As he releases the Christmas album Sleigher, the singer/songwriter talks Kit Richardson through some of the pivotal songs in his life and how the artists who wrote them inspired his own work.
It’s five days ‘til Christmas, and Ben Folds has just landed in another hotel room.
The piano-pop stalwart has been touring for a gruelling nine months, with a glut of dates around the festive season to promote his new Christmas album, Sleigher. I ask if he gets to meet many people ‘on the ground’, so to speak - especially during such a transitory time in American history. “I think you meet audiences, not people,” he explains, speaking to me from Jacksonville, Florida.
“Every night, every city has a different vibe, you know? And that's often affected by one or two people. If you've got two incredibly loud but well-meaning drunks near the front of the stage, even in an audience of thousands, that'll really tip the feeling of it.”
A pause. “I find it interesting; that’s often how society works too. You’ve got a couple of really loud people out there, you know, in the world, and they can tip the boat. But you have to remember - ‘OK, they’re not the whole audience.’”
Folds admits that he initially pitched Sleigher as a cheeky Buy One / Get One Free offer to his label; a way of securing extra funding for his previous record, What Matters Most. “I really felt the album deserved live performances - which is actually very expensive. The room full of talent, the engineers that know how to get the right sound. It's old fashioned, so you would think it was cheaper, but it isn't.”
“Anyway, I was asking the label for more dough, and I knew I’d hit the ceiling of what they could give me. So I said, ‘Why don't I throw in a Christmas album?’. I thought I could rob the Christmas budget to do the things I want to do, and I’d turn in a totally acceptable record.” He laughs, conspiratorially, then straightens himself. “Now? I feel like it's one of my best projects.”
Having taught songwriting for some years, Folds knows the power of a good prompt. And Christmas provided a powerful one. “There’s something so neat about the fact that Christmas is the same every year, yet we're different”, he explains.
“It’s so consistent: the same songs, same colours, same traditions. It's visceral. It becomes a point in the year you can measure your own change against.”
For many, it's also a time where familial joy and mouldering resentment catalyse - the ideal breeding ground for the sort of playful cynicism Folds is known for. On Sleigher, there are stories of dissociating through Christmas dinner alone; of grimacing through the chaos of relations reunited.
Folds’ Nine Songs choices include similarly complex stories of love and pity: grief and new beginnings. I ask him how he feels about the more one-note happiness of the season’s most omnipresent festive hits.
“I generally find that kind of happiness creepy. Because no one's that damn happy, either!” he laughs. “When you hear something that happy, what you’re hearing is someone really trying to avoid everything else. People feel all emotions in one day. We’re complicated, chemical beings. And I think the job of a songwriter is to find a combination of notes and words that can unlock that.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard” by Joni Mitchell
BEN FOLDS: I remember first hearing Blue in high school. It was not like any music that anybody I knew listened to - I don’t even know why I first bought it, I think it was at a yard sale. But I listened to Blue on repeat, every day: side A, in the dark, going to sleep. Then get up, turn it over, listen to side B. I’d go to sleep and wake up in the morning and the turntable was still click-click-clicking.
It's such a great song because it's like you're getting a letter and a story in one. And I think when you're younger, songs are your friends. You're taking a lot more out than the writer probably ever intended, especially with something this conversational. Joni just dispensed with anything formal. How ever many lyrics she wants to shove in, she was going to figure out a way to do it.
BEST FIT: You said it was very different to what everyone was listening to around you. How so?
Oh yeah - it opened a door for me as a kid. Everything at that time had that iambic pentameter, Dr Seuss kind of vibe. Stravinsky, years before, referred to that as ‘the tyranny of the bar line’. I always loved music that goes against that.
And when someone's speaking to you, in real life, you don't know how long they're going to take a breath for. That'll tell you if they've been thinking about what they’re about to say, for example. It's real unpredictable, the way that people speak. And so Joni Mitchell folds that into a song, and it gives her such great license.
“Send in the Clowns” by Barbra Streisand
BEN FOLDS: I don't really know a lot about musical theatre. I ought to, but I've probably seen eight musicals. So that's like one every 20 years. Not great.
But Stephen Sondheim is obviously a damn genius who knew exactly what he was doing, and there's so many versions of that song. The one I first remember hearing on the radio was by Judy Collins, but once I heard the Barbra Streisand one, that was the last one I wanted to hear.
I'm a pretty big Barbra Streisand fan, but I didn't know that one for a while, until I decided I needed to listen to some Stephen Sondheim. And I thought, ‘Well, let me listen to what Barbra Streisand did with Sondheim… that will probably make me like it more.’
Do you sing at all?
BEST FIT: I do.
So if you just were tasked with copying that for a movie, you'd feel so radical. [Folds demonstrates Streisand’s vocal control] Her voice is such an instrument really. It's crazy what she's doing on that song. But when someone’s got the greatest voice on Earth, they just make it sound easy.
“Between the Bars” by Elliott Smith
BEN FOLDS: I love Elliott’s music, but this is the album I’ve listened to the most. His self-titled record was the album all the cool kids were listening to, but I discovered that a little later.
