Who’s Got The Looks? Who’s Got The Brains? Who’s Got Everything?

“I was never cool, in school. I think you don’t… remember… me…”

Ben Folds Five was one of those bands that I started loving, then ended up admiring even if I didn’t particularly enjoy that much of their later material. I can still remember hearing “Underground” for the first time; I was getting ready for the day ahead, and listening to morning radio as I considered the sad fact of leaving the apartment and heading to art school for the day, when this song that sounded like nothing so much as a muppet version of Randy Newman came on:

I had to know more.

Their first album, Ben Folds Five, was the “pop” one, I guess; definitely the most Power Pop-y, and probably the most consistent in terms of tone and sound. For the summer that it came out – maybe 1996? – it was on constant rotation on whatever my CD version of a turntable was, and I’d fallen head over heels for the harmonies and the arrangements and the sweet-sour mix that pretty immediately fell out of balance as soon as they’d finished this album (Bits of the “b-sides and missing songs” album Naked Baby Photos demonstrate this, I think; the songs cut from the first album stand apart from the later material, somehow). When the second album, Whatever And Ever Amen, came out, I snatched it up, hoping to continue to fall in love even more, but something seemed out of whack – Songs were either too snarky or too sentimental, and lacked the… lightness of touch, perhaps? Sincerity, maybe? of the first album.

(“Brick” became the hit off the album, a treacle-y song that I liked more before I realized it was much more autobiographical than I’d initially thought; it had always been one of my least favorite songs on there, and when it started being the one everyone thought was great, my heart sank in worry about what’d come next as a result.)

The third album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner was jazz, and by that point, I’d pretty much checked out anyway; I was busy listening to what I thought at the time were weirder things and there was something weirdly insincere and dull about the album in comparison – it felt tired and unnecessary, in a way that they hadn’t before, and I couldn’t really bring myself to be interested. Years later, I’d try listening again, and think “Yeah, almost, but…” and turn it off.

If ever there was a band that felt like they ended up getting too smart for their own good, it was Ben Folds Five, for me; there’ve been smarter bands, and bands who’ve made the same “harmony-singing pop to jazz-influenced songs” journey and it’s all worked out, but what BFF (And who knows if that acronym was intentional, considering the “ironic” nature of the name in the first place) had going for them in the first place was more heart than mind, and somewhere along the way, it felt like that disappeared, somehow.