My guest today is Ben Foltz, widely regarded as one of the major music influences of our generation.

He's created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Foltz

five solo albums, so many collaborative albums starting as a drummer and then a piano

player and eventually a singer and a band member for over a decade now. He has performed with

some of the world's greatest symphony orchestras as well and currently serves as the first ever

artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. And in addition to

solo rock and orchestral touring and scoring and getting involved in cinema and TV now,

Foltz also branched into the writing world with a new book, A Dream About Lightning Bugs,

that debuted as a New York Times bestseller, dropping you into sort of the pivotal moments and

stories that have shaped his fiercely engaged life of non-conformity and perpetual creation and

collaboration and reinvention. You might also recognize him as a judge for five seasons on NBC's

The Sing-Off and Ben is also an outspoken champion for arts education and music therapy funding

in our nation's public schools and we dive into all of this in today's conversation. So excited

to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Let's take a bit of a step back in time and tell a little bit of the story that's brought you and

now to here and then kind of circle around to what you're up to these days also. Group in North Carolina.

That's correct. Green's Bra. Green's Bra was a Salem actually. I was born in Greensboro and

I moved when I was four. Yeah. Music touches down for you at a really young age but it seems like

actually before you were ever playing it you were just listening and it sounds like even from the

the earliest ages kind of a non-stop on repeat and a huge number of hours. Yeah. I mean my

mother is dead certain that it was at least eight hours a day when I was two years old. That's a lot.

I mean it's way on one hand it shows somewhat of an obsessive streak that's been part of my life

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