Kristen's Notes

The other night I went to a Ben Folds concert. Ben Folds is the kind of musician that gets into your head and into the fiber of your being. That he is one of the most talented people of a generation, is not even something worth arguing. He’s done just about everything short of losing his sense of humor. He’s composed concertos and played with symphonies, he’s judged acapella concerts, he’s played his own brand of alternative rock alone and as part of an ensemble and he regularly sings not to but with his audiences.

But I first learned about Ben Folds in the year 2006. I was in college at the time, living in a house on the corner of 13th and A street in Lincoln, Nebraska that doesn’t actually seem to exist anymore. I lived in an apartment on the 2nd floor of that house with a bathroom big enough to host a party in and a living room that I painted ocean blue (much to the chagrin of my landlord when I moved out). It was a conversion and the house was very old. But it was cheap, and it was big, and it was across the street from an apartment building where two of my good friends lived. It had a lot of weird little built in cabinets and cubbies, the sort of thing I love very much actually, and a scary rickety wooden staircase that led up to a back porch as an entrance. One of these weird little built-ins I used as my linen closet and it smelled… like an old, old house.

It’s hard to explain old house smell to someone who has never lived with it but while it is neither a pleasant or unpleasant smell, it is nevertheless distinctive and omnipresent. It wasn’t that the closet was dirty because I had scrubbed it religiously, it was just old, and every towel that I kept in it became imbued with that scent as well.

But I didn’t care. In 2006 I was working my way through college making about $8.75 an hour. I was dirt poor, constantly juggling which bills I’d need to pay that month since I definitely couldn’t pay them all. But the apartment was within walking distance to school, walking distance to the farmers market, walking distance to work and in a neighborhood populated by my friends.

It’s funny because back then I was working really hard to escape that season of my life but from my perspective now, all I remember are the good times. I’m sitting on the floor of that apartment’s kitchen with my friend Julie playing with my dog, trying tofu for the first time when my friend Clint made some egg rolls with it in them, having RENT singalongs at my friend Taylor’s apartment, sitting alone on the top step of the back porch one night at 2:30 am watching a blanket of the softest snow fall in a perfectly quiet city witnessed only by myself and the streetlights. And on every playlist and every burned CD from that era, there was Ben Fold’s music. Some of that music I wouldn’t really even fully understand until 15 years later when I’d left that stage of my life, but it sunk in anyway.

In a way music is time travel, because I don’t always listen to Ben Folds as much as I used to. I still love it when I turn his music on though. And when I listen to Zac and Sara, or Not the Same, Army or Still Fighting It I’m teleported through time but also space. I’m in my 20’s still figuring everything out, having nothing but unrealized dreams and the determination to chase them.

The connection is so visceral, I can almost smell that linen closet.

So where’d the years go
All the time we had
Being poor was not such a drag in hindsight
And you wonder why your father was so resigned
Now you don’t wonder any more

-The Ascent of Stan