34th Street: Do you remember performing here before, Ben? [Folds performed at Spring Fling in 2000]
Ben Folds: With my schedule, its hard, but when I show up there I will remember. I know that I have played there, but don't specifically remember the place. Since I have a couple of hundred dates a year, its hard to remember!
Street: How is it performing on campuses generally?
BF: That's kind of home for me. I play more on campuses than anything. I generally would lean to a university tour over a club tour. There is much less promotion to do, and the audience just gets it. I think I'm just perpetually stuck in university somehow.
Street: From Ben Folds Five to a solo artist and now with Reynolds and Jamieson for the album Songs for Silverman, how would you describe the evolution of your sound, and what can we expect next?
BF: Well, I am not sure I see the evolution I would like to see. When I was 12, I used to love playing with piano, bass and drum, and it sounded very much like it does now. The difference is one variable: I was into distortion, like everyone in the early '90s was, but I hadn't heard distorted music with a clean piano in it. The reason I started playing with the bassist in Ben Folds Five was because he was good at playing distortion on the bass guitar almost like it was a lead instrument. I did not want a guitar since that would constrict my freedom on the piano. But the bass distortion added something I hadn't heard before and has stuck with me since then. But the way I present my songs on piano, bass and drums has embarrassingly not changed since I was 12.
Every album has a different feel because I am in a different mood. My goal is for performances to be stoic, even at times constrained, and let the soul of the song do all the work. That may not be the best in practice, but in theory, I was really excited about that. I often recorded some vocals, and deleted them because they sounded too exciting. I just wanted them to be really straight. Sometimes that really worked well, and there are other times I play them live and I add little bit of oomph to them. You know ... you live, you learn.
Street: From "Brick" to "Bitches Ain't Shit", you've always kept us anticipating surprises. What next? More experimental music? Collaborations?
BF: Possibly collaborate a bit more on this record; I can see myself experimenting a bit more. But experimentation is hard to define. I consider some of the songs on this record experimental by itself. If you assume that experimentation has to consist of strange noises, it may make it eccentric. I can tell you that I am really enjoying fucking around with synthesizers right now. That doesn't mean that the record will be a synth record. That has been done before. And synths were first picked up by classical composers interested in orchestrating new timbres. Rather than making a catchy '80s synth pop record, I wanna experiment with the possibilities on a synth and have a good time orchestrating interesting sounds.
Street: Any message for Penn students waiting eagerly for the concert?
BFs: No, not really. In college, you know, you really don't have time to floss at times. I think everyone should floss their teeth.
