A Conversation with Ben Folds – HuffPost 10.12.12

Mike Ragogna: Hey Ben, How are you?

Ben Folds: I’m good, how are you doing?

MR: I’m pretty good. So it’s obvious that the band is rocking again.

BF: Yeah, we tend to do that. That’s one of the two gears. We play rock and then we play ballads.

MR: It’s thirteen years since your last Ben Folds Five album. What was the creative reunion like?

BF: It didn’t really feel like we’d been not playing together. I’ve been playing concerts and making records through the whole thing, so it felt pretty natural, really. It was natural up to the point where there’s really nothing to say about it. We just got together and started playing. It was good.

MR: Let’s look at your new album, The Sound of the Life of the Mind. There’s a song titled “Michael Praytor, Five Years Later.” Can you go into what jolted you into writing that?

BF: The hook of the song came from an improvisation. I freestyle songs quite a lot live and that’s one that was made up on stage, a lot of it. As I crafted the song, I made it about the kind of person that you get stuck in a boy scout tent with, that you have to partner up with or you keep running into over and over again, years after you’re out of school. It’s like, “Why this guy? This is so random. Why would I run into this guy over and over again.” That’s really what it’s about.

MR: The kind of guy that nature throws at you, and for whatever reason, you just keep partnering up with these people.

BF: Yeah, it’s true. That’s the way it works. Even on tour, I’m all over the country and usually I just run into people from high school–one or two of them over and over again.

MR: And you may be running into some more of them when you play New York’s ComicCon.

BF: Well, probably not, I don’t think I’ll run into them there, but yeah I’ll run into a lot of intelligent and interesting people there.

MR: I love that you’re playing ComicCon. This isn’t your first ComicCon, is it?

BF: It is, yes.

MR: Your first ComicCon! Okay, first day, you may be overwhelmed or disoriented, but by the second or third day, you’re going to surrender to it all.

BF: Awesome, I can’t wait.

MR: So, you’re going to play at the event. How did the gig come together?

BF: It was an offer, it was someone’s idea, and it sounded like a great idea.

MR: It is a great idea, and I think the audience is going to be very receptive to your music. Before we leave ComicCon, I have to ask you who your favorite comic or superhero is.

BF: Well, when I was a kid I like Captain Carrot.

MR: Captain Carrot!

BF: Yeah, and I liked Archie and Fantastic Four.

MR: Yeah the Fantastic Four had this sort of cosmic edge to them, and then, of course, we got the Silver Surfer out of their storyline.

BF: There was also Swamp Thing. He was pretty cool.

MR: What a great comic that was. Let’s get back to the album. All the lyrics are pretty dynamic, especially on songs like “Erase Me.”

BF: A lot of times, it’s something that I can understand — what I’m writing about — but I don’t often know why until years later, to tell you the truth. The music led to that and what I imagined was sort of a passive aggressive demand that since this relationship is over, the other person should just forget it all. “Forget me, forget the whole thing, erase the whole thing, delete our Facebook page together, delete our pictures, erase the entire thing, and I’ll just walk like you never knew me.” It doesn’t work that way because the other party has picked up and begun seeing someone else immediately, and so the protagonist flips out.

MR: That’s so right on. What’s funny about that is it’s almost like you expect a decent grieving period. You’re both supposed to be grieving through the whole thing and then when the other person takes off and everything is fine, that kind of sucks.

BF: Yeah, that does suck, and it’s hard on people. But at the same time, the character in this song sort of asks for it when they try to be too cavalier. You know, “Just don’t worry about it. Erase me. Act like it never happened,” and then the second verse goes right into, “What the F is this? You’re crazy! Two weeks later and you’re already with someone else? You’d better call the cops because I’m gonna kill you.” He or she just flips out. I couldn’t tell if the character I was writing was male or female. It also sounded like it was female sometimes, but I never got a gauge on that.

MR: It’s definitely easier said than done to hit that delete button, isn’t it.

BF: Yeah.

MR: All of the Ben Folds and Ben Folds Five projects are stimulating intellectually because of how you’re approaching the lyrics, and musically because of the chord patterns. You create an interesting combination of old school and new school in that you’re writing with a lot of the passion and maybe some of the imagery — almost like classic movie story lines — of different eras, with so many great twists.

