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A stranger has been in your house since you were four years old. He soundtracked your childhood, he was at your cousin's wedding, he stayed with you through your teens and college and university but you do not know his name.
Today we're building a case. Has Ben Folds been conditioning a generation to love him?
Spoiler: he hasn't. There's no plot and that's somehow the more unsettling part.
Most people know "Brick", the devastatingly sad song quietly written about a teenage abortion that somehow landed on US Top 40 radio in the '90s. In my mind, that one colossal achievement is buried under a decade and a half of animated rodents, Christmas classics and cult-comedy end credits. Folds once called himself a "songwriting sociopath": he'll build the best possible song for the job, whether or not it's "about" him. Which, it turns out, makes him the perfect person to soundtrack a generation's childhood without a single one of us clocking it was him.
So this isn't a story about manipulation. It's about a guy who got into all our memories precisely because he never made any of it about himself and that's a harder trick than any conspiracy.
Where a lot of us started, sat on the floor in front of How The Grinch Stole Christmas every single December because Christmas films don't age out, they just get rewatched into the ground. That closing song, "Lonely Christmas Eve"? Folds wrote, performed and produced it. It's genuinely lovely and it's doing the exact thing his best work always does: handing you real loneliness dressed up as something you can hum. I was only a wee chile. I had no idea but that's the point.
Lonely Christmas Eve (From "Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas" Soundtrack)
Chaotic, unsettling and a personal favourite, Hoodwinked is a Pulp Fiction inspired fairytale reboot that gives Little Red Riding Hood the Rashomon treatment. Folds contributed "Red Is Blue," a soft piano ballad tucked into the soundtrack to amplify the scene’s pathetic fallacy. I revisit Hoodwinked every few years and have dragged more than a few friends into rewatching it with me. I'd happily recommend you do the same.
Ben Folds - Red Is Blue • 4K 432 Hz
The Big Rodent Agenda of the mid-2000s brought us Flushed Away, Ratatouille, Alvin & the Chipmunks and, naturally, the best of them all: Over the Hedge. Hans Zimmer sat in the executive music producer chair (right, right) and Ben Folds wrote three original songs for the film, "Still," (Boom) "Family of Me" (BOOM) and "Heist" (BOOOM!). He also rewrote "Rockin' the Suburbs" into a family-friendly version, with William Shatner sharing the mic and the original's barbs at performative suburban angst replaced by jokes about homeowners' associations and tract housing. So a chunk of Gen Z's first ever Ben Folds song was technically a nu metal parody about the emptiness of suburbia, gift wrapped as an anti-consumerism cartoon about a raccoon finding community and rejecting individualistic tendencies. Well of course!
Rockin' the Suburbs ('Over the Hedge' Version)
Fun fact: "Rockin' the Suburbs" was originally released on 11 September 2001. One of the sharpest satirical songs of its era arrived on the same day the world stopped paying attention to almost everything else.
Now the one that got you as a teenager and will get you again at every wedding for the rest of your life. Richard Curtis wrote About Time while listening to Ben Folds, then emailed him, through Nick Hornby of all people, to ask for "The Luckiest." It soundtracks the soft, aching centre of the film. It has become a first dance staple for thousands of couples who could not pick Ben Folds out of a lineup. That's the ultimate version of this whole phenomenon: his song, your most important memory, his name nowhere in sight.
Then the rewatch show Gen Z adopted as its own long after it aired. In the "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics" episode, Folds wrote and performed the gleefully stupid but secretly gorgeous "Ass Crack Bandit" song, this mock serious ballad about a campus villain flicking quarters into people's jeans. And then he cameod in the episode as a botany professor. So for a certain kind of Community quoting Gen Z brain, Ben Folds isn't the "Brick" guy at all. He's the Ass Crack Bandit guy.
Ass Crack Bandit || Ben Folds || Lyrics
The Viceland cult comedy about two guys trying to book their band a gig. Every episode ends on the same thing: an excerpt of "Army" by Ben Folds Five, that big brass singalong outro, running over the credits. If you were the right kind of terminally online younger millennial or older Gen Z watching that show, "Army" isn't a Ben Folds Five deep cut you discovered. It's just the sound of an episode ending to a familiar sounding voice.
Line it all up and a pattern falls out. This isn't a guy who has struck gold with sync or occasionally licensed a song. This is someone who spent fifteen years gently stitching himself into the memories of a generation that mostly can't name him. The Grinch's sad Christmas. The anti-capitalist raccoon. The wedding song. The Ass Crack Bandit. The show that ended the same way every single time.
There was never a plot. The "songwriting sociopath" position is exactly why it worked - because he genuinely didn't need any of these to be about him, he could just build the perfect two minutes for a cartoon or TV show and move on. He ended up being trustworthy in a way precious artists never are. You hand that man a raccoon or a quarter flicking villain and he hands you back something that stays in your brain for twenty years.
So no, you probably can't name three Ben Folds songs. But you've been carrying about eight of them around since primary school. The con was never a con. Go back and actually listen to who wrote the soundtrack of your childhood.
It was him. It was always him <3
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