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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 to college and university but can't seem to put a finger on why he feels so familiar. His name is Ben Folds and you know him better than you think.
Spoiler - this isn't a conspiracy. He hasn't spent twenty years brewing up a scheme to condition a generation to love him. So how is he folded (wahey) into so many of my childhood memories?
Many people know his track "Brick", a devastating song written about a teenage pregnancy termination that landed on US Top 40 radio in the '90s. For me, that 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 "song writing sociopath," meaning he will write the best possible song for the job, whether or not it's "about" him. Which 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 a grand scheme. It's about a songwriter with a true passion for his craft who is embedded in our memories precisely because he never made it 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" from the closing credits. It's doing what his best work always does which is dressing sadness up with 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, which friends have actually told me to switch off because it's so visually unsettling. Hoodwinked is a Pulp Fiction-esque 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's called Red, so the moment she's betrayed and feeling blue, the line becomes literal: red is blue. But 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 have 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 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," "Family of Me" and "Heist". 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 for many Gen Z, their introduction to Ben Folds’ music was 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 yes!
Rockin' the Suburbs ('Over the Hedge' Version)
Now you’re a teenager and you’ve found a film that will make you cry every single time and will get you again at many weddings 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 film's soft, aching centre. It has become a first-dance staple for thousands of couples who couldn't pick Ben Folds out of a lineup. A shining example of this 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 yet amazing "Ass Crack Bandit" song, a mock-serious ballad about a campus villain flicking quarters into people's jeans. Folds also 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.
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 that show (me), "Army" is a Ben Folds Five deep cut you have on repeat. Extra points for those who love the live album version.
Folds isn’t someone who has struck gold with sync or occasionally licensed a song. He has spent fifteen years stitching himself into the memories of a generation that mostly can't name him.
The "songwriting sociopath" position is exactly why Folds is so enmeshed in pop culture, he didn't need any of these projects to be about him, he could just build the perfect two minutes for film or TV and move on. He turned out to be trustworthy in a way precious artists are. You hand that man a raccoon or a quarter flicking villain and he hands you back memories that stay with you for twenty years.
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 actually listen to who wrote the soundtrack of your childhood and keep an ear peeled for some secret Ben Folds.
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