Song: “The Luckiest”

There isn’t a love song that makes me break into tears from the first note like this one. I only heard it for the first time a couple of years ago at Todd’s one-man show. It’s one of my favorite songs.

If you had asked me if I was a Ben Folds fan about seven years ago, I would have said no. In fact, I remember getting into some kind of argument with my friend Josh about it. He was explaining how great they were, and I was too busy with my grungy music to listen to anything that plinky. That and the only Ben Folds Five songs I knew were the one with the “Kiss My Ass” refrain that seemed to have something to do with “One angry dwarf,” and the other song about a brick that was a bummer.

I remember one night in the summer of 2000, I was IM’ing stee about how Eric and I were breaking up because he had changed his mind and wasn’t going to move to Los Angeles with me. Instead he wanted to go to New York to pursue his acting. stee wrote, “You’re not going to believe the song I’m listening to right now.” I hadn’t heard of it, so stee started sending me the lyrics to “Don’t Change Your Plans For Me.” That’s the first time Ben Folds made me cry. And then I really hated Ben Folds.

I have since made friends who are incredibly close to me who love Ben Folds with a passion. And the more I heard his songs, the more I started to like them. I’m not really sure when it happened, but at a certain point I started paying attention to the words, and then I was hooked.

Actually, I know what song it was. It was “The Luckiest.”

And then, it was “Army.”

Today I loaded three Ben Folds albums onto my iPod. Over six thousand songs sit on this thing, but on my way home from work, in the dark, when I popped in iTrip and hit “Shuffle,” my iPod went straight to “The Luckiest.”

Crying in the dark, driving home from work on a Sunday night. That’s exactly how Ben Folds would have liked it, don’t you think?