The Enduring Genius Of Ben Folds

Burlington, Vermont-- September 26, 2016

The glorification and glossing over of the culture and music of the mid-1990s is, in some cases, leading to parody, as the time of a generation’s coming-of-age recedes into our national rear view mirror. I graduated from high school in 1997, and mine was the crowd that gave MTV its audience, as it attempted a stranglehold on popular culture: cable television was birthed (in part) in my suburbs of Philadelphia, so my friends and I often felt like we were the kids who were supposed to be watching Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video after school, who were supposed to be honing our Beavis and Butthead impressions at lunchroom tables, and who were supposed to know all the chanted verses of  Beck’s “Loser” every time it came over the FM dial. The film that resonated most with me and my high school friends was Kevin Smith’s Clerks, a black and white depiction of our suburban life that could have been filmed at the 7-11 down the street (actually the movie was made over 100 miles away, in Leonardo, New Jersey). Some of us aspired to be either Jay or Silent Bob; some of us resigned to becoming Dante (“I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”); others of us took the movie as a harbinger of potential times to come, and chose to leave home after graduation.  

Not many of my CDs from high school have survived: either digitized or stolen, lost or broken. My cherished cassette copy of Soul Asylum’s album “Grave Dancers’ Union” fell five stories and shattered during college; my cassette of Weird Al Yankovic’s “Smells Like Nirvana” vaporized, in its place appearing jam band bootlegs. I am proud, however, to still have possession of my Ben Folds CDs: their self-titled debut, their blockbuster Whatever and Ever Amen, their contractually obligatory live/rare compilation Naked Baby Photos, and the band’s final studio effort (until their 2008 and 2012 reboots), The Autobiography of Reinhold Messner. These discs came with me to college, and are still with me today. And, unlike many musicians I listened to in high school, Ben Folds is still around. Perhaps more than any other musician who made it big, Ben Folds and I have and will grow up together, and I am not alone. 

Two years into my undergrad, Folds released his first solo recording, Rockin’ the Suburbs.  I was living on another planet than the one I had grown up in, and when I heard the album, I didn’t know what to make of it. Unlike the melodic and crashing power piano-bass-drums trio setting  for Ben’s tenor vocals, the album’s single sidestepped the pastoral and instead tried to parody, even ridicule, so much of the culture Folds and I had been a part of: the white-boy angst anthem was ahead of its time in trying to name white privilege and racial and cultural exceptionalism through pop music. And the song itself was riddled with conventions not usually found on Folds’ albums: heavily compressed electric guitar chomps away as the drums rage on, in an angry cadence not far from stuff like Soul Asylum’s “Somebody to Shove.” As he confessed recently, in a YouTube promo video for his recent retrospective release, “Rockin’ the Suburbs” was intended to question and make fun of white people’s anger in music during the 1990s. It is as challenging a parody as Randy Newman’s “Rednecks” without using the n-word. Whether or not the song furthered that conversation (“you gonna look out/because I’m gonna say fuck” is the chant during the song’s bridge), the “Rockin’ the Suburbs” project—on which Folds himself played all the instruments, a la Stevie Wonder—began for him a new creative journey, one that would both influence and be influenced by the creation and rise of the Internet around him.

In the early 2000s, as the recording industry crumbled beneath the weight of mp3 piracy, Folds moved to Australia, releasing a series of cardboard-sleeved CD singles—mellow and random tracks produced at home, as far from the glitz and gloss of “Rockin’ the Suburbs” as Folds could get. By 2003, Folds released Ben Folds Live, a two-disc live recording, compiling performances from a solo piano tour in 2002. This was the artist alone: recounting his already-storied legacy of music, playing his hits and ballads, goofing around with foul language, and conducting the audience through background vocals in “Not the Same” and others. Perhaps most importantly, Ben Folds Live proved that a Baldwin piano can, like the human hand or heart, be a tender and careful instrument, and with love be suddenly smacked around (though I was present for his performance at Toad’s Place in Providence, Rhode Island in the early 2000s, when he literally broke the sustain mechanism on his piano and resorted to an acoustic guitar performance of his old song “Jackson Cannery”). Somewhere after the release of Ben Folds Live, my musical interests strayed, far enough away from Folds as to lose track of what he was doing.

