By Donald Liebenson
“In Actual Person Live For Real”—equal parts quirky and on-the-nose, the name Ben Folds chose for his first domestic tour since the onset of the pandemic nevertheless captures one of the main appeals of his return to Ravinia on September 18. Another is that, although it’s the sixth date on the tour, it’s the multi-platinum selling singer-songwriter’s first of the lot where his solo piano is backed by an orchestra, as he has been increasingly wont to do since creating a piano concerto in 2014 and becoming an artistic advisor to the Kennedy Center in 2017.
Connecting by phone with Ravinia Magazine from his home in Nashville before the start of the tour, he said he anticipates performing will feel like “the normal thing to do” when he takes the stage with the Ravinia Festival Orchestra. “I just finished up a tour in Australia. Having been playing shows for my whole adult life, I just kind of walked back out, played, and it felt fine. It is like riding a bike; I skimmed my knee for the first 20 minutes.”
Life was anything but normal when Folds chose to quarantine in Australia. To make the best out of this horrible situation gripping the world, Folds threw himself into the creative process. He broadcast a live weekly online show, he worked on a new album, he invited people to submit rhyming couplets from which he would create a song, and he launched Lightning Bugs, a podcast about creativity in which he talks to his guests about their creative processes. Guests have included Oscar winner and Late Show with Stephen Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste; Emmy, Tony, and Grammy-nominated singer Sara Bareilles; comedian Bob Saget; and children’s author and illustrator Mo Willems.
He also wrote a piano ballad, “2020,” that, in less than three minutes—and in waltz time, no less—encapsulates a tragically epochal year (“We’re not repeating history / Just the parts that sucked / 2020, what the actual fuck?”)
Folds does not talk in what he calls “snack-sized” sound bites. He speaks expansively about creativity, a mercurial process. We spoke about why waltzes are incredible, the pitfalls of writing a song about Rudy Giuliani’s disastrous Four Seasons Landscaping press conference, and why arts education is essential to our post-pandemic restart.
“I’ve played gigs in my adult career at Starbucks. I dressed up like a barista and I sat in a corner on the piano and played. That didn’t feel different to me from playing with a symphony orchestra in a classic space.”
Do you consider this a moment to reintroduce yourself to the audience after more than a year of not being able to play in front of them?
I tend toward the understated. Life has been dramatic, and that will probably come through. I always just try to do what feels right in the moment. If someone dies, you play a song differently than you would have if a child was born, you play it differently if you’re hungry. We’re going to get in a space and that situation and make it. I’ve played gigs in my adult career at Starbucks. I dressed up like a barista and I sat in a corner on the piano and played. That didn’t feel different to me from playing with a symphony orchestra in a classic space. And that’s weird, but it’s all the same to me. Playing the show the day after 9/11, yeah, that was weird. Playing the day after Trump was elected; that was weird. Things happen that change the world and you feel it, but we’re still just there making music.
I noticed in Australia differences I wouldn’t have thought about. After a certain amount of time of no live concerts, audiences were rusty. For the first 20 minutes, they were like, ‘How did we act again?’ Some of the apprehension was, one, they were spread out a little bit and were wearing masks. That creates a little bit of a muted atmosphere. Second, they seemed quieter than normal. But I was playing with orchestras, and the orchestra members felt like the audience was listening intently and taking in the moment.
You quarantined in Australia, and in an interview you said, “I think everyone should try to find any possible silver lining in this really challenging, awful moment in history. Hopefully we’ll come out of it with something we didn’t have.” One thing you came out with was the song “2020.” It nails what I, for one, felt about last year, with the lyric ‘What the actual fuck?’ And it’s a waltz. How did that song come about?
I had spent some time with Ricki Lee Jones. I love Ricki. We had a summer of hanging out for whatever reason. It was awesome, and I learned a lot. She’s so brilliant. She knew I liked waltzes in my music. She said that if you want to emote something, but you kind of want to distance yourself from it a little bit, like the kind of person that would talk about the human condition rather than their own feelings and let people sort it out, the waltz is a nice kind of old-man way of staying at arm’s length so you don’t get too messy.
I thought that’s what this song needs; it doesn’t need someone wallowing in the year. You want to be able to say the things you feel about it, but still feel like you can have a little bit of a bittersweet laugh. Before writing it, I gave up the idea that it would stand the test of time. It ain’t for any other year. We don’t know what’s going to happen next year; it might be worse.
“Arts education is kind of the only real restart button we might have.”
Ben Folds first played Ravinia in 2004 (left) and most recently in 2018 (right). His September 18 concert will be his first at the festival with an orchestra.
I got tired of being afraid of writing a song for fear that the song would date itself before I could sing it. I think that’s a real problem, and part of the reason a lot of songwriters in our era are not writing topical, activist, news-oriented political songs. It’s simply because unless it’s a theme that is so much bigger—like writing for a monthly magazine as opposed to writing for the internet—if you’re a musician, it needs to be huge or go the fuck home. I wrote part of a song called ‘Four Seasons’ about the Four Seasons Landscaping incident. As I was writing it, I thought I could put it on the internet and it would be a thing for a day. Things are moving so fast. The whole point of the song was, as awful as things have been and as awful as the news is, boy, that sure gave me a laugh. People in Australia didn’t know about it. It wasn’t news over there because they’re actually reporting news that might affect people’s lives. I would show people pictures of Rudy Giuliani next to a dildo shop and they would be, ‘Is that really happening?’
On your podcast, Lightning Bugs, you talk with creative artists about creativity and their processes. Have these conversations changed the way you create?
It has given me an opportunity to hear different people’s takes on it. What I get out of working with other artists and talking to them, the main overarching theme I get out of it, is we’re all hacks. Like, seriously. You talk to any of us; none of us know what we’re doing. It’s shooting in the dark until something sticks. I look back at stuff I’ve made and I have no idea how I’ve done it. I’m glad I’m not on my own podcast, I couldn’t articulate it.
You are very active in arts education, and even before the pandemic, it would be among the first things cut in schools. After a year of remote learning, just how important is arts education?
Well, I think it’s as dramatic as this: It’s kind of the only real restart button we might have to civilization. People have to start listening and being able to communicate in actual complete sentences, and complete sentences are done really well in the arts. We just don’t know how to deal in the novel environment we’ve created; we’re just not up to the task. What we need is to have a great reset where people learn how to communicate artistically and value creativity and get back to some storytelling or [there will be no getting any of it back]. ■
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times, as well as on RogerEbert.com. The first Ravinia concert he attended without his parents was Procol Harum in 1970.