Underground, Twice: Ben Folds Five's Debut Turns 30 With the Version Nobody Was Supposed to Hear

Ben Folds Five’s self-titled debut turns 30 this year, and the reissue arriving September 4 isn’t just a remaster with a new sticker on the cover. Alongside the familiar 1995 album, Capitol/UMe is releasing Shelved First Attempt – a full scrapped version of the same record, produced by Dave “Stiff” Johnson before the trio ever brought in Caleb Southern, the producer whose sessions actually became the album that came out. Ben Folds has said he found the abandoned tapes himself, on digital audio tape sitting in his own archive, apparently forgotten by the band that made them. Of the songs that exist in both versions, “Underground” is the cleanest test case: the same song, recorded twice, by the same three musicians, before either take had any idea it would end up defining the record.

Ben Folds, Robert Sledge, and Darren Jessee formed in Chapel Hill in 1994 around a specifically contrarian idea – a rock power trio with no guitar at all, Folds’ piano doing the job a guitar usually does, played percussively enough to function as a rhythm instrument rather than a ballad-accompaniment one. “Underground,” tracked at Wave Castle in Chapel Hill in February 1995 for the version that became the finished album, is the song where that idea turns into an actual statement of purpose rather than just a novelty setup. Folds has talked about writing it out of his own memory of being a social outcast as a kid – awkward, unable to talk to a girl who smiled at him, aware there was a scene of other kids like him he hadn’t found yet. By the time the band was playing shows, he was recognizing the same type of kid in his own audiences, drawn to punk and ska and hardcore scenes for the same reason he’d once wanted to be: somewhere that didn’t require fitting in anywhere else first. The song’s chorus turns that memory into something close to an anthem, not because the sentiment is original – outsider solidarity is one of rock’s oldest subjects – but because Folds writes it with just enough irony toward his own younger self that it never curdles into self-pity. It’s a song about needing a scene to belong to, sung by someone who’s clearly aware how funny that need looks from the outside, too.

What the Shelved First Attempt version offers isn’t a competing claim on that song – it’s a document of how far a band can get toward a finished idea and still not have found the right take yet. Dave “Stiff” Johnson’s sessions came first chronologically, before Wave Castle, before Caleb Southern; whatever the trio heard when they listened back was enough to send them looking for a different producer and re-cutting the album essentially from scratch, taking “Underground” with it. That’s a real gamble for a band with no track record and no guarantee a second attempt would land better – and by any reasonable commercial measure, it did. The Southern-produced version became the alt-rock radio single that introduced the band nationally, the version every subsequent list of the record’s highlights leads with, the version that’s shaped how three decades of listeners have heard this specific song.

Hearing the two side by side, once the reissue is out, isn’t really about deciding which “Underground” is better – the band already made that call in 1995 by choosing which one to release. It’s about hearing a specific kind of judgment in progress: three musicians, a producer, and a batch of songs that weren’t wrong so much as not yet right, getting scrapped and rebuilt by people confident enough in the material to bet an entire debut album on doing it again. Thirty years on, “Underground” is the song that makes that bet legible in a way no interview or liner note fully could – not a remaster, but an actual before-and-after of a band finding its own record.

Hero image: Ben Folds Five 30th-anniversary reissue cover art, courtesy of Universal Music. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.