Fully explaining the artist’s evolution here is unnecessary, but it is important to understand at least a summary of the path Folds has taken over the last dozen years, that led him to the stage of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont on a mid-September Saturday night in 2016. Since I last saw him, in 2002 on the tour that would produce the album Ben Folds Live, Folds had produced numerous new original works, got his old band back together for a few tour dates and studio adventures, rallied his fans via MySpace and later Facebook, worked to save a recording studio in Nashville from demolition, took a year off to write a work for orchestra, and collaborated in the studio with William Shatner, Nick Hornby, a wind/string ensemble, acapella groups, and others. He has hopped around continents on tour, raised a family, been married and separated. Personally and professionally, Folds has grown up, and in that growing up, he has consistently sought to experiment with music and media in as many forms as possible: to unseal and stretch envelopes of genre and category, and to generally defy characterization. All that stands between Ben Folds becoming my generation’s Randy Newman is an accidental career in writing film scores and infectious ragtime hits for animated big-screen blockbusters. Thankfully, if Folds was going to take such lucrative bait, he likely would have done so by now.  And, if Folds were going to laze out and rest on the existing laurels of his catalog like one of his heroes, Billy Joel, he also would have done so by now. Instead, he has consistently sought to do something new, to pursue something extraordinary through to completion, and to move on.

I didn’t even know the show was happening until that morning, when I saw what Ben had posted on Facebook: some shadowy black and white photograph of himself onstage surrounded by paper airplanes. Simply having the vehicle of Facebook for communication with an artist wasn’t imaginable when I bought my first Ben Folds Five CD in the 1990s. Not yet sold out, I decided to head to the show without a ticket and see what I could find. The box office sold me their last cheap seat, the farthest back left corner of the orchestra. I didn’t care if I had the last seat in the last row: the program billed Ben as “one of the major music influencers of our generation,” and while I was embarrassed I wasn’t up to date on the last ten years’ worth of Ben Folds’ creative output, I knew not only was I not alone in my ignorance of his recent endeavors, but that me and the performer went way back, before half of the crowd had even been born. The other half of the crowd were mostly either five years older or five years younger than Ben. To hear an artist you enjoyed in high school perform some of those same songs more than twenty years later, by himself, invites not only a sentimentality but invites a personal connection between the performer and their audience.

And if any of us needed a reminder of our having grown up, the show began with Ben’s seventeen-year-old daughter Gracie, who played her original songs on the piano and acoustic guitar. Her classical piano chops were immediately evident, as she played something that sounded like a Bach piano invention beneath a Natalie Merchant-style vocal. The song “Harper” ceases its repetition brilliantly at the chorus, becoming suddenly calm and soothing. Like the songs in her father’s catalog, her lyrics do not drag listeners through interpersonal drama, but rather introspection and psychological situation: “She’s always drowning in the water that she doesn’t drink” and “she’s not crazy/unless her mother tells her she’s not/crazy”. Her August 2016 Bandcamp release “pink elephant” contains five songs, four of which whose titles are first names—Emily, Nathan, Kevin, Harper (making me wonder if Steely Dan’s “Peg” is in her repertoire, and to what extent Folds has promoted her songwriting through assuming characters’ voices). Gracie’s piano songs are distinct and unique: “Nathan” is carried along by a drifting piano invention that, to my ear, defies its own time signature (perhaps intentionally, with an evocative chorus of “back when common sense was cool/I’m pretty sure caring was too,” and a staccato bridge stating “you feel like a person/you’ve only just met”). She transitioned to acoustic guitar for a few songs that were far more pedestrian, though one, “Yearbook Song,” contained a dissonant chord and horrifically dissonant chorus vocal. She knew exactly what she was doing, and giggled her way through the third chorus, almost laughing—as her father does—at her own adolescence. Before her half-hour set ended, she returned to the piano where she was obviously more at ease. Whether or not she will gain the level of major-label backing that Ben enjoyed early in his career, her skill as both a songwriter and pianist will carry her forward via Bandcamp and elsewhere. During his set, Ben rallied the audience for applause for his “opening act,” rightly noting that “people say she’s a chip off the old block, and I say no. She’s much better than that.” I am as excited for the career of Gracie Folds as I was for her father’s, back in the 1990s.

