I’m against retrospective box sets on principle. If I’m a big fan of an artist, I own everything he or she has released and probably a few odds and ends picked up on the Web along the way as well. Invariably, the contents of a career-spanning release will be 90% redundant with what I already have.
For that reason, I initially decided not to buy Ben Folds’ 3-disc set, The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective.
Once in awhile I’m pleasantly surprised by my wife falling in love with a song by one of my favorite artists. Normally our tastes overlap only sparingly and the music I listen to the most tends to fall outside of her circle of favorites.
Ben Folds is of course one of my very favorites and my wife is largely ambivalent toward him. However, she is a big fan of most of Ben Folds Five’s debut album (especially ‘Best Imitation of Myself‘ and ‘Video‘) and she recognized the brilliance of ‘Emaline‘ even before I did.
Best Songwriters – #3 – Ben Folds
Ben Folds could easily have been #1 on this list. It’s only his relative youth compared to the two songwriters to come that slipped him to the third spot. Twenty or thirty years from now, if he continues to produce the sort of music he has thus far, he’ll be pretty much unbeatable.
In 1995, Ben Folds Five released their self-titled debut, an album that I have often called my favorite of all-time, and to date the only record I’ve ever covered in its entirety on this blog. That album alone earned Folds a spot on this list.
And so I begin my next 1,000 songs.
‘Evaporated’ is the final track on Ben Folds Five’s sophomore album, Whatever and Ever Amen. It’s slow and angsty and one of the best examples in Ben Folds’ whole catalog of him being introspective.
Folds is so fast and funny so often than he really earns his more somber and thoughtful moments. For a guy so steeped in irony, an earned tear is a rare and lovely thing. He shares that quality with one of his idols, Randy Newman, who has written his own share of songs like this one.
Today is the 5th birthday of my younger daughter, Fiona. Yes, she was born on Valentine’s Day… cue all the comments about how sweet that is.
I figured it was appropriate to pull out the mack-daddy of father/daughter songs today. I have a few others I love (and I promise to feature one on June 20, my other daughter’s birthday) but ‘Gracie’ by Ben Folds is the one song to rule them all.
Appearing on Folds’ Songs for Silverman, this is one of the songs that caused fair-weather fans to dismiss him as soft. Those morons hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of his career.
