Dark humor, sharp words play into Ben Folds’ tunes

Ben Folds will bring a sense of humor, profound lyrics and a fine-tuned piano as his only tools to entertain an audience at the IU Auditorium.

Folds, a singer-songwriter with more than 15 years of experience in the music business, will play an original set of music solo on the piano Saturday night.

Doug Booher, director for the IU Auditorium, said Folds is incredibly talented as a pianist and entertainer. When Folds came to the IU Auditorium in 2006, the show sold out.

“What’s funny about his music is that he has a really wide range of content and emotion,“ Booher said. “He can be on stage goofing around and have a great old time and the best song he plays is a beautiful love ballad. To experience that wide range is compelling and makes for an incredibly strong show.”

Folds, a North Carolina native, has released a total of six complete albums, both solo and with his platinum-selling band, Ben Folds Five. His most recent solo album, “Way to Normal,” was released in September 2008, and during its first week it became No. 11 on the Billboard 200. It was also Folds’ top-charted album in the U.S.

Folds said he has spent a great deal of time working as a musician since he was very young, but he didn’t know what path his career was going to take.

“I’ve never really had any idea of what I was going to do with it,” Folds said. “The business came later, and I did the typical making-demos kind of thing playing in the band. This worked, but I didn’t quite care so much about approval, but I was also very stubborn and felt I wanted to change a note on people’s feedback. The getting into the business was a long process.”

Much of Folds’ music emphasizes the piano. Phil Sloffer, a piano tuner for the IU Auditorium, said the piano is a simple instrument to pick up and play. 

This characteristic, Sloffer said, allows piano music to range from very simple to extremely complex.

“The reason it’s called a piano is because the original full name is Fortepiano – you can play both loud and soft,” Sloffer said. “It has the ability to play dynamics. That’s why it caught on. It has the ability to play a lot more expression.”

Folds said he couldn’t really categorize his music.

“Pop music,” he said, adding, “I have a hard time categorizing almost any music.”
 
Folds said a big part of tours have had college students as the core audience. He said it seems that when people grow older, their interest in seeing music entertainment wanes.

“They get older, and I think they graduate and go to work,” he said. “Then their little brothers and sisters come, and literally to my surprise become the audience. When you get out of college, you get busy and you don’t stay up on it as much.”

Folds said even after decades of working in the music business, he doesn’t see an end to his music career.

He said he likes that everything from throughout the years has been recorded on tapes and documented. If he wants to hear something from his musical past, he said he pulls it out and listens to it.

Although Folds listens to his past music, he said he prefers not to think too much about the future.

“I don’t plan very far out, conceptually,” Folds said. “I have to plan six to 12 months out about what we’re doing.”

Yet, he said he doesn’t have a planned repertoire for his performance at IU and added that he’ll end up winging it, which is something he said he has gotten good at throughout the years.

“I play spontaneously more than when I’m on tour with the band,” Folds said. “Everyone knows what instrument to play next; I’ll make it sort of loose. When I’m playing solo it’s a whole different animal. Solo is anything could happen. This tour is a whatever-the-hell-goes tour. Anything goes.”