A "Super Fan" merchandise bundle was available. 

Folds himself took the stage and played for two hours, minus one short break. His entrance to the stage was accompanied by Nilsson’s “One” playing through the PA; he was calm, cool, collected, bearded, and wore a hat. He played his most recent song, “Phone In a Pool,” early in the set; interestingly, both Ben and his daughter Gracie had songs that talked about behaviors related to cell phone (one of Gracie’s songs ends with lyrical punchline “declined call”).  Songs in Ben’s first set spanned his career, including “Annie Waits,” “Selfless Cold & Composed,” “Still Fighting It,” “Landed,” “Not a Fan” (a new song that reminded me of Folds’ earlier work “Boxing”), and, the final song of the first set, “Uncle Walter,” which Ben introduced as having been prophetic: he told the crowd that he could have never guessed that everything in the song would “come true,” referencing the song’s lead character, a bigoted and prejudiced armchair-general type, and his similarity to a Presidential candidate (the chorus is “your Uncle Walter’s going on and on/where did you go that you were gone so long/and how could you leave me here alone/with Uncle Walter”). At one point, an audience member shouted requests, and he cringed comically, telling the audience, “I’m going to play what I’m prepared to play. And then we’ll take a break, and then shit will get crazy.” But by midway through the first set, ‘shit’ had already gotten crazy, at least as far as the crowd of us being swept up into the beat, the melody, and the melancholy of so many familiar lyrics. In a moment of audience participation, Ben introduced four parts of a complicated fugue, asking the audience to self-identify themselves as either low or high voices, and to choose a part to sing. After a practice run (from the back of the orchestra section, I could mostly hear just those around me), Ben broke into song, and at the right moment, conducted the crowd. There were other moments when the audience, unprompted, sang background vocals found on Folds’ studio releases. The sense of camaraderie in the audience was palpable, even prior to Ben’s first round of conducting us through an acapella fugue. I wondered: as we hone and perfect our digital lives, will visceral and human experiences like singalongs become popular, an experience we’ll pay to enjoy?

As Ben clearly explained to the crowd, ‘shit’ did get crazy in the second set: having played for about an hour, Folds told the audience that the houselights would come up, and three tracks from the 1968 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass release “Going Places” would begin to play through the PA. During that time, all audience members were invited to visit the lobby, where paper (some colored, mostly white) and pens were available. Requests were to be written down, and the paper folded into a paper airplane, and sent onstage all at the same time.

Not only was this paper airplane request experiment a remarkably brave feat for a performer (Ben never relied on any score, but played his works from memorization), but provoked and furthered the level of audience engagement. One request asked for a song to be written about the requestor, and Ben played along, riffing over a few familiar chords. The first song of the set was also by far the most-requested— “The Luckiest,” a tender love ballad, from Rockin’ the Suburbs—which led to Ben comically beginning the song with each airplane he picked up that called for it again. The paper airplane request set also led to some strange and deep cuts I never thought I’d hear again from Ben Folds live: “Valerie,” “Adelaide,” “Ascent of Stan,” “Emaline,” “One Angry Dwarf,” and one of his finest compositions, “Alice Childress” (upon completing the latter, he nodded, quietly thanking the requestor with “that was a good one”). He also played “Missing the War,” and expected—without rehearsal—the audience to join in on the song’s final vocal break (as heard on his 2002 live album). To create a good show-ending set, he searched the stage for the right three paper airplane requests: “Kate,” “Zac and Sara,” and “Army.” He emerged for one encore song, the odd and upbeat track from Whatever and Ever Amen, “Stephen’s Last Night In Town,” and ended with an impressive moment of showmanship and flair that I won’t reveal here.

On the next night, at Albany’s Hart Theater, the paper airplane request set included two covers: the Oasis song “Champagne Supernova” and his comical version of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit”; two nights later, in Madison, Wisconsin, he played the song “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service; three nights later, he was still playing almost thirty songs per show. I wonder at what age will Ben Folds quit using his left elbow or forearm, to gain sudden and crashingly grand rock-and-roll percussion sounds from his piano, and how old will we be when his performances are declared outright singalongs. And when, if ever, will Ben Folds slow down, and when will we, us children of the 1990s?