A Dream about Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons, Folds Ben

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 Dont Know Me, Rockin the Suburbs and The Luckiest. But Folds will be the first to tell you hes an unconventional icon, more normcore than hardcore. Now, in his first book, 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 antihero, and hauling a baby grand piano on and off stage for every performance.

In the title chapter, A Dream About Lightning Bugs, Folds recalls his earliest childhood dream--and realizes how much it influenced his understanding of what it means to be an artist. In Measure Twice, Cut Once, he learns to resist the urge to skip steps during the creative process. (There will be plenty of time for the limitations of the real world to impose themselves on your creation.) In Hall Pass, he 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 didnt kill him. Folds also ruminates on music in the digital age, the absurdity of life on the road, and the challenges of sustaining a multidecade, multifaceted career in the music business.