Best Imitation of Myself

As I do almost every year, I try to find a new way to get interested about writing things. This blog is full of series started and stopped abruptly, with no ultimate payoff or whatever. I think rewatching movies last year lasted about a month.

But I digress.

As I was finishing out 2021, I was listening to a bunch of Ben Folds music (again), as my musical taste has been squarely stuck on my favorite artist from when I was in high school. And that’s fine! A lot of Ben Folds’ music seems to punctuate certain periods in my life in ways that I can’t really figure out, so I thought I would lean into it a bit this year.

I was initially going to try and rank all the songs of Mr. Folds (and friends), but I’ve kind of done that already (see Ben Folds By Track), though that kind of leaves off a bunch of songs. So instead what I’m going to do is write essays (often personal) about 100 “tracks” off Ben Folds and Ben Folds Five music. Some stuff I’ve written on before (as it will be with tomorrow’s first entry), but I am randomly going to choose one of the songs from his catalog (I’m sticking to “mainstream” albums) and write about whatever the song makes me think initially.

I don’t anticipate that many people will read along with me in this endeavor, and that’s okay! But if I happen to expose somebody to the music of Ben Folds that otherwise didn’t know about it, that will make me happy. And if it helps me exercise my writing muscle a little bit, even better.

I plan on a daily release schedule (Monday through Friday) going forward, but we’ll see how long that keeps up and if I can get a bit ahead when a stinker of a song comes up randomly. If you want to do some homework before tomorrow’s post, you can listen to the last song on The Sound of the Life of the Mind to get ready.

Hope you come along for this journey!