Dream About Lightning Bugs

Reflections on art, life, and music from the genre-defying icon, in a memoir that is as nuanced, witty, and relatable as his cult-classic songs.

Ben Folds is a celebrated American singer-songwriter and former frontman of the alternative rock band Ben Folds Five, beloved for songs such as "Brick," "You Don''t Know Me," "Rockin'' the Suburbs," and "The Luckiest." Now, Folds looks back at his life so far in a charming and wise chronicle of his artistic coming-of-age, infused with the wry observations of a natural storyteller. He opens up about finding his voice as a musician, becoming a rock anti-hero, and hauling a baby grand piano on and off stage for every performance.

In the title essay, "A Dream About Lightning Bugs," he recalls his earliest childhood dream--and realizes how much it influenced his understanding of what it means to be an artist. In "Hall Pass," Folds recounts his 1970s North Carolina working-class childhood and the race and class tensions that shaped his early songwriting, and in "Cheap Lessons" he returns to the painful life lessons he learned the hard way--but that luckily didn''t kill him. Folds also ruminates on the nature of creativity in the digital age, the absurdity of life on the road, and the challenges of sustaining a multi-decade and multifaceted career in the music business.

Collectively, these stories embody the message Folds has been singing about for years: Smile like you''ve got nothing to prove, because it hurts to grow up, but everybody does, and life flies by in seconds.