It took me a while to warm up to Ben Folds. The first song of his I heard was Brick, which still feels like an admirable but clumsy attempt to express a complex feeling. I became a bit of a convert after hearing some of his more upbeat, wittier songs like One Angry Dwarf … and Army.
Yet he’s getting better at expressing emotional depth, especially on two songs from Rockin’ The Suburbs — Still Fighting It, a melancholy search for small doses of happiness when adult life doesn’t turn out as dazzling as you’d expect, and the song I’m reviewing here (I know, my intros are too long), The Luckiest.
Folds probably knows at this point that his audience is going to veer toward the geeky demographic, yet he realizes this group has emotions that can’t be expressed in a Monty Python sketch or comic book. (Among the avowed fans of this song — “Weird Al” Yankovic.) You wouldn’t put The Luckiest alongside an ’80s power ballad or even Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved. It’s simply not that simple. I like Maroon 5 just fine, and I don’t mind the fact that a vaguely pleasant melody hangs in my head what that song is over.
What Folds does is a little less palatable. He’s not brimming with confidence like Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. He’s in love, and he’s astounded that circumstances allowed such a thing to happen. How did I — how does anyone — find that person who means everything?
In one of the later verses, he sings of an old couple in which one dies quietly and is followed by the other a couple of days later, all events that seem perfectly natural and fitting in the world he’s describing. That’s a little too much for your typical pop radio station.
And that’s fine. I love this song, and I can’t listen to it every day. I have to be in a particular mood to reflect upon how improbable it is that we find that person. Maybe some people can’t relate — they haven’t found that person, or it all came easily to them. I can relate. I can think of at least 10 things that had to go catastrophically right in order for Jen and I to have ever had a chance — job situations, previous relationships, my temporary victory over self-doubt.
So when Ben sings about how different things would’ve been if one of us had been born 50 years before — hey, I get a little emotional.
I don’t get many things right the first time / In fact, I am told that a lot / Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls brought me here
No one’s ever going to express that thought any better. Thanks, Ben
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