When Ben Folds first moved to Nashville in 1990, the city wasn’t ready for him.
Or was it the other way around?
“Nashville was still a 1980s-music-industry town,” he remembers. “It was very formal. If you were a musician, someone would style you just to do an interview. Nothing was presented that wasn’t perfectly coiffed.”
With his perpetual case of bedhead, Folds was far from coiffed. He’d spent the previous two years in his hometown of Winston-Salem, playing bass for a local band whose songs blended Red Hot Chili Peppers’ party-boy funk with XTC’s brainy melodies. A mainstay at frat houses across North Carolina, the group allowed Folds to sharpen his chops as an instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer. He was accomplished, even at 23 years old. He stumbled against a backdrop of early-’90s Nashville neon, though he was mostly out of place.
“I had a publishing deal,” says Folds, who’d hoped to use Nashville as a launchpad for his solo career. “I came here for the whole demo/publishing/showcase route. I came here to do anything I could. It didn’t pan out.”
Brought to Tennessee by music executive Scott Siman — the same man who would go on to manage Tim McGraw’s early career and sign the Dixie Chicks to their development deal with Sony — Folds had powerful people in his corner. He spent his first weeks in town sleeping on the floor of Siman’s recording studio at the corner of Chet Atkins Place and 19th Avenue South. Later, flush with two months of royalty advances, he moved into a one-bedroom apartment near Wedgewood and 18th. Folds wrote songs like “Philosophy,” which later appeared on Ben Folds Five’s debut album while sitting in the living room of that Wedgewood home. His rough-edged demos of the new tunes were deemed unlistenable by local producers, though, and his solo gigs — including an infamous show at 12th and Porter that found a shoeless, shirtless Folds performing “Purple Haze” with fake tattoos covering his body — flew in the face of Nashville decorum.
As Folds said, things didn’t pan out. After two years in town, he packed up his Volvo station wagon and headed north, logging some time in New York City before returning to North Carolina. It was there, in 1994, that he formed Ben Folds Five and established himself as Generation X’s own Piano Man. The band closed out the decade with hits like “Battle of Who Could Care Less,” “Brick,” and “Army.” The very things that seemed so incongruous during his early years in Nashville — a desire to be unique, to be brash, to offset the pure pop craftsmanship of his songwriting with noisy performances that bordered on the subversive — were now his calling cards.
Pop music is for the mating age. It’s the companion that gets you through your younger years. —Ben Folds
Folds and Nashville are on much better terms now. He’s been a part-time resident for years now, splitting his time between homes in places like Tennessee, New York, California, and Australia. After his newest solo record, What Matters Most, drops in June, he’ll spend the remainder of the year on the road. The international tour includes a stop at Ryman Auditorium, just a 15-minute walk from 12th and Porter’s former home, but fans are unlikely to witness any half-clothed Hendrix covers at the Mother Church.
“The hardest thing to do when you’re younger is truly be unique, so you have to display that uniqueness in really vulgar, broad ways,” Folds says. “You have to be like, ‘I’m the girl with purple hair and the biggest vocal fry you’ve ever heard.’ I’ve already done that bit, though. I don’t need to do it any longer.”
With a piano concerto under his belt and a long history of performances with professional orchestras — including the National Symphony Orchestra, where he’s been serving as Artistic Advisor since 2017 — Folds is no longer the un-coiffed twentysomething who regularly throws his piano stool into the ivories. He’s grown into an elder statesman of the alternative era instead.
Spry and spirited at 56 years old, he plays concert halls across the world, his shows offering a rare balance of refinement and mischief. One minute, he’s topping the classical charts with albums like So There, his 2015 collaboration with yMusic and the Nashville Symphony. The next, he’s letting the expletives fly during live performances of “Army” and “Rock This Bitch.” The same man who rocked the boat during the 1990s and rocked the suburbs around the turn of the century is now rocking to the beat of his own drum.
“Frank Lloyd Wright said in his famous 60 Minutes interview that he didn’t feel the need to appear rebellious anymore, but that he was actually more rebellious — just quietly so,” he says. “I see what he’s saying there because artists want to do their own thing. It’s easy to jump on a lot of other trains, and one way to jump off all of them is to wet your pants on the subway or something. No one’s gonna come close to you if you do that! Suddenly, there are no rules anymore. So as a young rock band, you might want to blow up things around you, because subversion is a really blunt way of creating your own space to do what you intend to do, rather than what someone else already did. But for me, I find it’s no longer necessary to do that. I wet myself on the subway years ago, and it’s still following me around.”
What Matters Most offers a different kind of subversion. On the surface, it’s a pop album that walks the fine line between ambition and accessibility. There are melodies galore, from the geek-chic chorus of “Exhausting Lover” — a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a hotel room hookup — to the dreamy, lullabying “Clouds with Ellipses.” Dig deeper, though, and the subversion reveals itself. A younger Folds might have balanced the album’s sheer listenability with noisy, smart-ass snark, but here, the inside jokes take the form of showmanship and musical complexity. “Winslow Gardens” is performed in 7/4, a heady time signature more common to prog-rock staples like Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” than modern-day piano pop.
“But Wait, There’s More” is a sound collage of burbling keyboards, groove, and vocal harmonies worthy of the Beach Boys. “Kristine, From the 7th Grade” tackles big topics like political misinformation by looking at a childhood classmate who goes off the rails during adulthood, spamming her Facebook contacts with pseudoscience and memes. The arrangement flirts with film-score melodrama, underscoring some of Folds’ most biting lyrics — “The misspellings, they must be on purpose / We went to a good school, Kristine,” he sings, skewering his friend’s online rants with a wink that’s almost audible — with help from a string quartet. Even so, the humor is thrown into relief by a final verse that packs an irony-free punch. “Oh, what a shame, Kristine / This disease that makes strangers of friends,” goes the line, pulling back the curtain to reveal that hurt, not humor, rests at the song’s center.
