Century Songs is a deep dive into the songs that have meant the most to me in the 21st Century so far, 2000-present. The songs are not ranked, and I’ll be writing about whichever ones seem right that week. For an overview of the project, click here.
This weekend is Father’s Day, and while I haven’t typically tied the songs I write about in this newsletter to the calendar, I’ve had this one marked on the schedule since I started this thing. We usually keep that day pretty chill here, maybe doing something the family would enjoy, or at least something my son would enjoy. Our journey together has been a strange one, and it’s only just getting started.
Last week I wrote a little about what I was getting up to during 2020—watching old baseball games and listening to jam bands, mostly, but also filling out a million job applications for places that weren’t hiring anyway because of a global pandemic and trying my best to entertain a three-year-old in the summer with no pools, no playgrounds, no zoos, and no movie theaters. The truth is, we did pretty well for ourselves; I kept him busy and we watched a lot of Finding Nemo* and played in the backyard while his mom worked upstairs. More than anything, though, we bonded, and I firmly believe we have the relationship we do now because of those six months we spent together doing everything and improvising our way through the whole thing.
*And to all the anti-screen-time parents out there, fuck off, it was 20goddamn20, and Finding Nemo is a masterpiece.
Now my son is seven and just finished first grade. At this age, things are still pretty much smooth sailing. There are ups and downs—we found out at the end of the school year, for example, that a friend of his is moving away this summer, which was hard—but the work of growing up is still focused on the fun things, like riding a bike and tying your shoes and being brave enough to try the zip line at the park (a milestone reached a few weeks ago!). He’s playing soccer and still hasn’t scored a goal yet but his kick is improving and he mostly runs in the right direction. One day he’s going to be dealing with bigger, harder things, like crushes and bullies and anxiety and awkwardness and acne and breakups and loss. Growing up, as Ben Folds put it in 2001, hurts and sucks, but everybody does their best.
Ben Folds was born in Greensboro, NC, in 1966 and became interested in the piano when he was nine and his father bartered for one and brought it home. He learned by playing along with Elton John and Billy Joel songs on the radio, which makes sense, because I think Folds has continued that tradition of kind of surly piano guys who never seem to reach the same levels of rock star cool as their contemporaries. (Well, maybe Elton.) Like everyone else, I first encountered him in the 90s when he was the frontman for the inaccurately-named three-piece band Ben Folds Five.
Although their 1995 self-titled debut had its champions, most of us first heard the band in 1997 when the ubiquitous tearjerker “Brick,” from their sophomore album Whatever and Ever Amen, took over the radio. It’s the kind of song people my age liked to dissect and debate, and then someone in your class would tell you that it’s about the singer taking his girlfriend to get an abortion (which is true). It’s also a sharp contrast to “Song for the Dumped,” which is the one that goes “Give me my money back, you bitch,” which a lot of young people apparently thought was edgy and funny in 1997. I remember getting the album from Columbia House at the time, and while the big singles didn’t do much for me, I love a song like “Kate” (co-written by Folds’ first wife, Anna Goodman), which has a rolling barroom piano and a fuzzy bass line and is a bouncy ode to the kind of effortlessly cool, beautiful girl a nerdy guy who plays piano for a living would fall in love with.
“Every day she wears the same thing
I think she smokes pot
She’s everything I want,
She’s everything I’m not”
After the huge success of Whatever and Ever Amen, going platinum in the US, Australia, and Japan and gold in Canada, the band got to work on the follow-up. Folds opted for something more ornate and introspective, the not-quite-a-concept-album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, released in April 1999. The title comes from the name drummer Darren Jessee and his friends used to use for their fake IDs in North Carolina, and not, as it turns out, from the name of the actual Reinhold Messner, who was a professional Italian climber and the first person to climb Mount Everest without the use of supplemental oxygen. So while there are no songs about mountain climbing on Messner, there are songs about growing up and struggling with your upbringing (“Army,” “Your Redneck Past”) and songs about death, like the only song on the album I truly love, the gorgeous “Magic.” After a mixed critical reception and disappointing sales* compared to Whatever and Ever Amen, the band effectively broke up after touring to support it, although they briefly reunited about a decade ago.
*Granted, in 1999 we were firmly in the Napster era, but I doubt the album would have fared much better in a different environment.
Writing about Ben Folds may be an odd choice considering I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a fan of his music. He has a good voice and is immensely talented, and he is a quirky guy who writes clever (if sometimes petulant and juvenile) lyrics and draws from an AM radio tradition I can appreciate. But there has always been something of a try-hard streak in a lot of his songs, a chip on his shoulder that maybe comes from being tethered to such a cumbersome instrument. If not for songs like the ones I’ve already mentioned, I wouldn’t give Folds much of a thought, despite how obviously in my wheelhouse he should be.
