A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons Details
Review “A Dream About Lightning Bugs is an insightful, touching and often hilarious look back at [Folds’s] life and career, told with wit and good old-fashioned Southern warmth—like Truman Capote, but with more F-bombs.”—People“A Dream About Lightning Bugs offers a glimpse inside the head of another musical genius while also being one of the best-written, most interesting musical memoirs of the rock era.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette“A masterfully written memoir, and so much more. Folds imbues this literary work with keen insight and humor to create an elegant and moving tribute to art and life itself.”—Daniel Levitin, author of #1 New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind“Delightful . . . Singer-songwriter Folds explores the ways in which music shaped his life and offers glimpses into the process of making music. . . . Folds’s fans will take great pleasure in this charming and insightful memoir.”—Publishers Weekly“Engaging and solid . . . Rock memoirs have a distancing effect, but Ben Folds is as relatable as ever.”—The Washington Post “A memoir of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll that’s long on wry humor and short on—well, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. . . . A pleasure for fans and encouragement for novices to tune in.”—Kirkus Reviews “[Folds’s] journey, beginning with a dream he had at age three, is one of the most rewarding any musician has brought us along for in quite some time.”—Paste Magazine“A Dream About Lightning Bugs . . . radiates [Folds’s] goofy, brilliant, genuine, deeply empathetic spirit, marked by the kind of amiable self-consciousness with which unboastful genius often shades itself from the harsh stage-glare of attention.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Read more About the Author Ben Folds is an American musician who has created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, a classical piano concerto, and collaborations with artists ranging from Regina Spektor to William Shatner. Folds, who was also a judge for five seasons on NBC’s acclaimed a capella show The Sing-Off, was named the first ever artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in 2017. He is an outspoken champion for arts education and music therapy, serving on the distinguished Artist Committee of Americans for the Arts, and as chairman of the national ArtsVote 2020 initiative. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
I bought this book for a few reasons: I love memoirs and nonfiction, I love Ben's music, and I put great stock in Sara Bareilles's recommendation. She is my favorite musician, and after reading/devouring her memoir, all I wanted was to be her friend. Reading her candid personal stories made me identify with her and love her so much more than I did already. I am sad to say that this book did exactly the opposite for my relationship with Ben Folds.Let me start by saying that my Ben Folds appreciation is decades old. "Brick" was one of the first songs I taught myself to play on the piano. I arranged "Annie Waits" for my college a cappella group. I saw Ben play with just his piano in my college auditorium and was enthralled. But this book was not at all what I was expecting from watching him on the Sing-Off or listening to his music. I guess I was expecting to want to be his friend?Instead I found myself thinking, "Wow, this guy is kind of a jerk." Yes, it is intelligently written and funny in places (hence 2 stars instead of 1) but he seems so wrapped up in his own intelligence that he can't get out of his own way. All the pranks he has pulled and selfish things he has done made me hope for a huge revelation or deeper emotional confession/climax. It never came. There was some half-hearted self-reflection toward the end, but no real deep delving.I was really hoping to empathize with him, to feel like I wanted to be his friend. Instead I feel like he has played another prank and the joke's on me.