“I call that a Jimmy Webb moment,” Folds explains. “You’re listening to ‘Wichita Lineman’, and you think, ‘He’s just singing about fixing telephone lines on the highway.’ Then he sings, ‘And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time,’ and it’s a gut punch! That’s why the song is so timeless. You’re cruising along with a song about a telephone pole worker, and you realize you’re in a realistic space, and the songwriter has you right where he wants you, and then he drops something heavy. I don’t manage it very often. It’s one thing to be desensitized by an action movie where everyone’s shooting guns, but it’s another thing to be watching a realistic movie where someone suddenly pulls out a pair of scissors and stabs someone’s hand. It just hits very differently, and that’s part of songwriting.”
Folds, who released the best-selling memoir A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons in 2019, can be laser-sharp with the written word. Many of the new album’s songs were written during the pandemic, which Folds spent in a hastily booked flat in Sydney, and they highlight the lessons learned during lockdown without time-stamping themselves. “Back to Anonymous,” with its dreamscape of major seventh chords, finds its narrator walking around the neighborhood in a mask, inconspicuous, his recognizability stripped away and his freedom restored.
The lyrics never actually mention a mask — Folds trusts his audience to read between the lines — and “Back to Anonymous” could just as easily be a rumination on the fleeing nature of fame. “The wife and I, feeding the birds / In love, in comfortable clothes / The neighbors, they don’t wink like they know,” he sings, reveling in the beauty of the mundane. Elsewhere, he nods to his unplanned quarantine in Australia with “Winslow Gardens,” in which a couple hurriedly signs a lease and moves into an apartment as the outside world shuts down. As a ten-month stay turns into a ten-year residency, uncertainty gives way to stability. “Some trips just go one way,” Folds sings during the chorus, delivering those words with the gravity of a road warrior who’s learned to appreciate his time at home.
Then there’s “Exhausting Lover,” whose hilarious take on a one-night stand earns the album its PG-13 rating. “Every kiss is a jam band solo,” Folds laments in each refrain, weary from the night’s activities. Things get downright weird during the third verse, which may be the first song in pop music history to involve a Mattel toy fetish.
“She handed me a Hot Wheels track,” Folds sings. “I said, ‘Girl, that’s pretty weird. Where did you get that? / She said, ‘Never mind that. / Here, nerd, beat my ass in the bath like my dad did / When I was a bad kid.’ / I said, ‘Nah, what’s this? / Let me up out of the Motel Six!” There’s enough internal rhyme packed into those lines to rival a hip-hop song, and Folds’ nerdy delivery somehow lessens the song’s kinkiness.
“Ben is getting better and better,” says co-producer Joe Pisapia, who oversaw the recording sessions for Ben Folds Five’s final record, 2012’s The Sound of the Life of the Mind and reprised the role for What Matters Most. “He’s very disciplined about things like his voice, and he leaves no stone unturned. It’s always, ‘I can sing that better,’ or, ‘I can play that better,’ or, ‘This lyric feels awkward and needs to be changed.’ It’s inspiring to see that. He avoids the pitfalls of going too far into the minutiae, but he makes sure to get things right, just as intended.”
The two spent weeks working together in Pisapia’s Middletree Recording Studios, joined by Tall Heights — the electro-folk band whose members have backed up Folds since 2018 — and a revolving door of horn players, string players, and guest vocalists.
For Tall Heights’ co-founder Tim Harrington, the process amounted to something more than an album’s creation; it was an apprenticeship in hard work. “I remember the first rehearsal we ever had with Ben,” he says. “It’s very Foldsian to just walk into the room and start playing a song, and all of a sudden, you’re off. There’s no, ‘Hey, how are you?’ It’s just straight into playing music, and almost immediately, he’ll stop and start to tinker with the arrangements. We’re super comfortable with that process. We love it. Ben is the man! He just moves at the speed of his own thought process, which is four or five times faster than ours.”
Hypersonic movements aside, Folds sounds relaxed and levelheaded when he talks about What Matters Most. “It’s not a normal record,” he says unapologetically. “I mean, it’s not something you’d normally hear in an Uber, right?” Released 25 years after Ben Folds Five’s biggest hit, “Brick,” cracked the Top 40 in multiple countries, the album is unlikely to return its creator to the topmost tier of the mainstream. Folds knows that. He prefers it. He’s grown content with where he’s at these days — not only in Nashville but also within the musical landscape at large.
“Pop music is for the mating age,” he says. “It’s the companion that gets you through your younger years. It shows you who you are. Then you get married, and you have kids, and what’s new isn’t for you anymore. You’ve already gotten where you’re supposed to go. You’ve made it! Younger people are now making music to turn you away because they don’t want an old person with kids in their space. This is mating space!”
“So the next question is, why make a record?” he adds. “In the beginning, I had to make a record every two years just to support my career and not go back to waiting tables. But now I have enough other things to do, so if I’m going to make something, it needs to be unique to the noise. The thing I’m good at isn’t done much anymore. It’s old-fashioned, classic songwriting — the kind that was everywhere in the ’70s. This doesn’t mean I’m expressing anything more important than anyone else. It just means this is what I have to offer.”
For Ben Folds, the offer stands.
