Ben Folds Five

It's 6:50 on Thursday, and Nir [Z] is sick. We're now trying to figure out all the variables and constants in getting another drummer in here. So as you can see, [pans out to show David LaBruyere and John Alagia sitting down], we're working real hard on getting a drummer.

[Cut]

So John [Alagia] went through his address book and came up with Darren Jessee from Ben Folds Five. Darren came in and played on a couple of the songs. Nir [Z] ended up coming back in and being the guy for those tunes. But it was a real interesting little sidebar.

A giant influence on my songwriting is Ben Folds, and especially Ben Folds Five. I was attending Boston's Berklee College of Music in the late 90s, and was so happy to be listening to pop music with this kind of musicality. Because I was highly musically in-depth when I was at Berklee College of Music. And to have pop music introduce me to as much harmonic complexity as some of the other music I was learning, that was awesome to have both sides of the brain working at the same time. And perhaps I have a band like Ben Folds Five to thank for the music that I went on to write. I always hear a little bit of Ben Folds Five in No Such Thing, my first single on my first album.

This is my first single from my first major label album, Room For Squares. It's called No Such Thing. And I remember people saying, "I like that 'real world' song," and thinking to myself, uh, mighta shoulda called it something else. But it's No Such Thing. And it is really inspired I think by Ben Folds Five. In the spirit of both the sort of rhythmic aspect of the song, and also the harmonic aspect of the song.