A Life Of Music And Cheap Lessons

A memoir that is as nuanced, witty and relatable as his cult-classic songs.

Ben will be the first to tell you he’s an unconventional icon, more normcore than hardcore. Now, in his first book, he looks back at his life so far in a charming and wise chronicle of his artistic coming of age, infused with the wry observations of a natural storyteller. Ben opens up about finding his voice as a musician, becoming a rock antihero, and hauling a baby grand piano on and off stage for every performance.

In the title chapter, “A Dream About Lightning Bugs,” he recalls his earliest childhood dream—and realizes how much it influenced his understanding of what it means to be an artist. In “Measure Twice, Cut Once,” he learns to resist the urge to skip steps during the creative process. (“There will be plenty of time for the limitations of the real world to impose themselves on your creation.”) In “Hall Pass,” he recounts his 1970s North Carolina working-class childhood and the race and class tensions that shaped his early songwriting, and in “Cheap Lessons” he returns to the painful life lessons he learned the hard way—but that luckily didn’t kill him. Ben also ruminates on music in the digital age, the absurdity of life on the road, and the challenges of sustaining a multidecade, multifaceted career in the music business.

In his inimitable voice, both relatable and thought-provoking, Ben digs deep into the life experiences that shaped him, imparting hard-earned wisdom about both art and life. Collectively, these stories embody the message he has been singing about for years: Smile like you’ve got nothing to prove, because it hurts to grow up, but everybody does, and life flies by in seconds.