Day 12: "Whatever and Ever, Amen" - Ben Folds Five (1997)

Yes, I missed a day.  It was a busy weekend, my partner was back from a 10 day trip to Northern Ireland, I was playing Netrunner in the afternoon, then we went to the cinema to see The Big Sick, had Mexican food and watched TV.  That seems like a good enough excuse to me.

Today's album is great because it works slightly to dispel the image of me as a stereotypical angsty teenager by way of my music selection.

listen to me here

I have conflicting memories of how I ended up hearing Ben Folds for the first time.  "Whatever and Ever Amen" was definitely the first album of theirs that I owned, and I'm fairly sure I heard one of the tracks off here out of context, either on some mix tape someone had given me (back when a mix tape didn't mean 'I secretly love you' but 'I want you to listen to these bands I really like you might not have heard of'), or on one of those free CD's you used to get from record stores which were a kind of light smattering of what was new and they wanted you to buy.  If the latter is the case, it obviously worked on me.  Way to go, early viral marketing.

I'm fairly sure it was "Battle of Who Could Care Less" that I heard first, out of context with the rest of the album, and while it didn't jibe with my dark and brooding personal brand at the time, I actually really liked the song.  So much so, in fact,  that I went out and bought the album soon after hearing it for the first time.  But where it would lodge itself in my memory would be the confluence of buying an album with a song called "Kate" and meeting Kate for the first time.

I'd had crushes and flings before, but Kate was my first serious relationship.  I was out at the terrible alternative club in Chesterfield called the Green Room on a Saturday night.  I don't remember who I was with or why we were out that night, but somehow I remember ending up by myself, my original party having disbanded in a drunken haze to head home.  I was in there regularly on a Saturday night at that point, and because the sample size for alternative music fans in our tiny town wasn't high, eventually you just got to know everyone in there, by sight if not by name.  Fortunately that night, a girl I'd met through a previous brief stint as co-DJ at the Rock night at a previous dive bar was in there, so I said hi to her, and hung out with her friends.

One of them was Kate.  She was out that night trying to stay with a crowd of people, as a previous boyfriend of her's who she had dumped only the week before was expected to be out as well.  We talked, because I talked to everyone, and as people cycled on and off the dancefloor, me and Kate would end up being the only two people at the table at some point.  By happenstance, her ex had shown up on one of those occasions where we had somehow been left alone.  She was looking for a way to make him...I dunno, jealous or upset or just to stir stuff up.  Regardless, she needed a partner in crime, and I was more than happy to help out.  In hindsight, perhaps this should have been a sign of things to come.

We spent much of the later parts of that evening making out, and as the club kicked us out at 1am, she wrote her phone number on my forearm in eyeliner pencil.  I walked home in a kind of daze, and collapsed into my bed.

I spent much of the following morning trying to reconstruct the black smudges on my arm into the numbers they had been the night before.  It took me a couple of tries and calls to wrong numbers, but eventually I managed to call her.  And that was how it started.  I would end up buying "Whatever and Ever Amen" the following weekend, and it felt like serendipity.  I listened to "Kate" off that album a lot.

Even though the course of that relationship ended with a typical first-real-relationships shambles, this album still reminds me of the fun parts of that; the being young and in love for the first time.  It's easy at times to look back on how it ended without thinking about all the interesting times that came before it.  I still keep kind of in touch with Kate on Facebook, and I'm always pleased to see she seems to be doing well.

And this album would go on to become one of my favourites.

Listening to it again today just reminds me how much I love every single track on here.  I'm pretty sure I have the entire BF5 discography still in my collection (I can see Self-titled coming up in a few days time in The Pile), but this album more than any other distils everything I like about their entire style into 12 tracks conveying a range of emotion, a blend of the comic and the tragic which really works.  If you were ever thinking of giving their stuff a try, this album is where I would start.