Ben Folds Is Not Cooler Than You

If you only know Ben Folds as the piano dude from Ben Folds Five who puts out solo albums and sings songs about his kids, that’s fine with him. But if you want to talk about his side projects, he’ll tell you about producing William Shatner’s Has Been album, playing piano on Weird Al’s Poodle Hat and how he circumvented the music industry by releasing three Internet-only EPs in 2004. Last week saw the debut of Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP, a mixture of songs from the EPs (including covers of Dr. Dre, The Darkness and The Cure) and other material. His original songs range from the story of a horny mall security guard to a sweeping number about the inevitable pain of love. The Scene caught up with Folds to talk about the music industry, soccer moms and why he recently ran around lower Broadway dressed like a pirate. Scene: Your new album is basically a mix of the EPs. Why did you make those? Ben Folds: To me it was a sort of a natural progression of the state of the music business. Scene: And what is that state? Folds: Well, the music business as a whole is changing. God, you know it would almost require me to prepare a lecture on this. OK, so suddenly I can put out music on the Internet that gets out there within days of mixing it. There’s an unknown quantity there, how many people are going to be able to get it. So a lot of people [in the music business] are going to be scared. They want it to be in stores. But I insisted that it didn’t go into the stores. I wanted to make what I thought was my best shot at the moment. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ll put my shitty stuff on the Internet,” or anything. I just wanted to make something quickly and put it out. So we made these three EPs. And it was really significant in my little music career because they all were like No. 1 at iTunes and on the Billboard Internet charts. Scene: So you knew people were listening to them? Folds: No one really knows how many people are listening, because they tend to then take the files and share them. But I’d come to the conclusion years ago that I wasn’t going to make money by selling records. And that liberates me to feel OK about people downloading stuff freely, because I know they’re just excited about music. Scene: So tell me about the live Supersunnyspeedgraphic performance you did for MySpace last Tuesday. It was done in your Nashville recording studio, right? Folds: Yeah, we filled the place up. There were about a couple hundred people, but it looked like more than that. And the first 30 people that showed up who could play four chords got to be in the guitar orchestra. It was on MySpace. It was simultaneous with the release of the record. The record came out on Tuesday and this broadcast was at the same time. It felt like some kind of Elvis TV special or something. I don’t know how many people it reached on the Internet, because it was the first time they’d done that with the massive satellite thing out back. It will come out as a DVD later too. Scene: You seem to be really into the Internet music thing. Folds: The Internet is reaching enough people to make it significant now. At the same time it’s not controlled yet. During the webcast, we did a lot of bizarre things that would have been censored immediately for television. And not even censored because they were offensive or anything, but because people are just in this headspace. It’s like “Oh, that’s weird.” Scene: But what if those first 30 people just suck at guitar? Folds: Actually, they ended up being session players because it’s Nashville. This is guitar town. Everyone and their guitar, they were really good. And they were so happy to be there. I wish we’d had more for them to play. I picked four songs for them and we had spots where they stuck out and did their thing. It was such a great experience. You know, I think broadcast television at one time would have been like that when everyone was still excited about it, but it’s down to such a science now. Scene: I saw you on Conan recently. You wore a pirate outfit with an eye patch and sword. What was that about? Folds: The video for “Learn to Live With What You Are” is getting ready to come out. That’s the single. And people will see, it has a pirate in it, so it’ll tie in. But I don’t feel good about the music when I’m on those shows. So something like a pirate costume helps. If I watch the Conan show back I’ll probably be like, well, that was a fairly spiritually flat performance. I mean, I sang relatively in tune. There were a couple flat moments here and there, everyone does that. Fuck it, it was fine. But I find that if I push really hard on television, the overemoting sounds fake. And it if I play it chill, which is how I feel, which is more honest, it doesn’t pop on TV. So I don’t know. There’s no room for me on TV…. A performance is about the moment. It doesn’t need to be recorded, it doesn’t need to have people remember or know about it. There’s something about television that takes the moment away completely. The audience just saw some dude walk on in a pirate suit and thought it was funny. But “Learn to Live With What You Are” happens to be a really well crafted song. So at least that counts. But I can’t say that I wasn’t dead behind the eyes, so— Scene: Well, you had an eye patch on, so we couldn’t tell. Folds: Ha, yeah, I was dead behind the eye. Scene: I heard you shot part of your new music video at the Villager in Hillsboro Village. Folds: That was our bar scene. We also went downtown with the pirate costume and a kiddie bike and I road down Broadway at about 11 o’clock on a Saturday night. People didn’t know who I was so they were just yelling “Arghh!” and stuff. Folds: That was our bar scene. We also went downtown with the pirate costume and a kiddie bike and I road down Broadway at about 11 o’clock on a Saturday night. People didn’t know who I was so they were just yelling “Arghh!” and stuff.Scene: Tell me about the song “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You.” Folds: It’s about anybody who elevates themselves through making someone else feel like they aren’t up on something, or that they try too hard or that they’re too interested or they tuck their shirt in when they’re not supposed to. There’s always someone cooler than that person too, and if they’re going to play that game, then they’re going to feel like a dickhead. You see soccer moms now dressed in ringer tees, kinda looking like Sonic Youth from 10 years ago, and it’s not that becoming on them. Scene: You’re working on another album right now—will it be along the same lines as Songs for Silverman or Supersunnyspeedgraphic? Folds: The next record is going to be much different. People who think and talk about music and then turn their mouths and pens to mind will notice that there’s never been a pattern with me. It’s not like I’ve gotten more and more this way, or more and more that way. My latest endeavors have been Internet-only EPs that were done really quickly, a William Shatner record and a fairly stoic studio album. People tend to look at the stoic studio album and go “Oh, he’s kind of deciding he’s Elton John,” or something. Scene: And they’re overlooking all the other stuff. Folds: Yeah. The stoic studio album is my day job. It’s just another album. Right after we did the Reinhold Messner record, I went and did a very poppy, produced record called Rockin’ the Suburbs. The album before had been recorded in my house. There’s no pattern. Music writers and people who want to catalog and talk about these things would like to find a pattern. There’s nothing more fun than to give them Songs for Silverman because it’s laidback and stoic. I say stoic because it’s composed—it’s on purpose. For better or worse, I think that’s a good album and that’s where my head was at. But they wanted to hear that, it seems, and go “Ah, he’s gotten old—chuck this guy off because we’ve got to make room for something new.” And that’s fine, but the next one is going to be totally different. Scene: It seems like you get one idea and then you run with it, and then when that’s over you go on to the next one. Folds: Oh yeah. I sort of veer off into the ditch on the side of the road and then get back and veer into the other ditch. But it’s better than always staying in the middle. Folds: Yeah. The stoic studio album is my day job. It’s just another album. Right after we did the Reinhold Messner record, I went and did a very poppy, produced record called Rockin’ the Suburbs. The album before had been recorded in my house. There’s no pattern. Music writers and people who want to catalog and talk about these things would like to find a pattern. There’s nothing more fun than to give them Songs for Silverman because it’s laidback and stoic. I say stoic because it’s composed—it’s on purpose. For better or worse, I think that’s a good album and that’s where my head was at. But they wanted to hear that, it seems, and go “Ah, he’s gotten old—chuck this guy off because we’ve got to make room for something new.” And that’s fine, but the next one is going to be totally different. Scene: It seems like you get one idea and then you run with it, and then when that’s over you go on to the next one. Folds: Oh yeah. I sort of veer off into the ditch on the side of the road and then get back and veer into the other ditch. But it’s better than always staying in the middle.