BF: Yeah, and I take that as a huge compliment. It’s a perceptive thing to note, and not the kind of thing that’s often obvious to people until years later when you can see that it was mixed up. So many things that we do today are taken for granted. You don’t have to make a reference to something modern in order to be seeing things through a modern filter. Someone who’s living a modern life, contemporary with everyone else, might sit down with a violin and play a part from a string quartet that was written three hundred years ago and play through that filter. It’s hard to judge those things. I like the tools that I grew up with, which are pretty basic: a microphone and a recorder, a piano, my voice, things to pound on, drums. This is a computer’s age. It’s almost considered, if you don’t compose on a computer, you’re of an older era. But I really think it’s more what you do with it than it is the tools. It’s fascinating what people are doing with the tools. I think computer music is fantastic.

MR: Yeah. I interviewed pianist/organist Werner Elmker the other day who, when he plays classical music — like Bach or Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, whoever — he starts off with the basics of what the composer intended and then takes off, he improvises. I said, “But you’re not playing the classics as the classics they were intended to be,” and he told me that’s an element of classical music of its day. The page was meant to give you the basics, the bare bones, but when you played the piece live, there was an improv element. It seems we completely miss that point when most piano teachers instruct. During the education of classical music, in general, we’re staying on the page. I would go as far saying that the demand on what to do live is to not mimic the record, it’s to maybe improv on top of that, jam on top of that, express how this fine wine is breathing, how it’s meant to open up, you know?

BF: Yeah, because you can even play fairly note-for-note, but the interpretation can be really different. One of the things that I didn’t really dig from the evolution of the internet was where people would say, “Here’s what he played,” and then the next time, “He played the same thing, it’s the same concert,” and then, “He’s played the same thing three nights in a row!” Really, they were truly very different. I think we have some idea of how much tone someone like Rachmaninoff would’ve had because there are recordings. You see a lot of Rubenstein and Horowitz. Horowitz was more on the page, Rubenstein was more of a loose cannon.

MR: Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not taught in schools traditionally that you can actually have fun with the sheet you’ve got in front of you. It’s logical that it’s not supposed to be verbatim, because then it would be robotic or some regurgitation.

BF: Yeah, there are some artifacts that come along with a personality type that’s willing to go against the grain completely and become a classical musician. They can be very rigid. The great musicians aren’t, but a lot of the great classical and orchestral musicians are rigid in the thought of why music is made, how it’s made, why we listen to it. They have a very defined idea of that, often. They certainly have an idea of when they start and finish… and that’s rigid as well. I’m so glad that they keep it going. In a way, their note-for-note preservation, it is probably really important that they’re doing that, and it’s also good for people to point out that maybe there’s a little bit more latitude expected in the piece. It doesn’t have to be exactly like the way they’re playing it, but I’m glad that they’re doing it.

MR: That’s exactly it. The preservation element is the notation, but the element of actually how you’re experiencing it and how you’re playing it, the flair of it… My feeling is that goes hand in hand with experimenting with the notation.

BF: I was playing Chopin Études when I was a kid and when I finally got to my teacher with it he was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Much faster than that! There’s a much more brisk pace to this piece.” He’d play it the way that he thought it was supposed to be played and it didn’t move me at all. I was like, “Nope, sorry.” Even recently, I finally found some guy’s version that’s about as slow as I’d like it to be. Someone out there’s playing it like that, but most people consider it’s supposed to go faster. I don’t know how they really know that Chopin wouldn’t have been okay with it slow. Why’s he rolling in his grave? How do you know he’s rolling in his grave? Glen Gould would ask the same thing. He’d be like, “How do you know Bach’s rolling in his grave? I’m interpreting this stuff the way that I’m doing it.” He has constant groans over it as well, so everyone can kiss his ass. [laughs]

MR: [laughs] Ya! And the thing is this is supposed to be about feel, too! There has to be latitude as far as grace notes and even just places where you might need to stray for feel.

BF: Just the Beethoven tone, “Sonatas should be played,” or “Here’s the tone that Beethoven intended. It’s more manly! It’s got Sturm und Drang,” and you’re like, “Really? I guess.” It probably does. They know more than I do, but that’s the problem with age, and it’s a general problem. The oldest dude around, the oldest guy you can find who still knows where he is, hasn’t got enough experience to know anything at all. I’m tired of old people telling me anything. I’m old and I know nothing. If I’m telling you something, I don’t know s**t. There are a lot of these old people that are like, “I’ve been around a while, I’ll tell you what, this is what’s happening in America and this is happening in society.” “Okay, dude, if you’re five hundred years old, you can tell me.” Five hundred years will get you through a lesser civilization’s cycle. Then you can tell me what’s going on. Nobody knows. Nobody knows at all. I think it’s amazing that you can read these notes, that they can be written. Rachmaninoff was not that long ago, and look what he could do. It’s absolutely incredible. I think we’ve lost that. We can’t do that.

