Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of Ben Folds Five's fourth album. The lyrics for the song came from some of author Nick Hornby's unused material during his 2010 collaboration with Folds, Lonely Avenue. Folds explained to FMQB: "It wasn't leftover because it wasn't good, it's just I couldn't get to it. He'd written so much and I only got around to the 12 songs on the album."
• Folds told FMQB about the meaning of Hornby's lyrics. "He was talking about a friend of his, the author Sarah Vowell," he explained, "and was saying that sometimes the world can sometimes feel like a thuggish place, not all that friendly. And up in your mind you can have your books, you can have any thoughts that you want, and that is kind of the story of his friend's life. There's a big rock show going on outside and that's awesome, but she's kind of up in her head, which is far more dangerous and noisier. It's like Keats and Emerson and all these people are playing a Rock concert in their heads. That's kind of what he's talking about."
• The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind debuted at #10 on the Billboard 200. In doing so it became Ben Folds' first ever set to enter the top 10 of the US album chart, with or without the Five.