NEVER ‘BEN’ BETTER
PIANO PRODIGY DISCUSSES AMBITIOUS NEW ALBUM, COLLABORATING WITH YMUSIC AND OUTPLAYING HIS PIANO TEACHERS
Ben Folds has been making pop music longer than I’ve been alive.
He’s battled being labeled as a “novelty act” for his hilarious piano ballads, but nothing slowed him down from releasing his most ambitious project to date. Folds’ 2015 release “So There” boasted a supernatural sense for crafting catchy pop songs, and he mingled well with the yMusic Ensemble. The album also features a piano concerto performed by the Nashville Symphony.
Q: I and I’m sure a lot of orchestra enthusiasts were excited to hear there
was a concerto with three movements on the album. What made you want to close the album with it? Was it intentional for the concerto to land there?
Ben Folds: I think the sequencing decision to make it last over the record was one of going, “OK, well, you’ve come from what I normally do.” (I decided to) start with pop songs with a small chamber orchestra ... and then you’ll understand the thread when you hear the concerto. I won’t be so sudden.
It makes sense. I think it’s important for people to feel the thread . ... It’s really easy to just fold your arms and go ... “OK, what pretentious s--- has he done now?” If you’re warmed up to it by the time it’s there, it seems more logical.
Q: I saw you play with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic
in 2011. That was a fun show and made sense in the Civic Center venue. So, what’s it like touring with a pop chamber orchestra and playing in rock clubs? Is there a difference, depending on the room you play?
Folds: Oh yeah, there is. I mean, it’s a lot smaller, obviously, and these guys are very specific. When you’re charting for an orchestra, ... I mean you have to be good, but you know, it’s more interchangeable. The thing with live music is that ... it’s very much based around how many musicians you’ve got, so it’s sort of like a rock record in that way. Just because someone plays guitar, guitar, bass and drums doesn’t mean they’re The Beatles. It depends on who the people are, like what band is that? It’s really based on their personality. My music group is very much like that. They’re like a rock group in that you
can’t replace them.
You
replace them and they’re someone else.
Q: You’re pretty well known for your voice. At any point during the concerto, did you find it weird that you weren’t able to sing?
Folds: No, I enjoyed the angle of telling the story without the lyrics . ... It has a flow. A piece of music has a flow that somehow develops evolution in a story and has cadence to it. I think it’s good for my chops. It’s good for my imagination and it’s good to listen to, for me, too, because it moves things for me that lyrics could step on.
Q: You had a lot of starts and stops during the months it took you to write the concerto. Can you give me an idea of just how much work went into writing the movements?
Folds: Yeah, it’s always involved painful concentration that I would just have to go, “Stick with it, stick with it. What next?”
It’s like when you have to crunch numbers in math and you don’t wanna do it. It was good to have a coorchestrator sort of person there. That was really helpful for me, because it kept me to appointments, which I think is really important when you’re writing longform material.
(Similar to) when you’re writing a book, like, OK, well, here’s my thing. I wake up in the morning, I stretch out, have my coffee, and then I go into my writing room and I stay there for six hours a night and then let myself out. I don’t work that way when I’m making pop music, because you don’t need to really, but for this, I had to. Everyday would be a few hours, for four hours maybe, and I would schedule the guy to come over to
my
house with his computer program so he can input the notes. A lot of times I would have a lot of the stuff written on scraps of paper; it would be on a (digital) voice note or I would have it memorized. I would try to get 15 seconds of finished orchestra a day.
Q: A lot of the album feels cinematic. Almost like listening to a film score. Are you a big soundtrack fan?
Folds: There are good ones and bad ones. I’m usually not that aware of a soundtrack, because the story is being told by something else and not the soundtrack . ... When people say orchestra music is not relevant anymore — it certainly is in movies, and movies are relevant. It’s just they’re taking on a different role. I don’t really think about movie music that much. I know some of it’s great. I think that the very well-deserved (Oscar) award for “The Hateful Eight” — I thought that (expletive) soundtrack was (expletive) great.
Now, that was pretty artful. That’s rare. I think everyone knew it immediately. Wow, it’s just the best thing about this movie is the soundtrack, and that’s saying a lot, because the movie is great, but the soundtrack is certainly one of the stars.
Q: I read you started outplaying your piano teacher at age 10. What was that like?
Folds: She was like a baby sitter who could play a little piano. There was another cat I was with for a while, and he was just really supportive. There were things I was playing that he would want to know how I did them, and so I think it put my mother off one time to pick me up, because she could hear from outside the door that I was showing him over and over again how to play this riff, and he was like, “That’s so (expletive) outside man. How did you do that, and what finger goes where? That’s crazy.”
And I was actually learning by that, but I think probably my mother’s view was, “I’m not paying this guy to take lessons from my son.”
There was a little bit of that attitude, but I learned a lot from the two teachers that I had.