes us into his mind and into his process from the very beginnings of his childhood to where he is today one of the greatest musicians and writers that has ever graced the art

Bob Saget

I read this in one glorious, giant gulp. As a fan of your work and as a musician, this is truly a gift moments for me to geek out, moments to laugh and cry and many fragments of pure, hard won wisdom and honesty

Jamie Cullum

Im gonna learn to read for this

Josh Groban

A DREAM ABOUT LIGHTNING BUGS

First published in Australia in 2019 by

Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

Suite 19A, Level 1, Building C, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

First published in USA by Ballantine Books, a division of

Penguin Random House LLC, New York

A CBS Company

Sydney New York London Toronto New Delhi

Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au

Ben Folds 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

All lyrics by Ben Folds Free From The Man Songs LLC (BMI). All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Lyrics from Grown Man Cry written by Amanda Palmer. Published by Eight Foot Music. Administered by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing. Used by permission.

A Dream About Lightning Bugs is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Cover design: Lisa White

Cover image: Lisa White, based on a photograph by Emma Sandall

Internal design: Susan Turner

For Emma

MUSIC FEELS LIKE THE frame on which Ive hung nearly every recollection, giving me access to large files of childhood memories. Each song, each note, has a memory attached to it. Just a few bars of the saxophone intro of The Girl Cant Help It, by Little Richard, and out of nowhere I can see the towering leg of my fathers gray sweatpants passing. I can almost feel the crusty scar of the radiator burn on my forearm and smell the creosote of asphalt shingles. The song Puff, the Magic Dragon brings back the texture of the dirty linoleum floor, the spinning of the colorful label of the 45-rpm record, and the window-lit specks of dust on their journey around my room. These memories are from when I was two years old. Thats a lot of detail to recall from so far back. Either that or I have a good imagination.

I recently asked my mother if it was accurate to say that I was listening to a couple hours of music a day when I was two years old, and she said no. It was more like eight hourssplayed on the floor at my record player, organizing my records into neat stacks and just listening. And I would become an absolute irate little jackass when interrupted. Eight hours, damn. Thats obsessive, but then, some things never change. Its also a lot of input and stimulation for such a young brain.

I happen to believe that all the music I listened to in my toddler-hood has served as a memory tool of sorts. Maybe its why I can accurately describe the floor plan of our house on Winstead Place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Where all the furniture was placed, where the Christmas tree was, which radiator to avoid ever touching again, the jar of salt I would never ever again mistake for sugar, and the small black-and-white TV playing a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. We left that house in Greensboro when I was three. In fact, we moved nearly every year of my childhood and I can tell you these sorts of things about each house we lived in.

Neurologists and music therapists are increasingly convinced of the effect of music on the brain. A music therapist friend of mine likes to say that Music lights up the brain like a Christmas tree. Shes referring to the large regions of brain scans that light up when stimulated by music. Other important functions, like speech, activate far smaller areas. In fact, there is an observable physical difference between a musicians brain and everyone elses. Here, I googled this for you, so you wouldnt think I was crazy.

Using a voxel-by-voxel morphometric technique, [neuroscientists have] found gray matter volume differences in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial brain regions when comparing professional musicians... with a matched group of amateur musicians and non-musicians.

From Brain Structures Differ between Musicians and Non-Musicians, Christian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, Journal of Neuroscience, October 8, 2003

But neuroscience is not my area of expertise, and this is not a book of science or facts. This is a book about what I know. Or what I think I know. Its about music and how it has framed and informed my life, and vice versa. About the stumbles, falls, and other brilliant strokes of luck that brought me here.

HERES A DREAM I had when I was three years old. Its the first dream I can remember. It was set in one of those humid Southern dusks I knew as a kid. The kind of night where Id look forward to the underside of the pillow cooling off, so I could turn it over and get something fresher to rest my head on for a good minute or so. The old folks described this sort of weather as close. In my dream, a group of kids and I were playing in the backyard of my familys home in Greensboro, North Carolina. Fireflieslightnin bugs, as the same old folks called themlit up in a dazzling succession and sparkled around the backyard. Somehow, I was the only one who could see these lightnin bugs, but if I pointed them out, or caught them in a jar, then the others got to see them too. And it made them happy.

This was one of those movie-like dreams and I recall one broad, out-of-body shot panning past a silhouetted herd of children, with me out in front. There was joyous laughter and a burnt sienna sky dotted with flickering insects that no one else could see until I showed them. And I remember another, tighter shot of childrens faces lighting up as I handed them glowing jars with fireflies Id captured for them. I felt needed and talented at something.

Now, this dream wasnt any kind of revelation. Hell, I was barely three years old. And although its stuck with me all these years, Ive never taken it to be a message from above that Im a chosen prophet, or Joseph from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat . However, a half century later, its obvious to me that the dream reflects the way I see artistry and the role of an artist. At its most basic, making art is about following whats luminous to you and putting it in a jar, to share with others.