Shaped by Sound is made possible through the support of the Come Hear NC Music Office (CHNCMO), a program of the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The PBS NC original series spotlights North Carolina’s thriving music scene, featuring artists working in a broad range of genres, including indie rock, rap, R&B, country, jazz, bluegrass, folk, and gospel.
Ben Folds holds a special place in the hearts of many North Carolina music fans. Since the mid-1990s, he has created sardonic but tender piano rock unlike much else on the pop charts. And his songs are seasoned by the special history and sensibility of the Tarheel state. A platinum-selling artist and the composer of the evergreen song “Brick,” his lyrics nevertheless make a deeper sort of sense to those who know about where and when he grew up. Born in Greensboro, raised in Winston-Salem, and launched into stardom in Chapel Hill, Folds’s sense of humor, mix of high and low musical modes, and general narrative frame of reference (and references) all can be traced back to his North Carolina origins. This, paired with his philanthropic efforts here—promoting early music education through the Keys for Kids program and his Hurricane Helene benefit work through the 2024 benefit concert From Wilmington, With Love—have made Folds a unique presence in the state.
Recently, Folds appeared on an episode of Season 2 of Shaped by Sound. To help you get behind, under, or within the music, we’ve created a North Carolinian’s Guide to the Life and Music of Ben Folds. Most of the information and all of the quotations below come from Folds’s fine (and funny) memoir, A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (Ballantine, 2019).
Winstead Place, Greensboro, 1968
Ben Folds’s first memory was a dream about his boyhood backyard on Winstead Place in Greensboro. This dream inspired the title of Folds’s memoir: A Dream About Lightning Bugs. A sleeping toddler, he imagined jarring “lightning bugs” (AKA fireflies) and showing them to other children: a premonitory metaphor for the work of an artist. It was also on Winstead Place that Folds developed an obsessive relationship to music, specifically one mediated by vinyl. For eight hours a day, Folds writes, the two-year old would be “splayed on the floor at my record player, organizing my records into neat stacks and just listening.” As Folds tells it, his focus took on a near-antisocial intensity: “I would become an absolute irate little jackass when interrupted.”
Before he could read, then, the young Folds was already behaving kind of like a Ben Folds song: a little off-kilter but the product of preparation, cranky but passionate, pairing beauty with the all-too-human tendency toward excess.
Winston-Salem, 1970s
The Folds family moved to Winston-Salem soon after Folds’s lightning bug reverie. There, he attended Moore Laboratory Schools, the first magnet school in North Carolina. At Moore, Folds was a distractable, daydreaming pupil. And it was here that he was spurred to learn piano when he heard his fellow second-grader (and future wife), Anna Goodman, playing Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” and was immediately enflamed with emulative desire. Soon, Folds was trudging in the snow down Peace Haven Road to his piano teacher’s house, and at home his uncle and father were dragging a piano inside for the boy to build his chops.
In Winston-Salem, Folds was an active observer of North Carolinian culture, registering how desegregation and shifting economics were unevenly bringing together black and white, “millionaires and mill rats,” as he would later sing about in 1995’s “Jackson Cannery” (a song inspired by the Cannery hosiery mill, in Winston-Salem). He attended Wiley Middle School and R. J. Reynolds High, and in his senior year he and his girlfriend lived through the traumatic events that would inspire the 1997 song “Brick.” At this time, Folds drummed in more than one band, perhaps because the piano was more difficult to lug from gig to gig, and few venues had the instrument on hand. In his memoir, Folds shows his memory to be a storehouse of Winston-Salem-related experience; he throws out stray references to the D.J. at Hanes Mall, and casts his mind back to a stint working at Mount Tabor Supermarket, on Robinhood Road. The latter’s slogan was LOW PRICES WERE BORN HERE AND RAISED ELSEWHERE, but on his first day, an old hand warned him the motto should really be LOW WAGES WERE BORN HERE AND RAISED ELSEWHERE.
Veronika’s German Restaurant, I-40, summer 1985
During a time in the wilderness, Folds found his first paying music gig: playing polkas on a Casio keyboard for the regulars at Veronika’s German Restaurant, off a Triad exit on I-40. For this absurd job, Folds tried to walk the line between professional and irreverent: he learned four “electro polkas,” and cycled through them repeatedly night after night. But, according to his telling, Veronika’s taught him a bit of humility a la “the show must go on,” and he made friends with a few of the regulars. In the Veronika’s parking lot, Folds survived a brief carjacking attempt, one that made him briefly fear that his father’s admonition, bad people “will make you drive to Mt. Airy,” could be coming true.
