Ben Folds | Music, Creativity & Nonconformity

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  My guest today is Ben Folds.

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  Widely regarded as one of the major music influences of our generation.

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  He's created an enormous body of genre bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Fold's five solo albums, so many collaborative albums, starting as a drummer and then a piano player, and eventually a singer and a band member.

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  For over a decade now, he has performed with some of the world's greatest symphony orchestras as well, and currently serves as the first ever artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy center.

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  And in addition to solo rock and orchestral touring and scoring and getting involved in cinema and tv, now Foles also branched into the writing world with a new book, a Dream about lightning bugs, that debuted as a New York Times bestseller, dropping you into sort of the pivotal moments and stories that have shaped his fiercely engaged life of nonconformity and perpetual creation and collaboration and reinvention.

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  You might also recognize him as a judge for five seasons on NBC's the Sing off.

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  And Ben is also an outspoken champion for arts education and music therapy, funding in our nation's public schools.

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  And we dive into all of this in today's conversation.

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  So excited to share it with you.

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  I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.

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  Let's take a bit of a step back in time and tell a little bit of the story that's brought you in and out of here and then kind of circle around to what you're up to these days.

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  Also, I grew up in North Carolina.

• 01:44

  That's correct.

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  Greensboro.

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  Greensboro was in Salem, actually, I was born in Greensboro and we moved when I was four.

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  Yeah, music touches down for you at a really young age, but it seems like actually, before you were ever playing it, you were just listening.

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  And it sounds like even from the earliest stages, kind of a nonstop, on repeat and a huge number of hours.

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  Yeah, I mean, my mother is dead certain that it was at least 8 hours a day when I was two years old.

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  That's a lot.

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  I mean, on one hand, it shows somewhat of an obsessive streak that's been part of my life.

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