_(cropped).avif)
You knew Ben Folds before you knew his name. He was in your house by the time you were four, playing over the closing credits of your favourite Christmas film while nobody thought to introduce you. You've carried his songs around since you were small and couldn't pick him out of a lineup. So how is he folded (wahey) into so many of my childhood memories?
Plenty of people know "Brick", a song about a teenage pregnancy termination that hit US Top 40 radio in the '90s. For me that's buried under a decade and a half of animated rodents and cult-comedy end credits. Folds once called himself a "song writing sociopath," meaning he'll write the best possible song for the job whether or not it's "about" him. Which makes him the ideal person to soundtrack a generation's childhood without one of us clocking it was him.
Nobody planned this. Folds is a songwriter who loves the craft and stays out of its way. He ended up in our memories because he never made the songs about himself, and that's a harder trick than any conspiracy.
Where a lot of us started: sat in front of How The Grinch Stole Christmas each December because Christmas films don't age out. Folds wrote, performed and produced "Lonely Christmas Eve" for the closing credits. It does what his best work always does, which is dress sadness up in a tune. This may have set me up to be the introspective sad girl I am today. I was only a wee chile!
A personal favourite. Friends have told me to switch it off because it's so visually unsettling. Hoodwinked is a Pulp Fiction-style fairytale reboot that gives Little Red Riding Hood the Rashomon treatment. Folds contributed "Red Is Blue," a soft piano ballad tucked into the soundtrack.
The main character is called Red, so when she's betrayed and feeling blue the line goes literal. It works without her too, because growing up is exactly this. Everything you were sure of stops making sense. Up is down. Red is blue.
I revisit Hoodwinked every few years (months) and I've dragged more than a few friends along for the rewatch (did I?). I'd happily recommend you do the same.
The Big Rodent Agenda of the mid-2000s gave 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," "Family of Me" and "Heist."
He also rewrote "Rockin' the Suburbs" as a family friendly version with William Shatner sharing the mic. The original's barbs at performative suburban angst became jokes about homeowners' associations and suburban sprawl. So for a lot of Gen Z the first Ben Folds they heard was a nu metal parody about the emptiness of suburbia, gift wrapped in an anti-consumerism cartoon about a raccoon finding his people. Well yes!
Rockin' the Suburbs ('Over the Hedge' Version)
Now you're a teenager and you've found a film that makes you cry every single time and will get you again at weddings for the rest of your life. Richard Curtis wrote About Time while listening to Ben Folds. He then emailed him, through Nick Hornby of all people, to ask for "The Luckiest."
It plays under the film's soft aching centre and has become a first-dance staple for thousands of couples who couldn't tell you who wrote it. His song at your wedding and his name never comes up.
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 and amazing "Ass Crack Bandit" song, a mock-serious ballad about a campus villain flicking quarters into people's jeans. He also cameoed 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.
The Viceland cult comedy about two guys trying to book their band a gig. Every episode ends on an excerpt of "Army" by Ben Folds Five, that big brass singalong outro running over the credits. If you were the right kind of chronically online younger millennial or older Gen Z watching it (me), "Army" is a Ben Folds Five deep cut you have on repeat. Extra points if you love the live album version.
Fifteen years of film and TV work later, most of a generation still can't name him.
The "songwriting sociopath" position is why Folds is so tangled up in pop culture. He never needed these projects to be about him. He built the perfect two minutes for a film or TV show and moved on. Hand that man a raccoon or a quarter-flicking villain and he hands you back a memory that stays with you for twenty years. He turned out to be trustworthy in a way precious artists aren't.
So no, you can't name three Ben Folds songs but you've been carrying eight of them around since primary school. Go back and listen to who wrote the soundtrack of your childhood and keep an ear peeled for some secret Ben Folds.
Sign up for gig news, early access tickets & special treats