Last week, I made a Ben Folds mix disc for my friend Tracy – we had been talking, and she mentioned that she was a Ben Folds fan, but didn’t own anything. With that in mind, I set out to make the all important mix disc, a one CD primer in my mind, of the essentials from Ben Folds.

I’ve always made mix tapes (and now discs) for the same reasons that I think many of our generation make them for. You make them for a girl, for a friend, when you’re feeling down, when you’re feeling good, and sometimes, just to make that “greatest hits” compilation to fill the void for a compilation that either doesn’t exist, or to replace an existing record company collection that in your mind, sucks.

There’s a book actually called Love is a Mix Tape that has been on my “want to read” list for a while now. Gotta get my hands on that one, one of these days.

I made quite a few mix tapes growing up as a kid, and when I got to the radio station, I found a kindred musical spirit within my comrade Spoony. He and I would go into the station’s music closet, grab a stack of CDs (often hair band stuff, since we didn’t play any of it at the time) and we would head into the station production studio to make a mix tape in a whole new way.

Because we had multiple CD players set up, we had the ability to make the mix tape live in real time, segueing each track from the previous track to the next song/band…..no changing CDs after each song, pausing the tape, etc….instead, it was a continuous process and we would continue to add songs to the mix, until we filled a tape.

It was a lot of fun, and sometimes I would make my own tapes separately with more rock based stuff, and it was often a bit of musical therapy – if I was having “a day,” I could head into the production studio with a stack of CDs, make a tape, and everything would be better……sometimes I wouldn’t even listen to the tape after I was done with it.

Back to Ben Folds. If I was making a mix for myself, I would probably stretch it out to two CDs worth. But I made an effort instead to really distill it down to one really great CD. This is the first mix disc I’ve made in about 2 years, and results can vary when you listen back….when I listened to this one, I knew I’d hit the mark. The mix is pedal to the metal full on rockin’ stuff for the first seven tracks before taking an introspective break. There’s no “Brick” on this mix…I’m not a fan of the song, and never have been. I elected to leave it off, and told Tracy that if she was a fan, that I’d get her a replacement copy with Brick on it. I’m good like that, ha.

Here’s the track listing for the mix.

1. Jackson Cannery
2. Best Imitation of Myself
3. Julianne
4. Underground
5. Song For The Dumped (it was discussion of this song, that brought this mix to life.)
6. One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces

tracks 7-9 are from the final Ben Folds Five album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, an album that I didn’t really get, until I heard it at a club a few years after release, I finally got what the album was about, and it’s been a favorite since that point. If you’ve heard the album, you know that it’s not the most uplifting album. Imagine hearing nearly the entire thing at a club between bands.

7. Army
8. Narcolepsy
9. Regrets
10. Annie Waits

the next two tracks are from Ben Folds Live – the album that sold me on the shows that he did that were just him and a piano. After hearing this album, I realized that I really should have gone to see the solo shows.

11. Not The Same
12. Tiny Dancer (awesome!)
13. You To Thank (a worthy companion to Song For The Dumped in my book!)
14. Landed (one of many Ben Folds songs that makes you go wow….)

the next four tracks are from the Ben Folds EPs….not supersunnyspeedgraphic – I prefer the versions on the EPs to what eventually wound up on the “album.”

15. In Between Days
16. There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You
17. Adelaide

Wandering is a track that was on the Speed Graphic EP. I’m very surprised that it didn’t wind up on “supersunnyspeedgraphic.” It’s one of, if not THE best Ben Folds ballad from his body of work.

Remember sitting on your car
that night
clouds rolled out unveiling lights around the bay
and you told me all those things
remember that?
you told me you can’t match your clothes
remember that?
confessed how when I laugh sometimes, I’m crying
and we sat and didn’t talk for half an hour

We’ve all had those conversations sitting on the car. And for me, the silence that follows isn’t because you’ve run out of things to talk about. The silence comes at the point when you’ve both said enough, and it just feels good to sit there on the hood of that car, enjoying the sounds of the night around you. Or alternatively, the silence can also come for different reasons when you’ve talked throughout the night. Coming into it, you thought you had it all figured out, and the more you talk with each other, you begin to realize that you really have no idea. Yeah, it’s a great place to be. I prefer the first scenario, without question.

The lyrical silence that follows the final lyric above is genius – just the sound of Ben’s piano as the final thought hangs in the air. Awesome.

18. Wandering

And now the twist – Ben Folds covering B*tches Ain’t Sh*t by Dr. Dre. Oh my.

19. B*tches Ain’t Sh*t

And that’s it – that’s my take on Ben Folds in 80 minutes. Did I miss anything? (well yeah, of course I did!)

Thanks for reading!