Ben Folds
Bayou Music Center
October 17, 2023
We don’t yet know if Ben Folds’s latest album, What Matters Most, is going to nab a Grammy, but the tour supporting the record released in June had us thinking about Tony Awards. From the one-time theater kid who opened the show to Folds’ extended soliloquys, the Bayou Music Center audience must have wondered if it took a wrong turn and wound up at The Alley Theatre last night.
Like the best of musicals, the action bounced from sock to buskin, moments of levity followed by dramatic introspections on life and especially love, all set to the music from one single instrument, the piano. Folds and supporting artist Lindsey Kraft didn’t need an orchestra to bring home their respective messages, just four hands and 88 keys. And, if there was one message in the music, a theme to their musical, it was remorse. Regrets? Like Sinatra and Sid, they’ve had a few.
If there was a companion to that theme, it’s how songwriting can heal a lot of what ails us.
Folds’s set was bookended by walk-on and walk-off music. Harry Nilsson’s “One” was playing when he sauntered up to the piano at a quarter ‘til nine. At 10:30, Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” shut it all down. And listening to the set selection, it occurred that Folds has a lot of songs about the paths that wind through any relationship, especially the errant ones that can lead you to some isolated place where you’re suddenly (and repeatedly, in Folds’s case) all by yourself.
“This is hopefully the last breakup song I will have written,” he said when introducing “So There,” after sharing rueful ideas in “Exhausting Lover” and crowd favorite “Annie Waits.” “It’s such a rich genre. If we have anyone in the audience whose day job is to write breakup songs, you’ll know that it’s a whole study. They become more complex as I get more experienced. Writing songs, I mean,” he said to laughs.
“I had to write one more because I realized there’s a moment that I had never captured before and that’s the ’emergency apartment rental time.’ You’re sitting in a space that you probably even really didn’t inspect. You don’t have time for that sort of thing because you’re out. You’re in your new place and it’s all such a whirlwind and you’re sitting in silence for the first time in a long time, amongst boxes.
“And you think to yourself, ‘Wow! I can put my shit anywhere that I want to!” he said to more laughter. “It’s a moment of kind of glee in an otherwise sad song.”
That’s sort of Folds’s catalog in a nutshell, poignant tunes that are outlined by the humor in it all, the crying and laughing masks folding into each other. The best place to feel what Folds does is in the live show, where he swaps masks frequently. A favorite moment of levity was when he spoke directly to the Houston Press’s own Sean Thomas, the lone photographer in the pit last night.
“If you want to get a couple of pictures that would completely misrepresent the show, I’d be down for that,” he said. “Basically, you’ve probably just got like 75 reasonable shots of the same thing because I’m pretty much just sitting here. So, let’s do this.”
Folds left his piano bench and posed in outlandish ways to the glee of the audience and for the benefit of our photographer.
“I just hate to see you go home with all the same shit,” he said. “If there’s a reviewer, pay him off to say that I levitated.”
Folds did levitate the audience’s spirits, with sing-along songs that reflect on our ethos and pathos, individually and collectively, and how art captures it all. Folds told the crowd that some songs from What Matters Most were written while he was teaching an online songwriting class during the pandemic.
“Over the pandemic I was teaching songwriting on the Internet and I’d come up with a curriculum,” he said. “I thought it would be very helpful if we all wrote songs from the same chosen subject and the way to do that, I felt, was to do it by headlines in the newspaper. So, everyone would pick a headline from the newspaper that particular day and they’d talk amongst themselves and then decide which one was going to be a story that we would all write the song to, including me.”
He told how the group chose an article about a couple who walked into their home as it was being burglarized. When they confronted the would-be thief, he began crying, gave them $200 for items he’d broken in his would-be heist and “for the shrimp that he’d eaten out of their refrigerator. Some of the people wrote about the shrimp,” Folds added for more laughs.
How many people can relate to the idea here, he asked the audience? Presumably most of us in the crowd weren’t burglars, but at the heart of the song – titled “Fragile” – is the idea that “if you’ve been around an abusive person or you’ve been in an abusive relationship or around a bully even as a kid, you’ll recognize what he did in that situation.”
Folds shared how a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why I Won’t Be Taking Off My Shoes in Your Shoeless Home,” became “Kristine From the 7th Grade,” off the new album. He said the op-ed was a culture wars piece that “was intended to piss you off at someone that you’ve never met. There’s enough of that anyway without making shit up about taking your shoes off.” He said he wasn’t interested in writing about that subject but he did want to focus on the person who might have written the story. He knew her name was “Kristine with a K” from the cutline and he pretended he knew her to create the song, imagining her as a twisted, angry, conspiracy-theory pusher.
