Yes, it’s that time of the year again. And no I’m not talking about wrapping presents, eating dry turkey and visiting family members you only hope to see once a year. I’m talking about the inevitable Spotify Wrapped and Apple Replay posts. As I’m sure everyone here is a huge fan of Ben, it should be no surprise he’s topped your lists this year. Let’s please try to use this thread to post your end of year streaming lists. Cheers and happy holidays to everyone!

https://youtu.be/1VtAAy4cGWc?si=unrU1-c1rL21neQs

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/benfoldsfive/yourmostvaluablepossession.html

Hello everyone, I hope all is well. I apologize for the lack of posts over the last couple of days. I got a new job and life has been fairly busy. But today we are back and we are going to be chatting about “Your Most Valuable Possession” which is the 8th track from the band’s third album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner.

This is maybe one of the weirdest songs in the band’s discography and it makes sense because it comes off the band’s most experimental album. The song begins with a phone answering machine letting us know it’s 6:49am, Friday, November 20th. We then hear Ben’s dad Dean wishing his son a good morning as he starts talking about how he was thinking about him while he was half awake/half asleep in bed.

This is then proceeded by the band fading into this laid back jazzy vibe. Which includes a steady drum beat with some simple but slick fills, a vibey electric piano, some bass, and later on some clavichord I believe. The music is a perfect blend of the type of music the band was crafting for this album and it’s a cool setting for Dean’s ramblings.

Speaking of Dean, he does go on to ask Ben if he’s looking after his “most valuable possession” which of course is his mind. There’s a humorous sigh after this section which sounds like was added in by Ben after the fact. This could have been his actual response to getting this voice mail from his dad at almost seven in the morning.

Dean goes on to explain his thought process behind how the mind is extremely valuable with him bringing up astronaut John Glenn. At the time of this voice recording John had just returned from his second trip to space at the young age of 77 which makes him the oldest person to space travel. John had mentioned before that in space you lose muscle mass and this fascinated Dean. Dean continues this train of thoughts and wonders how long it would take until you’re just a floating head and mind. Because sometimes all we have is our mind.

Ben’s dad then realizes he only has 30 seconds of his voice mail message left so he asks his son what he thinks about all of this and hopes that he’s been doing well. And also admits that when he fully wakes up later on he might have forgotten about this whole conversation. Which turns out to be true as Ben wrote about his father was on a lot of cough medicine that night in his autobiography.

Is this an essential Ben Folds Five song? Not really. It’s not even a two minute song that is mostly a spoken word song with some tasty playing. It’s unique and rad, but it’s not like a “song” song. And it was only played live once which was during the band’s reunion concert for MySpace in 2008 where they played this entire album from front to back. And for this song they actually had Dean come out to perform his own dialogue. It’s a sweet moment and I’m glad it does exist because it does have an intriguing idea of your mind being the most important thing you can have.

But what do you think of this track? Is the background music and message in Dean’s conversation worthy of spot on this album? What do you think the song is about? Favorite lyrical or musical moments? And were you lucky enough to catch it that one time live?