Tear Jerker / Ben Folds

Whether it's a Lonely Piano Piece or super depressing lyrics set to a happy tune, Ben Folds knows how to hit listeners in the gut.

• Quite a lot of Rockin' the Suburbs is really damn sad, even with the upbeat tunes to most of the album.
  • "Fred Jones, Part 2," the unofficial Sequel Song to "Cigarette", about the titular character, an elderly but dedicated newspaper employee, being forced into retirement, fading away, unremarked on by the universe at large.
  • "Annie Waits", while insanely catchy and upbeat is rather sad. It tells the story of a woman who waits for a call from someone she loves, with the narrator of the song delivering one hell of a Wham Line at the end of the song, punctuated by a low, harrowing piano chord.
  Annie waits, for the last time
  Just the same as the last time
  Annie waits
  But not for me.
  • "The Luckiest." It's love incarnate.
  • "Still Fighting It." Depending on one's interpretation, it's either a song about how teenage years are hard or an ode to parental failure (or both).
  • "Carrying Cathy," especially if you know someone who's suicidal or eventually committed suicide, or are even suicidal yourself (and if you are, please know that You Are Not Alone).
  • "Gone" seems to be a song about someone finally coming to terms with a broken relationship, writing one last note to their former lover.
  • "The Ascent of Stan", a song about someone who hated the establishment before succumbing to it and becoming the very thing they despised.
• Technically Darren Jessee's song, but "Magic" by Ben Folds Five is particularly touching if you've ever lost someone to a painful disease.
  • Somehow the version on the University Acapella compilation (performed by University Of Chicago's Voices In Your Head) feels sadder than the original- for one thing, their arrangement starts with just the baritones holding a note that sounds like an acapella Drone of Dread, while the sopranos sing the main piano riff, to an eerie effect.
• "Don't Change Your Plans" is another one.
• "Kylie From Connecticut." That chorus is heartbreaking.
• "Cigarette," which packs a heck of a lot of tragedy into a Single Stanza Song. Worse, the lyrics are taken verbatim from a newspaper clipping about a man who wanted to divorce his wife because her brain tumor made her "become a different person."
• "Brick," especially if you know the very real backstory behind it.^note It's about how his high school girlfriend had to get an abortion. There's a reason it's Ben Folds Five's most popular song.
  • The lines "Then I walk down to buy her flowers / and sell some gifts that I got" have sometimes been taken as some sort of metaphor - it turns out he was literally selling his Christmas presents the day after Christmas to help pay for the procedure.
• "Late," his eulogy to the late Elliott Smith. It doesn't say much about the man himself, as Ben didn't know him that well personally, but it says more than enough about why he was important.
  Elliot, man, you played some fine guitar
  And some dirty basketball
  The songs you wrote got me through a lot
  Just wanna tell you that
  But it's too late
• "Picture Window." An autobiographical song written by Nick Hornby about a time when his son was in the hospital on New Years Eve and the struggle he and his wife went through trying to understand if they should have hope or not.
• "Evaporated" is a pretty strong tear magnet.
• "SMOKE!"
• "From Above." Don't let the catchy tune fool you.
  It's so easy from above,
  You can really see it all,
  People who belong together
  Lost and sad and small.
  But there's nothing to be done for them,
  It doesn't work that way.
  Sure we all have soul mates, but
  We walk past them everyday.
  • And the music video doesn't help either.
• Dear God, "Belinda"... a depressed, barely One-Hit Wonder singer whose one hit is about how he cheated on his girlfriend who he clearly still misses and now he is forced to play that song constantly despite how it hurts him to sing. His coping mechanism seems to be imagining some sort of fantasy where he can still be with Belinda.
  Belinda,
  I love you,
  Don't leave me,
  I need you.
• The chorus of On Being Frank just sounds hopelessly lost.
  And I don't know where I might be going
  I rode the wind, the wind stopped blowing,
  Left me on the roadside, thumbing home.
  But home, for me, was always someone else, you know?
  How shadows always fall when the sun goes down....
• "Still" from the Over the Hedge soundtrack, a somber reminder that, whether we like it or not, everything changes after a while. And the reprise is even sadder.
  "I stay focused on details
  It keeps me from feeling the big things
  But watch the microscope long enough
  Things that seem still are still changing"
• "Landed" can be sobering for anyone who realized too little too late that they were the victim of an abusive relationship, and that you ended up shunning your true loved ones as a result.
• Even on Ben Fold Five's first album, there's a great sense of melancholy, particularly with the track "Video", presumably about a sense of disappointment with where life has led them, hoping that things someday improve.
  Well, I've seen some old friends sort of die
  Or just turn into whatever
  Must have been inside them
  Whatever all of us had then in common
  Grew up
  And left home——
• "Mister Peepers," his ode to United States Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who Ben believes is being unfairly trashed by his political enemies for standing up for the law. It sounds comical at first until the back half of the song, which marks the fragility of America:
  "They say it dies in the dark.
  Right now, they're trying to kill it in broad daylight.
  Can flashlights really fight bombs? We'll see right now.
  • And then the final verse:
    "Would he call him Mister Peepers,
    And some thugs do smash his glasses?
    The institution's standing,
    But we're trying our best to trash it.
    And aren't we all the keepers of this fragile young republic?
    And when all those Mister Peepers people fall?
    Lord, help us all.
• "House" perfectly encapsulates what it's like to move past trauma.
  "I've had the nightmares
  I've seen some counselors
  But I'm not going
  Back up in that house again."
• "2020," released in June of the titular year which, even at the time, was being called the single most collectively traumatic calendar year in recent memory. The song is appropriately sardonic, describing how the year that many had half-jokingly hoped would be the new Roaring Twenties instead turned out to be all of the worst parts of 1918 (The Spanish Flu pandemic = the COVID-19 Pandemic), 1930 (The Great Depression = America's second recession in twelve years caused by the mass shut-downs of various businesses due to the pandemic, and the government offering little to no financial aid) and 1968 (the murder of Civil Rights spearheads Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy sparking mass protests for racial justice, which devolved into riots due to police brutality = the murder of black US citizen George Floyd via police brutality, followed by more police brutality during a march held in his honor, sparking regular mass demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement, most of which were met with yet even more police brutality) in the first six months alone, with the refrain asking "How many years will we cram into one?". The absolute hopelessness of the last verse perfectly sums up the collective trauma the whole world was experiencing both from what had happened thus far and the utter dread of what was to come.
  "We're not repeating history, just the parts that sucked
  2020, what the actual fuck?
  Pray we get through, but hey don't hold your breath
  'Cause there's plenty left to wreck
  We got six months left"
  • The bridge, while not explicit, doesn't mince words about exactly who and what Ben feels are to blame for all of this.
  "Oh boy
  How much more will she take?
  Boys, hope you enjoy
  Your beautiful tax break"
  • And for a sobering bit of Reality Subtext, Ben wrote and recorded the song while he was essentially trapped in Australia, due to the airports shutting down to prevent the spread of COVID while he was there.

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