“I realized I’m not going to be able to rekindle this friendship and I began to think about all the people that are separated from family and friends over propaganda, over stuff that’s just bullshit,” he said, getting to the song’s thesis. “This song is about that. I was laughing when I wrote it because I think I’m funny but I put it in a minor key to add the weight that it deserves.”
Of the balance of the album, Folds said, “I was only writing them for the purpose of the songwriting class, I wasn’t intending to put this stuff on my album but it was better than the shit that I was writing, so I went with it,” he said to the crowd’s laughter.
Will the album get Grammy consideration? It’s worthy, for sure. But we really need to see Ben do Broadway soon.
The Opener: Speaking of Broadway, Lindsey Kraft is a name you may associate with the Great White Way soon. The singer-songwriter was thoroughly engaging in her half-hour set as the “amuse-bouche” (her description) of the evening. She performed songs from a musical she’s writing and shared stories behind the songs to set up the power they’d deliver. Check out songs like “Alice,” “Onces” and “Beautiful Pain,” to get familiar.
“I will tell you something about Lindsey that she wouldn’t tell you herself, and she’ll pretty much tell you everything else about her personal life,” Folds told the audience following her set. “She didn’t even play piano – like didn’t even know where middle C was- three years ago. It’s true. I watched her go from not knowing anything about the piano to starting to learn piano because she had songs in her head that she wanted to write. She’d never written a song, she’d never played piano. So, what you saw was someone doing a professional-ass show up here who’s only been doing it for three years.”
Personal Bias: Recently, I was a guest on the Long River Radio Show on KPFT HD2. The show’s hosts, Thomas and Masaya, are two of Houston’s nice guys. They’re funny and music knowledgeable and all-in when it comes to showcasing music, especially if it’s made by Houstonians. I am not a musician but do have some proximity to many and I’m a big fan of Tom and Masaya’s work, so they asked me on the show to talk music. Surely, they didn’t expect me to go the whole KCRW Guest DJ Project route and bring four songs that meant something special to me, but as someone who seems to be getting more sentimental as the years go by, well, I couldn’t help myself.
All of this was to the slight annoyance of Mrs. Sendejas, who was sitting feet away from me during the show’s taping, when I announced Ben Folds’ “The Luckiest” as one of the songs I wanted to discuss. She squirmed a little but laughed along with the guys’ good-natured jabs about “our song,” the one that seems to capture the idea of how meant-to-be two people can be. We waited all night to hear “The Luckiest” last night and alas, it was absent from the set list. Thank goodness we’ve heard him perform it live in the past. Folds’ expressive songs about love, kids and life still gave us lots to consider about our shared journey, one that’ll see its 40th anniversary in a couple of weeks. The Luckiest? Yeah.
The Crowd: They knew the words to every Ben Folds song and politely only sang them with gusto when Folds requested such, which was quite a few times over the evening, particularly during “You Don’t Know Me,” when they sang the Regina Spektor parts. Y’all sounded pretty good!
Overheard in the Crowd: (Seeing Kraft’s shadowy form behind the piano at 8 p.m., right when the show was set to start) “Is that Regina?”
Random Notebook Dump: Earlier in the day, Cactus Music held a meet and greet for the most avid of Ben Folds fans (Mrs. Sendejas and I were there, naturally. Ben signed copies of What Matters Most and cheesed for a couple of photos with us. When he asked to whom he should sign her CD, it took my wife a solid five seconds to spit out her name, star-struck as she was). Clearly, you’ve been to the record store, but if you’ve never been to a meet and greet or a book signing or an in-store performance there, please scan the store’s schedule of events to see what’s happening next. Besides rubbing elbows with superstars, you get a chance to visit with fellow music lovers. Best of all, Cactus’s warm and accommodating staff makes it feel like it’s all going down in your own den, one filled with records maybe, but really homey altogether. Do yourself a favor and take in one of the store’s special events soon.
Ben Folds Set List
Exhausting Lover
Annie Waits
So There
Fragile
Kristine from the 7th Grade
Capable of Anything
Sentimental Guy
Emaline
Effington
Evaporated
What Matters Most
Landed
Don’t Change Your Plans
Still Fighting It
Kate
Zak and Sara
You Don’t Know Me
Not the Same
Army
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
