How did you discover BF5 / BF?

Dunno if this has been done or not (it probably has), but how did you discover the delights of Mr Ben Folds? What was the track you heard that made you invesitgate further? Who introduced you to the music? Have you got a good story to tell?

I was at university back in '97 when a friend told me to watch the video to Battle of Who Could Care Less, probably on MTV when it used to still play music videos. I was completely hooked and have been ever since 

Ha. I love my story, and I love hearing other people's.

I was 19 - that was 2005 - and my ex from high school said to me one day; "hey, there's this free concert down at summerfest on the fourth of july, dunno if you'll like it, but here's a burned bootleg so you're not oblivious if you want to come."


dunno if you'll like it......

the live show, four days later, which i was still kinda dumb - i know i sang the words along to one angry dwarf WAYYYY wrong. but yeah, hooked in that moment. I was, a few years later, able to take that friend of mine to meet Ben. Haha it was funny, 'Hey, Ben I'd like to introduce you to the person who introduced me to your music in the first place.' and my friend goes 'yeah, sorry, it seems I created a monster' Ben just laughed. It was great.

the live show, four days later, which i was still kinda dumb - i know i sang the words along to one angry dwarf WAYYYY wrong. but yeah, hooked in that moment.

ahhh, this reminds me of the guy stood behind me at the Nottingham gig a couple of weeks back, who sang every word of Brick wrong. I'm not even sure he knew the song was called Brick! 

I was 13 when I first heard them.  It was June 1997 at summer camp and one of my counselors had the self title and WAEA.  I remember hearing Jackson Cannery though the wall and running into the room asking what it was.  He made me a cassette with the self title on side A, and WAEA (minus evaporated, MtW cut-off) on side B.  I wasn't the only who got hooked too.  I'm pretty sure dozens of other cassettes like that were passed around the cabins.  When I got home from camp 8 weeks later I looked them up online and saw that they were playing in Chicago in October at the Vic.  My parents took me to the show and were hooked as well (my 61 year-old dad just asked if I could get him TSOTLOTM for xmas, lol).  Good times.

My parents and sister saw the Sessions at West 54th broadcast on TV, bought WA&A, and my dad put OAD on one of his many mix CDs for the car.  I loved that song when I heard it, but I was in my phase of "AW YEAH SKA MUSIC" and didn't really look into Ben Folds/Five.  It wasn't until after I saw Over the Hedge that my sister introduced me to the rest of Ben Folds/Five, as she was, and still is, a big fan.

I remember hearing Brick on the radio when I was maybe 13 or so? I distinctly remember it playing right after Savage Garden's Animal Song. I couldn't make out the chorus too well and wasn't that into music at the time and mostly forgot about it.

Flash forward to just over 4 years ago, I was engaged and we were looking for songs for the wedding on YouTube (this is not going where you think it is), and my now ex and I had already figured out our song, but I needed to find something for the mother/son dance and thought I'd see if I could find a decent Elton John song, as she's a huge Elton fan. Maybe a few videos deep, the sidebar showed some guy named Ben Folds in Elton glasses covering Tiny Dancer.

It was a f*cking landslide from there, and when the ex and I broke up, I fell into music a lot harder than I had before that. My first Ben Folds show was in Columbia Missouri on May 27th. Turns out that a good chunk of my Ben Friends were there too. I've seen him (or the Five) 16 times since then.

I still remember being young and dumb and thinking his solo work was somehow "better" than the older stuff. I don't even know why I thought that at the time, but the very first time I heard Fair and Underground was July 11th of that year and I was just blown away by amazing songs that I didn't know. After that show, I met Ben back by the bus, where my camera acted all sh*tty and he talked about how much he hated digital over film.

The fact that I could actually end up seeing Ben Folds Five more times than the man solo, depending on how the spring tour shakes out, amazes me.

A friend of mine was a big fan. In 2004 (i was about 17) I bought Rockin' the Suburbs, and I still remember the first time I heard Annie Waits. It absolutely floored me. It was at that point that I remember thinking "THIS is the kind of music I like". Right then and there, it defined me. By Christmas, I had all of the five's records. Been a fan since

I first stumbled across them with the "Battle of Who Could Care Less" video playing in rotation late nights on MTV back in '96.  I would never actually see the whole video.  (I have since.)  I'd either catch it in the middle or it would come on during blocks while I was doing something else and the TV was just on in the background, so I never caught the band's name or the name of the song.

We ended up going to see Counting Crows on tour for Recovering the Satellites back in early 1997 and BF5 opened for them.  I remember hearing the name Ben Folds in the lyric for CC's song "Monkey," so I kind of got that connection, but I hadn't placed them as the band I had been seeing in that video.  When were in line waiting to get into the show at the Paramount in Seattle, someone came along and handed out marketing materials.  The main one was this oversized fake $5 bill that was tri-folded.  You open it up and it announced Ben Folds Five with the pictures of these three dorky white kids.  Cute and effective.

Then, the boys came out and blew the lid off of the place.  As much as CC was my fave band then (and now), these guys outshone them on the night and I was completely hooked.  And I finally resolved that feeling I'd had about being familiar with them in some fashion.  I don't think I bought WAEA at the show, but I picked it up within a day or two and spun it like mad.  Loved every moment from the opening piano on "OAD" to "Ben Folds is a f*cking assh*le!"  Didn't take me long to track down a used copy of the self-titled and I was cemented as a fan.  

They came back to Seattle later that year and played the old DV8.  By that point, "Brick" had dropped and gotten substantial radio play.  They rocked the hell out of that old club and I remember being particularly taken by how many people were involved in the then audience-participation movement of "Underground." (Still catch some people chiming in every now and again at shows.)  That gig started a string of catching them every time they came to town to play that lasted for years into Ben's solo career.  I remember breathlessly waiting for TUBORM to come out in the spring of '99 and being thoroughly blown away.  Wasn't too long after that that we got hooked on Napster and scoured the place for all manner of live recordings and demos.

Goes on and on from there, including a chance to meet the man and shake his hand -- even though I was drunk off my ass -- after his set at the Showbox in Seattle on the Suburbs tour.  RTS was also the thing I used to get my mind off of the tragedy of 9/11 for a few brief moments as that was the day it was released and I'd kept my plan of going and picking up the album on the day.  Don't recall that I listened to it that day, but I knew that I needed to own it to foster some sense of normalcy.

My first exposure was 1996. I was at uni in the UK and one of my friends kept asking for Underground to be played in the union bar. I liked it and borrowed the album off him, liked that and bought the album myself. Listened to it a lot BUT it was a period of my life when I wasn't really into music so when WEAEA came out I just assumed it wouldn't be very good, I think as a lot of the bands I had listened to up until then seemed to tail off rapidly after a first stellar album.

Anyhoo, fast forwards to 2009 and I was digitising all my CD's and happened to be listening to a particular song ("Let Your Love Flow" by The Bellamy Brothers for the nosy ) and the next track in the list was "Annie Waits". Listened to it, liked it, listened to it again. Worked out who it was, listened to the album, loved the album and then proceeded to just go completely Ben crazy. Absolutely kicking myself that I didn't get to see Ben or the Five up until 2009.

That's pretty much it really. I've seen Ben solo 6 or 7 times and now the Five once in Sydney where I live. I'm fairly shy so I don't think i'd ever be able to wait around to get an autograph or a photo but I can live in hope