Lyrics, Composition, and Popularity
The song is extremely popular among fans of the band and even after the band's break up, the song is still almost always performed at Ben Folds' solo concerts. The song deals with indecision, independence, conflict, and freedom, and contains many memorable moments, including the opening line ("Well I thought about the army, dad said 'Son, you're fucking high!'") and the bridge, which consists of a horn ensemble.
Folds has explained at live performances that the entire song is based on personal experiences, with a few exceptions (most notably that he never grew a mullet).
Here's Ben's explanation from a recording at Enmore:
| “ | This one’s about my really horrible experience trying to get through college. And I got a scholarship and then I lost a scholarship… after a semester cause I flunked a class because I flunked one test. The class was based on one test. The one I flunked. I flunked the test because I got delivered to the test in a police car at six o’clock in the morning with stitches in my nose and stitches in my mouth. And I was still drunk. And I had a broken hand, presumably because I had clocked that ass. I hit the wall.
So I threw my drum set, which is the instrument that I flunked on, into Lake Osceola in the middle University of Miami and I took a Greyhound bus, I don’t shit you, it was a Greyhound bus back home and I worked with a bunch of old ladies in a grocery store for about 18 months. It was at that time that I decided in my bedroom I decided while listening to Elvis Costello in 1986 that maybe I shouldn’t wait tables and do this old lady job anymore, maybe… I should join the Army. And umm, for those of you who know the lyrics from the song I derived them, except for the rhyming part which I setup myself, I derived it from the way it actually went down My father knocked on the door. I’ll just be dad for a second. “Benjamin, what are you doing in there?” “Well I was thinking about joining the army…” “You’re F*$%&@% High” |
” |
The clean version is sometimes referred to as the "We Got the 'Fuck' Out edit."
Read more about this topic: Army (song)
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)