Ben Folds Five

Welcome to The Keys To Rock, everybody!

Thanks for stopping by to check out my first post!  If you're a fan of piano-rock music and you like what you find here, subscribe with the box to the right.  I've started this blog out of my personal love for piano-rock music.  As a piano-rock based songwriter and artist myself, hearing some of the bands you'll find in this blog has been very inspiring to me.  I would be a vastly different artist without influence from these bands.  But without further ado, let us dive in!

Ben Folds Five

   

In thinking about the true genre of piano-based rock, where else to begin than with Ben Folds Five.  If you'd like to listen while you read, I've created a Ben Folds Five Spotify playlist and embedded it below.

As a piano-rock based songwriter myself, Benjamin Folds (lead vocals, piano/keyboards, and principle songwriter of Ben Folds Five) has been one of my biggest influences.  Folds, along with bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee formed the piano-rock trio Ben Folds Five in 1993 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.   The three never brought an overly mainstream sound to their unique style of rock, which, in my mind, has shown that having a mainstream sound isn't the only way to find success.

Ben Folds has a vocal style that certainly doesn't scream well-trained-vocalist, but somehow his unique voice and wide range of lyric styles fit right in with the band's self-prescribed "punk rock for sissies" sound.

As Ben Folds Five began to find its sound in the early years, it released its first self-titled album, Ben Folds Five, in 1995.  Following was Whatever and Ever Amen, the band's sophomore album. This has always been a personal favorite of mine, having listened to it with my family on many cross country family vacations.  Folds' varying writing on this album features a pull-no-punches style of blunt lyricism and music that perfectly accompanies each lyrical mood, both qualities I admire in Folds' writing.  The album's most successful single, Brick, would reach #6 on US charts in '98.

Naked Baby Photos, an album containing a lot of odds-and-ends songs, was released early the following year.  One year later, the band released The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner which was ultimately a flop album, achieving little to no commercial success and receiving mostly average reviews. Folds has explained that this album really showed how naive the band was in thinking that the music industry would care about their most somber and musically sophisticated/different writing, though he thinks that the album contained some of their best work.

In October 2000, Ben Folds Five would break up.  Folds would then begin his string of six solo LP releases, as well as collaborations with a variety of well known artists.  Ben Folds Five reunited in 2011 and released their album The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind and would tour with that album in 2012.

As one of my all-time favorite bands, Ben Folds Five has already been a major influence for many piano-based rock artists, and I'm sure they will continue to be an influence to many generations to come.  As an artist, I like to think that true well-honed musicianship and the expression of one's truest emotions can help an artist find success.  Bands like Ben Folds Five give me hope that I may just be right.

For more extensive information about Ben Folds Five, or Ben Folds' solo artist work, check out the links below.

Thanks for reading my first post to my new blog The Keys To Rock! Don't forget to subscribe to The Keys To Rock by entering your email in the box to the right.  You can also follow me on twitter @alecryanmusic to get information about future posts, and to hear what I have coming up as a piano-rock artist!

Until next time,

Alec Ryan

http://www.benfolds.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Folds_Five

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Folds