One chatty dwarf and 2200 avid faces

Notes on last night’s Ben Folds solo-with-piano concert at Carolina Theater of Greensboro:

1. I had no idea he’s 50 years old. Dude looks real good for 50. Similarly, it’s snuck up on me how truly impressive I find his catalog. My blog’s countdown of my favorite songs has a one-per-artist limit that’s often easy to enforce, but he’s got fully ten songs that would qualify for me to write about — some funny and aggressive, some incredibly sweet, some thoughtful and a bit neurotic, one that helped anticipate and explain Trump’s presidency by six years. Even only playing five of those, he had no problem filling a 100-minute-plus-encore concert with excellent songs.

2. The concert was sold out: 2200 people. With the possible exception of some They Might Be Giants shows, I have never seen such a large, enthusiastic, utterly devoted audience. Second song of the show, he played the resounding opening riff of “Annie Waits” — and without any signal, hundreds of audience members clapped, once, in sync at the eighth beat. (For the sixteenth beat, I joined in.) A song or two later, he launched into the lyric “If there’s a God, he’s laughing at us”, nodded gently towards us all, and enough voices to hear clearly (perhaps only a few dozen, but still) finished the melody and lyric for him: “and our football team”. It’s from “Effington”, a non-single album track from what is not regarded as one of his crucial albums, and he knew he could rely on our help.

2a. Another song he introduced by saying “When I recorded a song with Regina Spektor, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to just drag her along on tour with me to do the harmony vocals”. As much as I love both Folds and Spektor, I’ve always considered the song in question, “You Don’t Know Me”, a minor and subpar effort by him. Given the absolute precision of the audience members filling in for her vocal part, I may have to reconsider. 

3. The audience also gave him immense freedom to (by his own description) “work on being Bruce Springsteen — you hear recordings of his concerts, and he’ll talk for 15 minutes before sitting down and playing a 3-minute song”. He was born in Greensboro and grew up in nearby Winston-Salem, so the mention of every passing local landmark would get interrupted by whoops and cheers. He responded by going nostalgic: relating his first memory (and thereby his only childhood memory of Greensboro itself), something about hearing a noise and asking his dad about it and being told “it’s probably a car-bomb”. He recalls most of his family as entirely unmusical, except one uncle, who was in the audience, and who Ben spent a minute playing an old informal jazz composition by (it was a genuinely nifty minute of music). Still, his family dutifully recorded his songwriting efforts starting from the age of 8. “They were serious songs, I was serious about it. And then, when I was 14, I turned into a 14-year-old, and started writing songs like ‘Having Two Dicks is Cool’”.

4. Best audience participation gimmick: coaching the audience to do four-part vocal harmony with counterpoint. (As a baritone, I got the easiest part.) Extra credit: it’s for the song “Bastard”, which switches among several different time signatures; I believe the part the audience took was in 6/4, which is one of the less tricky sections, but still ambitious given how many alcoholic drinks the theater was selling. Came out pretty well.

5. Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001), which I consider his masterpiece and clearest claim to immortality, seems to strike him the same way; he played fully half of its songs. Pleasingly, he also seems proud of its follow-up Songs for Silverman, the album where critics turned on him and decided he no longer mattered, but which I think is a smart and lovely record in its own right.

6. He doesn’t seem to assume his audience has heard his (excellent) 2015 album So There. He led with its “Phone in a Pool” — and turned the album’s chamber-pop melodic twirls into a variety of overtly weird angular piano riffs — but neither got nor appeared to expect large reaction, and he introduced the other So There song he played, “I’m Not a Fan”, with an explanation of its not-that-complicated emotional plot. It was a contrast to the Jesca Hoop concert I saw a couple months ago, where she was openly self-conscious about the likelihood that most of us *only* knew her recent work, and she played only a single song, apologetically introduced, from her debut Kismet (a shame: it’s wonderful, and still my favorite of her records).

7. As a pianist, Ben Folds began his career with giddiness, flash, and a love of showing off: glenn mcdonald described his playing as like “a six-month-old puppy on speed that he’s somehow trained to leap 90 feet straight up into the air to catch the frisbees of the gods”. He’s steadily calmed it down over the years, but in concert he used the few songs he played from those days — “Uncle Walter”, “Philosophy”, “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces”, and "Army" — as opportunities to be even more spectacular than he was on record. Just in case we thought he was losing his edge.

8. I’m sadly used to my date being the only black person at various places we go, but it’s discouraging that in a crowd of 2200 people, she *still* appeared to be the only black person. I didn’t get a look at everybody, of course, and (EDIT) she did see one black man, so that's almost 0.1% of the audience right there.

9. On her other side were a couple of heavily-drinking sorority girls. One, an excellent singer, was the prototypical avid fan ready to react to every cue; the other, to whom she explained various songs (sometimes while the songs were playing), was not, and spent most of the evening playing with her phone. I just mention this because it was annoying, not because it contradicts what I’ve said earlier about the audience. My seats, in the name of affordability, were in the absolute back row of the balcony. As with the back row of a college auditorium classroom, there’s probably only so much that could have been collectively expected of us.