Greensboro, 1985–1988
Following a disastrous stint in music school in Miami, and a little time drifting through jobs like the one at Mount Tabor Market, Folds found himself uneasily returning to higher education as an undergraduate at UNC-Greensboro. After (perversely) pretending to be unable to play during his initial piano exam, he wound up in an entry-level keyboard course. There, Robert Darnell heard Folds goofing his way through nonremedial runs on the keys: as a result, soon Folds transferred his degree focus from percussion to piano. Now with a full scholarship, he spent almost every day in Darnell’s office overlooking Tate Street. There he learned composition and technique and workshopped songs on Darnell’s Steinway. Darnell told Folds stories about the composer Aaron Copeland and the pianist Nadia Boulanger, and taught him lessons about the unexpected pitfalls that can attend a life in music. (A younger Darnell had dropped out of serious performance after a nervous breakdown.) Meanwhile, Folds was taking in local shows, everything from Eugene Chadbourne playing an electric rake to seeing REM at Friday’s on Tate.
During this time, Folds began drumming for his first serious band, Majosha, which formed in 1988. Majosha won a Battle of the Bands contest at Duke University, made one studio record, and self-released a cassette before breaking up, in 1990. Folds then formed the short-lived band Pots & Pans. Also around this time, Folds worked odd jobs like waiting tables at the Dogwood Room, and sundry music-for-hire scenarios, including playing in a lounge band at Giovanni’s Italian restaurant and wedding cover bands, playing slap bass for hire in “white funk” groups, and playing percussion in Europe for a semester with a Duke student band. Ultimately, he dropped out of UNC-G to focus on music full-time.
UNC-G Practice Space, Greensboro, 1993
After UNC-G, Folds felt lost. After impressing a music licensing representative at the Rialto theater in Raleigh and securing a “tenuous publishing deal” during a sweaty and awkward showcase at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, Folds tried to make it as a songwriter in Nashville. But he soon became dissatisfied and listless there, moved to New York, and started playing weekly at Sin-é in the East Village. The club, now most famous for the rapturous crowds that packed in to see a young Jeff Buckley perform, did not break Folds out into stardom. Eventually, after this time in the urban wilds of Manhattan and on the heels of a divorce, he returned to North Carolina.
Licking his wounds, Folds found himself in a jam session on the UNC-G campus with Robert Sledge, who would later become the bassist in Ben Folds Five. Before he knew it, they were moving together to Chapel Hill.
Isley Street, Chapel Hill, January 1994–1997
Folds rented a small brick house for himself and Sledge on Isley Street, “within walking distance of everything.” He had recently run into a drummer, Darren Jessee, whom he’d met briefly in Nashville, and boom presto, the Ben Folds Five was born. Soon the cops were called to Isley Street for noise complaints, and a “Piano-Band-that-Rocks” was on its way to finding its sound. By summer, the fledgling group had a 45 rpm record and was signed to Caroline Records on the strength of a rehearsal tape. After an abortive recording in Pennsylvania of their first album, the Cat’s Cradle soundman Caleb Southern (who already had Archers of Loaf and Metal Flake Mother production credits) rerecorded the band during a five-day marathon stretch in the Triangle. The band’s debut record was done, and Folds, now 28 years old, “was officially a recording artist.” The television show Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-, and for a moment the Ben Folds Five was “the next big thing.”
After two years of touring and a bidding war, Folds and the band signed to Sony 550. In a flush era of studio largesse, Folds writes that they were given “free rein over our budget, which we spent purchasing or renting recording equipment and soundproofing” the 700-foot Isley Street house.
Caleb Southern ran the control room out of the kitchen; “Brick” was recorded “on about six audio tracks live in a small bedroom of the house.” To date, the band’s second album, Whatever and Ever Amen, has sold 1.42 million copies.
UNC Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, September 18, 2008
The Ben Folds Five broke up in 2000. At the time, Folds felt he was “spinning way too many plates and some of them were […] hitting the floor.” Folds now had kids, Jessee wanted to record solo stuff, and Sledge didn’t want to be in the band without Jessee. Folds recorded and released his first solo record, Rockin’ the Suburbs, in 2001, which featured fan favorites such as the song “Fightin’ It.”
By 2008, though, the band was back together in the Triangle, playing UNC’s Memorial Hall a benefit concert for Operation Smile. The group played the entirety of their “difficult” post-Whatever album: The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (a record replete with NC references to names from fake IDs in Charlotte and to Forsyth Medical Center, in Winston-Salem). To hear Folds tell it, musically the bond was still strong, even though the members hadn’t seen one another in years: “It felt like no time had passed at all.”
The NC Arts Foundation, Raleigh, 2022–Present
Folds launched Keys for Kids, a charitable initiative to support NC programs that offer school-age youth access to keyboards and proper music lessons at little or no cost. Keys for Kids is a partnership with the North Carolina Arts Council and the North Carolina Arts Foundation.
Greenfield Lake Amphitheater, Wilmington, October 29, 2024
In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastation, Folds headlined the benefit concert From Wilmington, With Love alongside Jim Lauderdale, Moonshine State, Caleb Caudle, and Josh Goforth. All funds went to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund, and the proceedings ended with a rousing group rendition of James Taylor’s song “Carolina in My Mind.”
PBS NC, 10 UNC-TV Drive, Research Triangle Park, October 13, 2025
Ben Folds recorded an interview and performance for Season 2 of Shaped by Sound, a program made possible with the support of the Come Hear NC Music Office, a program of the North Carolina Arts Council.