Ben Folds - Get Your Hands Off My Woman

Ben Folds - Get Your Hands Off My Woman

Ben Folds got married again - and don't they look lovely in the photo? Aww. Good luck to them. But that's wife number four. He's going to be getting a bit of a reputation is he's not careful. It's very noticeable how this marriage wasn't mentioned on Ben's myspace or his website. It may be just because they're trying to keep it private. But I suspect it has more to do with the fact that Frally Hynes, his last wife, was really involved in a lot of his projects. She recorded some of his videos, sang on Root To This on Fear Of Pop Volume 1, took loads of photos which were included in album artwork. I guess the fans kind of felt like they knew her. So in a way Fleur Folds has big shoes to fill. But all I really hope is that they have lasting happiness.

I often wonder what goes on in the minds of people who get married multiple times. Do they just like weddings? Or do they just see weddings as the next step in every relationship that lasts over a certain amount of time? And do they treat each marriage like it is the one? How seriously do they take the vow to grow old together?

I'm not sure that I believe in "the one" and I'm definitely a bit cynical about most marriages (you almost can't help it when you've grown up in a marriage like that of my parents) but I do think that if you make a vow you should take it seriously and do your very best to follow it through. People get divorced too quickly. Scrap that: people get married too quickly and then get divorced too quickly.

Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Folds, I really do. I could very easily write a big long paragraph here about how much but it wouldn't be all that interesting to anyone but me. Suffice to say I treated Ben Folds a bit like a messiah when I first heard Whatever and Ever Amen. But as you get to know music and musicians more and more you realise that they're not perfect in the way you once thought they were, and the more familiar they are to you the less exciting they become. Where songs like Underground literally used to make me laugh out loud, now the joke is too well-known. Where each different version of Rock This Bitch used to amuse me with how creative it seemed, when you've listened to a whole group of them in a row you realise how they aren't as different as you once thought. And where Evaporated's "And I poured my heart out..." line seemed like the most perfectly spine-tingling moment I could ever have, the tingles have become less and less. It's just like a real relationship - you get accustomed to the features you love about your partner until they don't seem so amazing any more. The difference is, I suppose, that you can always take a break from listening to a band until it acquires a new freshness. I'm listening to Rubber Sled off the Fear of Pop Volume 1 album for the first time in absolutely ages and it sounds brilliant. It's a bit more difficult to take that kind of break from a real relationship. (Plus, real people have more faults than the average Ben Folds song). Anyway this has been a long an meandering paragraph and it's about time for the summing up sentence which, as usual, looks just a wee bit egotistical if you take it out of context...

I guess I'm kind of married to Ben Folds!

Here's a bonus for those who read that ramble (or skipped to the end)

Ben Folds - Rubber Sled

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Now playing: Fear Of Pop - Rubber Sled