Brick (song)

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"Brick" is a song performed by Ben Folds Five released on their 1997 album Whatever and Ever Amen. The verses were written by Ben Folds about his high school girlfriend getting an abortion, and the chorus was written by Ben Folds Five's drummer, Darren Jessee. "Brick" was one of Ben Folds Five's biggest hits, gaining much mainstream radio play in the USA, the UK, and Australia in 1998.

[edit] Backstory

On the album Ben Folds Live, Folds explained: "People ask me what this song's about... I was asked about it a lot, and I didn't really wanna make a big hairy deal out of it, because I just wanted the song to speak for itself. But the song is about when I was in high school, me and my girlfriend had to get an abortion, and it was a very sad thing. And, I didn't really want to write this song from any kind of political standpoint, or make a statement. I just wanted to reflect what it feels like. So, anyone who's gone through that before, then you'll know what the song's about."

On Ben Folds recent iTunes Originals compilation, he confesses that he had attempted to write a song about the abortion for quite some time, but he had trouble getting the song finished because it was too literal, but thanks to Darren Jessee's chorus, the song was given just enough mystique to be the hit that it was. (Folds even jokes that "I've never understood his choruses. I wish I did.")

[edit] Fan response

Many of Ben Folds Five's previous fans were put off by the hit's slower tempo, more serious themes, and popularity. These fans even went so far as to dub any people who were introduced to Ben Folds Five through the song as "Brickheads" ^{[citation needed]}.

In his iTunes Originals interviews, he addresses his fanbase's disapproval: "When you have a hit song, much of your fanbase and people that listen to your music... their opinion is gonna be loud and clear that they feel that you've abandoned the fanbase; you've written something that's not for them, it's for everybody else, you've 'sold out', all kinds of things like that... That was the overwhelming vibe... 'What is that crap?'... because we'd been playing silly, up-tempo... we were the piano band that rocks... We couldn't even fit the song into a show."

He goes on to explain that he was not put off by the fans: "When I look back on it, I think that the fact that that song was a hit gives me some confidence in pop music because the song is completely honest, what it is, it's crafted well, it's relaxed, it's recorded in a way that we'd never recorded a song before, which was absolutely live, three or four microphones in a bedroom. The song cannot have more integrity than it had."