MR: Sweet. Ben, The Sound of the Life of the Mind features songs like “Sky High” and “On Being Frank” that are extremely… well, frank. Is this album, in your mind, the sound of the life of the mind?

BF: Yeah, where I relate to “The Sound of the Life of the Mind” is Nick Hornby’s lyrics. I think we can all relate to going inside often because it’s not so great outside, especially when you’re a kid, which is what the song’s about. Things aren’t going your way or it’s not a nice place to be; you can turn “in.” In the case with the character in the song, she’s turning in and she’s spending time with her friends Abraham Lincoln, Frost, Glen Gould… This is what interests her, but on the outside, she’s in a mall and there are a bunch of thugs and someone’s getting beat up. They’re just a bunch of silly kids. That’s her escape. I think it’s about escapes.

MR: Ben I’ve asked you this before, but what advice do you have for new artists?

BF: My answer stays pretty much the same. I thought VH1 had it right with their old moniker, “Music First.” That’s what I think for young artists. Keep it about your art. It’s really easy for someone to say, “Well things change. Everything’s changed because the music distribution system has changed.” That doesn’t change your music. You make great music first. That’s the main thing. It’s easy to take your eye off the ball. It’s never been easier to take your eye off the ball. If I want to screw around on GarageBand writing something pretty, I might just kind of swipe over and see what my emails were or look something up on the Internet. You can do all kinds of crap. You can take a self-portrait. I think it’s important to stay focused on whatever it is you do. Stay focused on your art. The distribution of what you do is not important unless you’ve done great work.

MR: Wow. “The distribution of what you do is not important unless you’ve done great work.” Absolutely great. When I ask that question, I often get the art side, which is what you’re talking about — get your creativity together before you start marketing it — but then I also get the other side, which is, “You’ve got to get on Facebook, you’ve got to get your social media together.”

BF: Yes. By the time you write a great song or a great album, Facebook might not even be on the Internet anymore.

MR: [laughs] Yeah!

BF: We don’t know, we just really don’t know. Things have changed so much in my time, but the thing is with all the changes, it’s almost like that change has stunted music in some ways. I think it’s drugged people out. Really, a band that gets together thirteen years after they broke up shouldn’t even be close to relevant. It should be a nostalgia act. I’m not saying that we are relevant; I don’t think we ever were. But I don’t think we’re any less relevant now than we were. Consider 1948, and a band has been together in 1948, and they split up and they got back together in 1960? I would say they would be in for a big change. But I don’t think between 1998 and now has been all that big of a change.

MR: Yeah, that’s right.

BF: 1950 to 1952 you see it go up and accelerate for a little while, 1954 and then twelve years later, it’s 1966 and acid rock has happened. You’re going from before Elvis had even hit the stage to acid rock. Everything that was relevant is irrelevant. Now, I think some of the reasons for how slow things have evolved musically is partially technology. You have half of the people falling into the bed of “I’m going to spend my time making sure that my music is marketed online.” You can’t market something that doesn’t exist or that isn’t good. You can’t even crowdfund your record unless someone knows who you are. You still have to get out and do it. You still have to have quality material and be the best artist that you can. I say stay off the computer and get good, and then use the computer to send emails.

MR: [laughs] Very nice. Ben, what I love about this conversation is that this is the same Ben Folds that was doing the same kind of thing on The Sing-Off. You are a consistent person, sir.

BF: [laughs] Thank you! Some would argue, but that’s cool. Thank you.

MR: I have loved this conversation, and this has been great, Ben. I appreciate you spending time with me and being on solar-powered KRUU-FM.

BF: You know… about your solar powered thing, I was going to tell you, my father’s electricity bill is ten dollars a month — heat and everything — either that or it’s a dollar-eighty. He has solar panels all over his house — PVs and passive and active solar panels, and our geothermal situation. He’s really into it.

MR: Man, congratulations to your father!

BF: Yeah, he could run your radio station if you run out. He sends a lot more power back into the grid. If you guys need a couple extra watts, let me know.

MR: [laughs] You’ve got it, we’ll reach out for those extra watts if we need’em! Ben, this has really been a pleasure. I appreciate your time so much. Let’s do this again next time.

BF: Right on. I’ll talk to you next album. Cheers.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne