Hi writers, here are some timely updates about my classes and workshops before we get to the rest of the newsletter:
My most accessible offering, Word*play, restarts on Wednesday September 6th from noon-1pm ET, and continues every Wednesday until the end of May. I call this my most accessible offering for a few different reasons: it’s on Zoom, meaning that you can join from anywhere; it’s low cost; and it’s open to adult writers of any experience level and genre— even writers who don’t call themselves writers but want the opportunity to try something new. This relaxed, low stakes, playful hour of writing and sharing is a lot of fun. Purchase tickets by Tuesday September 5th here. I’d love to see you there. Bring a writer friend!
The Thursday Writers, the new-ish monthly creative writing workshop that I launched in June is well underway. You can read a little bit about our time working together here. The next opportunity to apply for this creative writing workshop will be December 2023/January 2024. Send me a note if you’d like more information.
In March of 2023 my essay “The Superfan” placed 2nd in the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition. Sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network, the contest annually awards essays “that are outside the realm of conventional journalism and have relevance to North Carolinians."
Today I’m sharing this previously unpublished essay, for the first time, with all of you. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
The Superfan
I had just turned fifteen years old when I first heard the song, “Brick,” by the band Ben Folds Five, on the radio. It was sandwiched in a song loop that probably included other popular hits of ’97 —“Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, “MMMBop” by Hanson, “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls — songs that sounded like they were actually created in a sound lab with a focus group in mind. “Brick” was understated and elegant, with lead singer Ben Folds singing as if he didn’t really want to, and didn’t care if we liked it.
In the song, Folds’ voice is flat and reluctant, the words coming just slightly behind the rhythm, as if the listener is pulling the story out of him. If you listen closely on the first edition of the compact disc, one of the musicians, probably Folds, sighs deeply between the first and second verses.
Its edgy subject matter, the frank declaration of loneliness, the halting repetition of the melody, the bass solo—I declared it the best song I’d ever heard on the radio.
“Chapel Hill’s own Ben Folds Five,” the radio DJ crowed after each replay. That was another reason I liked the song: the band had formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, roughly eight miles over from what was then my stodgier hometown, Durham, so in my mind they were hometown heroes, and we had something in common.
With my rabid enthusiasm for all things musical, I was no stranger to converting friends and even acquaintances to my favorite bands, which up to this point had been the oldies I swiped from my dad’s record collection. But soon, at my insistence, carloads of teens from my high school, even the popular kids, were listening to “Brick.” I could claim Ben Folds Five as my own, something I had discovered by myself that wasn’t a cultural hand-me-down from my parents. Having my own musical opinions, my own discoveries, made me feel grown up.
I bought Ben Folds Five’s second album, Whatever and Ever Amen as well as their first eponymous album at the mall with my babysitting money soon after I heard “Brick” on the radio. These were among the first two CD’s in my own modest, but growing, collection.
Ben Folds Five’s songs mentioned North Carolina landmarks: bookstores that had closed down, the street where my parents had their first date, my favorite grungy downtown music store. In interviews, Ben Folds displayed a slight southern lilt that mimicked my own family members.
The songs were wry, sarcastic paeans to ex-girlfriends and laziness and apathy and indecision and being pissed off at older people. I learned their music, inside and out. I played their albums on my small stereo system in my room almost continuously, until everyone in my family reluctantly knew every word. And then, just when I thought I couldn’t get any more obsessed, they came to town.
I’d been to a few concerts with my parents — to see singers in their second acts like Jimmy Buffet, where the point was to sit out on the lawn of a big outdoor amphitheater and sway to the music drifting off the stage, eating chips and salsa and watching your parents drink beers out of a cooler and act utterly unlike themselves. But I’d never been to a show with my friends.
Ben Folds Five was playing Cat’s Cradle, a small Chapel Hill music venue that often books up-and-coming bands. Years later, Ben Folds Five would barely come home to play at all, opting instead to tour the west coast, hit the late-night TV circuit and Saturday Night Live. This concert was to be the first and last time I’d see them in such close proximity.
I bought tickets for myself and two of my best high school friends, Caroline and Maggie. We knew every word, we knew every nuance and we knew we’d have to get to the venue, Cat’s Cradle, at least an hour early to get to the front row. Since none of us had our driver’s licenses yet, my dad drove us from Durham to Chapel Hill and dropped us off at a pizza joint near the UNC-Chapel Hill campus called Pepper’s Pizza. Pepper’s had a blaring punk soundtrack and an all-male scruffy cavalcade of tattooed and pierced waiters. We felt cool going there, amid the college kids.
As we finished our meals and moved toward the exit, I spotted him. Ben Folds. Sitting in a booth near the door with an older couple. Eating a slice of pizza.
“Guys. Guys. There’s Ben! He’s here!”
“No he’s not. That can’t be him,” said Maggie. But it was. He looked smaller than I’d anticipated, and he was wearing such a normal outfit for someone I thought was such a star: a short sleeved t-shirt and jeans. But I saw the same young face and slightly receding hairline that had stared up at me many times from the covers of his albums.