So as the Ben Folds Five era wound down in the beginning of the century, Folds wasted little time putting together a solo record, Rockin’ the Suburbs, in 2001. The less said about the title track the better, but I will say that there are a few other gems in here. In fact, I was once of the mind that the opening track, “Annie Waits,” might be one of the finest pop songs ever written, and while I wouldn’t stand by that hyperbolic assessment today, it’s a damn fine song and I still find that hook pretty irresistible. (It’s definitely his most charming song since “Kate,” as far as I’m concerned.)
Folds wrote “Still Fighting It” for his son Louis, who was born in 1999 along with his twin sister, Gracie*, which would make him just a little younger in 2001 as my son was in 2020. I don’t recall if I heard the song at the time, although I remember the title track getting some airplay, and I may have downloaded it during my early-00s Audiogalaxy music binge. (More on that another time.) Whenever I heard it the first time I wasn’t yet a father, but there I still found something poignant in the lyrics. Once my son was born, though, the song didn’t sound the same at all.
*Gracie got her own tender ballad on Folds’ follow-up album, Songs for Silverman.
The opening of the song seems a bit odd at first:
“Good morning, son
I am a bird wearing a brown polyester shirt
You want a Coke? Maybe some fries?
The roast beef combo’s only $9.95
It’s okay, you don’t have to pay
I’ve got all the change”
The bird line doesn’t really make sense until the end of the song, when he talks about how one day his son will fly away, leaving home as a grown man of his own like a bird leaving the nest. And the fast food talk reminds me of weekend lunches with my dad when I was my son’s age, going to garage sales in the morning and hitting up whatever lunch spot sounded good that day. (Pretty sure there was an occasional Arby’s roast beef along the way.) I also love the line “I got all the change,” both financially and as an attempt to absorb all the changes occurring as he grows up. And dads are always changing, too.
“Everybody knows
It hurts to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here”
When I was young, I dealt with a lot of bullies. I was a sensitive kid, and I cried easily. Tears are catnip to bullies, or at least they were when I was young. Maybe it’s different now; I hope so, because my son is also a sensitive kid who cries easily. Maybe they’re more enlightened somehow, Idunno. But as much as growing up hurts, I’m happy as an adult. Those bullies are gone, and I don’t worry much about what people around me think. So Folds is right: it’s weird to be back here, where “here” is childhood, growing up, learning about the world around him, and making the sometimes painful discovery that not everyone is as kind as he is.
“Let me tell you what
The years go on and we’re still fighting it,
We’re still fighting it”
Even as an adult, with a job and a mortgage and a kid of my own, I’m still sometimes fighting those same demons and memories. It never really goes away, and the truth is I don’t really cry anymore, even when I should. There are moments—when my son was born, for example, or while I’m thinking about and writing parts of this—but they are fleeting. So when I think about how I was as a kid, I see so much of myself in my son. I see the sensitivity, but I also see the curiosity, the caution, the loneliness, the imagination. That’s what makes the next line of the song such a gut punch.
“And you’re so much like me
I’m sorry.”
That “I’m sorry” feels so achingly familiar. I know that my life turned out well, but along the way was hard for a lot of reasons I probably haven’t fully reckoned with yet. And while I know my son is his own person, I worry that he will have similar trials and sufferings along the way. And I plan to be there for him for every step, but I can’t help but feel responsible, both for helping bring him into this world and for giving him whatever parts of me that made things so difficult. He’s so much like me, and yet he’s also very different, and often fiercely independent. He’s becoming his own complete person, and maybe his journey will be nothing like mine. He continues to surprise me with everything he is and does and accomplishes, so I know he’ll have a different story ahead of him, one he can tell me all about someday.
“Good morning, son
Twenty years from now maybe we’ll both sit down and have a few beers
And I can tell you ’bout today
And how I picked you up and everything changed
It was pain, sunny days and rain
I knew you’d feel the same things.”
My son already wants to know a lot about how he was “when he was a baby,” and I tell him some of the stories, and show him the hundreds (thousands?) of pictures and videos I already have of him. When he’s a grown man (well, as grown as 21 really can be, anyway), I hope we’ll have similar conversations, and maybe he’ll understand certain choices that were made along the way, or at least try to understand them. And so maybe we’ll sit and talk about serious things or silly things or both, and continue getting to know each other as we have been all this time.
And if I do a halfway decent job, the best case scenario is that he’ll leave the nest.
“You’ll try and try, and one day you’ll fly
Away from me”
This Sunday, I will likely be spending at least part of my Father’s Day in a movie theater watching Inside Out 2. In previous years we’ve gone to the zoo, or I did some cooking outside, or we built some Lego sets. It seems fitting that Father’s Day is defined by whatever my son wants to do, since he’s the only reason I get to celebrate Father’s Day myself in the first place. I’ll also call my dad and talk to him about traffic and the house and his grandson. And I’ll know he’s proud of me, just like I’m proud of my son, and will be proud of the person he becomes because I’ll know that the journey he’ll have taken to get there is a hard one. Because it sucks to grow up, and everybody does it.
Next week: A shamelessly horny song about young love in the face of death and horror