SHARPEN YOUR PAPER AIRPLANE SKILLS AHEAD OF FOLDS’ MAHAIWE PERFORMANCE
By Mark Greenlaw
This interview initially appeared in the May/June issue of Berkshire Magazine.
BEN FOLDS is best known for his alternative rock career and songs such as “Brick” from his time with Ben Folds Five and “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and “You Don’t Know Me” from his solo career. An ultra-creative who seems to be able to do just about anything he sets his mind to, Folds is the artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, has composed a piano concerto, is a photographer whose work has been published in National Geographic, has written a New York Times bestseller, and has appeared in numerous movies and TV shows. In advance of his June 22 performance at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, Folds spoke to us from his Nashville studio.
What are you working on right now?
A Christmas album. I jumped into it, not thinking I would take it terribly seriously because that’s one of the biggest strengths of making something like that. You can just do it and drop it and run. I’m now taking it dead seriously, and I seem to be all in.
Can you talk about your upcoming Paper Airplane Request Tour and what the Mahaiwe audience might expect?
The beauty of it is we don’t know what to expect because people chuck a paper airplane with their requests, and I bend over on stage, pick them up off the floor, and then play the song. The sets are all completely different. The predictable part is that I’ll be there, and I’ll be playing piano. The rest of it is always a little scary. You don’t know what you’re going to pick up. I bring a songbook with maybe 100 songs that could cause me problems so that I don’t dip below the level of professionalism that we’ve all come to expect.
So, you’ll be open to playing music from your Ben Folds Five days all the way through your most recent album, What Matters Most?
Whatever lands on the stage, if I’ve played it before, I’ll play it. It came about because people were screaming their requests for years when I played solo shows, and I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It just seems loud and uncivilized. So I sent out a tweet years ago that said, “Instead of screaming, why don’t you just make a paper airplane and throw it on stage?” And oddly, everyone seemed to have gotten the memo and got their hands on paper and a pencil and the air was just full of paper airplanes. And it was so pretty! I thought, this is the way to do it. So once every three, four, or five years, I’ll do these shows.
Have you ever been to the Mahaiwe?
I don’t think so. My daughter went to Simon’s Rock, so I spent quite a bit of time in Great Barrington, usually just going out to dinner or visiting her, because I lived over in Hudson. She worked at the ice cream shop in Great Barrington for a while. We had to get her out of work one night in order to sing with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center to fill in at the last minute on Women’s Day with Sarah Silverman. [You can watch Gracie’s performance here.]
In addition to your many creative pursuits, you also had a podcast on creativity. Any advice about how to nurture creativity?
There’s a saying that luck is when opportunity meets preparedness. I think that applies when it comes to creativity. There’s really no reason to do art if you’re not expressing. And that’s very tricky. Because we don’t always know when we need to express or what we’re expressing. You have to be ready to be brave, you have to be ready to express without breaks, and that’s not comfortable. It’s not comfortable for your friends, for yourself, or anything. It’s just the reason that some people are artists and others aren’t. Art is often just a willingness, or an ignorance, or a naïve personality that doesn’t understand it’s not appropriate to walk into work and say a lot of the things that are in songs, even average songs. But when these people put these songs out, they’re actually going out on a limb. You don’t realize that. If they aren’t, it’s fake. So you need that, and then you have to be prepared the same way as with any kind of luck, because songs and creativity are luck. So there are two things that are meeting, and the opportunity needs to be met with the preparedness of technique. When you’re not being an artist, you have to be a technician. And you have to learn the craft of it. It’s not sexy; no one wants to talk about that part. They love talking about the first part, but you don’t have to have Horowitz chops. You can have Bob Dylan chops. He could play things on the harmonica that are interesting, and you might not like his voice, but he sang perfectly in tune. The point is that he had a skillset ready to go and things that he wanted to express. And that’s true of any artist.