I marched directly up to the booth. Oblivious to the fact that they were in mid-conversation, I launched into my spontaneous introduction.
“Are you Ben Folds?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “We are going to see your show at Cat’s Cradle right now! These are my friends.”
He looked stunned, but stammered a nice-to-meet-you.
“Omigosh, are these your parents?” I shouted, looking directly at the couple. “Ben is the coolest,” I told them. Ben had parents, just like me! He eats pizza at the same place where I eat pizza! With his parents!
“Would you like us to take a picture?” the woman asked kindly.
Ben shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
I dug my bulky camera out of my purse and we crowded around Ben. He put his hands limply around our shoulders. In the picture he is not quite smiling but looks as if he’s considering some potentially bad news.
There was no question of what I would say next. I was prepared for these sorts of things, should they happen in real life.
I addressed him as if we’d known each other for years, telling him that I had a favor to ask. My favorite song was “Evaporated” and I asked Ben if they could play it that night at Cat’s Cradle. It was the last song on their second album, a quiet lamentation on choices. Plodding and slow, it was almost sure to kill any buzz generated at a live high-energy concert. I’d visited a fan website, which archived all of their previous set lists, and I knew for a fact that they’d only played that song a handful of times.
His first response was good-natured laughter, followed by a long pause. He told me that my request was interesting, one they didn’t get very often.
But I knew that already. I wanted to request something unusual. It was my way of telling the band that I appreciated even their lesser-known masterpieces, the songs that weren’t radio hits. If I requested “Evaporated,” they would know that I had listened to the entire album, from beginning to end, instead of just playing “Brick” on repeat.
He told me that he’d see if he could remember how to play it, but something in the tone of his voice told me we wouldn’t hear it that evening. He had a show to do.
***
Cat’s Cradle is located in a strip mall, with unassuming signage that is almost entirely covered by low hanging, leafy trees. The sun had not yet set when we showed our tickets and walked in the door and I was unprepared for the stark contrast of the dark and cavernous building, where each wall, and even the floor, was painted black.
When the guys stepped onstage and the concert began, I wasn’t tall enough to see Ben’s hands speed over the piano keys, but I was standing in front of the bassist and the distorted hum of each note reverberated in the pit of my stomach. The music filled the space, louder than anything I’d listened to in the car or on my Discman at home, late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. It seemed to sink into my bones and thread its way around the whorls of my brain. I suppose that was the beginning of my addiction, to being pressed against a sound so loud that it has a physical presence covering my whole body. It was, as I look back now, my first love.
Toward the middle of the concert, Ben stood up from his piano and walked over to the bassist standing on the stage in front of me. He whispered something in his ear and then walked back to the piano. I could feel the crowd around me struggling to know what was going on, as if we were all connected, a living organism. Then Ben leaned into the microphone and told all of us that he’d met some friends tonight who asked him to play this, and that this song was for them. Evaporated.
What I've kept with me and what I've thrown away
And where the hell I've ended up on this glary, random day
Where the things I really cared about, just left along the way
For being too pent up and proud?
And I poured my heart out
And I poured my heart out
It evaporated …
See?
The crowd roared in approval. My first thought was that this was the pinnacle of my existence. My favorite band was playing my favorite song because I told them to play it. Of course, I thought, Ben and I are going to be best friends now.
And then I really listened to the song, as if for the first time, because it was being played at my request. I thought I knew what the words meant, but, really, I didn’t yet, because I wasn’t old enough. But one day I would, and this song would be there when I did.
***
Ben Folds Five’s third studio album, released on April 27th, 1999 and longwindedly titled The Unauthorized Biography of Rheinhold Messner, was disjointed and anxious, beginning with a song called “Narcolepsy,” which built in a hastily growing crescendo while Folds wailed in an exhausted pitch, “I’m not tired/I’m not tired/I just sleep.” It included a song called Regrets, whose lyrics consisted of a list of regrets, and a 3-minute rambling early morning voicemail from Folds’ father, the same man I’d met in Pepper’s, set to a slow-tempo jazz piece.
I mostly found it confusing. It had a darker finish than their previous work, and the seriousness of their subject matter sounded forced rather than earned, as if they’d decided, as a group, to make a Serious album with a capital “s.” It was critically panned, and the band broke up amicably soon after its release.
Even though I didn’t like their final album as a trio, I was upset at news of their breakup. It meant no new music from them, ever again. A chapter of my life, closed.
When Ben Folds announced plans for a solo career, I was apprehensive, thinking it’d never quite be the same without drummer Darren Jessee and bassist Robert Sledge. But Ben fashioned a steady solo career, gaining new fans, donning square thick rimmed glasses and becoming the unofficial spokesperson for white, angsty, nerdy outsider kids who bang out their aggression on the piano.
My favorite song from his solo albums was one he composed for his newborn son. The chorus sometimes made me wince.
Everybody knows it sucks to grow up
But everybody does
So weird to be back here
Let me tell you now
The years go by and we’re still fighting it
We’re still fighting it
***
In October of 2010, when I was 28, I bought tickets to a small event in New York City featuring Ben Folds. He was playing and giving a talk with Nick Hornby about collaboration across media. Hornby, author of High Fidelity, is a longtime fan of Folds and had written lyrics which Folds set to music on his 2010 solo album, Lonely Avenue. It had been over five years since I’d last seen Ben Folds play live. It was the first time I’d seen him since college, and the only time I’d seen him in my newly adopted city of New York.
I took my oldest friend, Caroline, who had been there at the first concert when we accosted Ben and his parents at Pepper’s Pizza. The venue was small and when we arrived, early as usual, we were able to sit in the front row, as close as we’d been at that first Cat’s Cradle show. After seeing him play in a large amphitheater, this show felt intimate, and like walking back in time.
Folds performed a few of the new songs, a stripped-down set, just Ben and a piano. Folds and Hornby signed CDs and books after the show, and Caroline and I waited in the short line.
We were both so far away from Chapel Hill. The concert reminded us of home. When we got to the front of the line we beamed at Ben like he was an old friend.
“We used to see you back in the day at Cat’s Cradle,” I said, as I shook his hand.
He was so at ease, his patter so practiced.
“I lived in New York for a few years before I moved back to North Carolina,” he told us. He looked away quickly as if remembering it, then smiled. His teeth were much bigger and whiter than last time. He thanked us for coming to the show.
There was no flash of recognition in his eyes as he signed our CDs. Of course not. It had been over ten years since we’d stumbled onto his dinner plans.
***
“[Adolescence] is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,” wrote Daniel J. Levitin, in The New York Times. A professor of psychology and director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, he continued, “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”
Bob Dylan heard Elvis Presley for the first time as a high school student in the Midwest, and said that: “Hearing him … was like busting out of jail.” Paul McCartney heard Presley sing “Heartbreak Hotel” at age fourteen, and his first thought was: “This is it.” There was no logical explanation for the way these songs made them feel, and how their world seemed to shift and change before them, how the songs seemed to help them figure out what sort of person they were becoming, or wanted to be. It was just perfect timing.
***
Songs — and bands — accompany you through life like friends, doling out an equal mixture of maturity and youth when required. Just as I now understand the lyrics to “Evaporated,” which I knew, even when I was young, would eventually teach me something about being an adult, I can also use the song to erase time, and feel like a teenager all over again, when Ben first played it for me at Cat’s Cradle.
This is a story about loving a band. You can fill in the blank for your own band, the one that catapulted you toward a thousand other songs, toward an understanding of yourself, toward a new passion and toward the kind of fevered devotion that can only be felt by someone in the bloom of youth.
But this is also a story about time; how it changes, folds in on itself, moves quickly and slowly all at once, and then — evaporates.
The dog days
August has a peculiar effect on me. I’m often more nostalgic than usual, revisiting books I read as a teenager and lingering over old pictures in frames around my house, remembering times that have come before. The heavy, muggy air and sudden thunderstorms we’ve had this summer haven’t helped with the vague sense of uncertainty that accompanies me this month. I saw someone on Twitter say that all of August feels like a Sunday. Yes. The crisp air of September usually jolts me back to the present.
What I’m writing: I continue to chip away at my memoir, a process that is both more emotional and more interesting than I anticipated. I look forward to letting you in on my process.
What I’m reading: Most journalism that is written by nondisabled people is laden with stereotypes, centers the nondisabled experience, or uses outdated language, but The Ones We Sent Away, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jennifer Senior absolutely gets it right. This gripping story decades in the making is extremely personal and shines light on a slice of history that a lot of us don’t learn in the classroom.
What I’m watching: Does anybody else find watching reruns of The Office extremely comforting? I need a new TV show to dig into. Any suggestions?
Until next time,
Allison
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You are reading the intangibles, by writer and creative writing instructor Allison Kirkland. This publication is geared toward writers of memoir and creative nonfiction and the people who love them.
Want more? You can find me on Instagram or visit my website. Thanks for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.
I lol’ed reading about your encounter with him at the pizza place, haha. I can picture you so perfectly! Also I am currently reading Demon Copperhead and finding it better than I anticipated. Sometimes if a book is so buzzy I don’t want to try it. But I’ve found this one to be worth the hype.
Oh and for tv shows this may not be up your alley, but I’m watching the 10 part series on the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance, that came out a few years ago. It’s on Netflix. There’s great archival footage and with Michael Jordan’s NC connection maybe you’d like it too?
Allison's writing is so honest and revealing, without regret. I guess all of us have had musical epiphanies that we don't understand at the time, but that play a permanent note in our sensorium at a critical time in our development (whether it's in youth or beyond). Thank you, Allison, for sharing yours and describing it in such superb prose. Your stories grab the reader from the beginning and make it impossible to set aside without finishing. I look forward to more.