Band: Ben Folds Five
Album: Whatever and Ever Amen
Released: March 1997
Favourite Track: Battle of Who Could Care Less
Favourite Lyric: “I poured my heart out, it evaporated, see?”
I got into Ben Folds Five because Richard had a spare ticket to a show at the Kentish Town Forum as he’d split up with his girlfriend and unsurprisingly didn’t want to go along to a show with her. He lent me this album along with Ben Folds Five and Naked Baby Photos. I listened to them a fair bit before the show but it wasn’t until I saw the show that I fell in love with the band.
The energy and passion in the show draws you into the band, along with the fact that they all seemed like people you’d want to be friends with. But mostly it was the fact that Ben Folds scaled the speakers and threw his piano stool at his piano. It was at that point that I realised that pianos could be cool and not just for Elton John.
This album is the one that I will come back to again and again. The first is rawer and punkier, The Unauthorised Biography of Reinhold Messner is more musical and more polished and the stuff after they reformed was more experimental but Whatever and Ever Amen is the one that just encompases everything the band is about – beautiful harmonies, an interesting combination of instruments, songs about people and experiences which are at the same time both specific and universal.
For my birthday last year, my brother got me Ben Folds book A Dream About Lightning Bugs which I highly recommend. It is an autobiography that completely focuses in on the music and isn’t self-indulgent. It really helped me understand how he constructs his songs and gave me inspiration for song writing as well.