It's interesting contrasting this with Joni. Because Joni is really enunciating words in a way that you feel you must listen to what she's saying. Elliott - even though his words were really good - he's sort of a constant vowel sound. All I hear is vowels, and the feeling of it.
I don’t know if that was intentional or not. I think Elliott thought he was doing one thing, and it was hitting people in a different way. Which is totally fine… you can't control people's reactions to your work.
Anyway, that’s the feel I got from him, especially after touring together a little bit. He was such a student of music. I mean, he could play Rachmaninoff on the piano… I can’t do that.
BEST FIT: You toured together?
Elliot and I toured together back in the day, yeah. In fact, one day I was backstage with him, and I wanted to ask him if he would play the song “Alameda”. And he said, “Well, the drummer and the bass player don't know that one”. Well, I figured it wasn’t going to happen. But about 10 minutes later, he was on the other side of the cloth divider that separated our halves of the dressing room, and he sang the whole song, just so I could hear it. It was a really nice thing.
He was super shy, you know. “Between the Bars” was a bit of a breakthrough for him, because it was in a big movie [Good Will Hunting]. I think he was up for some award on it, which was probably pretty surreal for him.
“I Can’t Write Left-Handed” by Bill Withers
BEN FOLDS: There are a few really amazing Vietnam songs that aren't ‘the big ones.’ And to me, this is one of them. I mean, the idea that there was a guy whose main concern about having his arm blown off in the war was not being able to write with it.
That specificity is what makes it. There are those big motifs you get everywhere else - of sending the boys off to war, all the political stuff. But this angle makes it so much more human.
It’s like if you're making a movie, you want to start with a small detail - like a discarded Coke bottle - and then back up. I mean, your mind goes into places when you're in real life.
BEST FIT: I love writers who write in specificities. There’s a degree of detail that can make a song more relatable than something technically relatable.
Uh huh. In fact, I remember knowing some kids that had done film school, and you know, they were talking about how all the original projects in the first couple years are on big topics. But by the time they get to the end of their studies, they're whittling it down to very small ideas. That's where you get people. That's where I get got, anyway.
“(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding
BEN FOLDS: It’s a perfect story. It's just awesome. And his voice - I know a lot of people have covered it, but with Otis singing it, it's just so real.
And as you get older, I mean… I’ve had my moments of wishing life could be like that; that I could go get lost and just sit on a dock somewhere, swinging my legs over the edge, after losing everything.
To get to have a whole new beginning. Any song of loss is always about gain; any song of ending is always about a beginning.
“American Tune” by Paul Simon
BEST FIT: I’m assuming this is a childhood fave?
BEN FOLDS: Actually, I didn’t hear this when it came out. I sought it out when I started to think more about being a songwriter.
I was writing songs when I was, like, eight or nine years old, and I thought they had good melodies and stuff. But I started really considering myself a songwriter when I was in my late teens, early 20s. And then I started listening to songs like a student - writing down the forms, and asking, ‘How are they doing that?’
And “American Tune” always stuck out to me. It has that combination of perspective - he dreams he’s flying, and then we’re back to his everyday weariness. That helicopter / microscope view.
I guess he’s of that same Joni Mitchell school of lyricism - very spacious. I’m fascinated with people who can do it in a couple words as well - you know, the tighter writers - but I like his looseness.
It stays that way throughout Paul Simon's career. Even by “You Can Call Me Al” he’s using these crazy strings of words. I can’t believe he got away with that on the radio; it sounded like beat poetry.
“Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen
BEST FIT: Full disclosure, I just can’t hack Leonard Cohen. So please convince me on this one.
BEN FOLDS: Well, the song itself, it just has so much in it. And it’s given me a lot. Sometimes I don't notice it until I'm inside one little lyric of my own song, and I go, ‘Oh, man, that was made possible by “Famous Blue Raincoat”’.
I recently performed this with the National Symphony Orchestra for a Leonard Cohen tribute night. That would have been your favourite night ever - all night, nothing but Leonard Cohen. [Laughs]
But I get it. There's something about Leonard Cohen’s work. It's not pretty, it’s like… bad breath music. But he's so fucking good with words and this song is absolute, state-of-the-art writing.
He starts with this small detail - “It’s four in the morning” - and with each narrowing of the lens, the picture gets bigger and bigger. Like the little reveal, “If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me”. It's as good as it gets for a certain kind of song.
I think there’s a degree of removal or distance in his music, emotionally, that just doesn’t resonate with me.
Well, that’s funny, because I would say British listeners have always seemed more willing than American audiences to embrace more intellectual writing. Neil Hannon [of The Divine Comedy] and I were on tour once, and we’d been taken on a detour to this kind of corporate blues club called House of Blues.
On the wall, they had a picture of some generic blues player from the 50s. And underneath it said, ‘Music is made with the heart, not the mind’. And Neil - who was grumpy from touring too much - he was like, “God, I want to get a marker and change that to ‘AND mind.” And I've always felt like, in general, an English audience thinks like that. In America, they just want more heart.
And this Canadian fella has gone all mind, hasn’t he? I think it's probably hard for a lot of people to hear the heart in it. He's really professorial in the way he delivers that song.
“Marie” by Randy Newman
BEN FOLDS: That’s another perfect song for me. It sounds like it's a love song to begin with, and it is, but it comes from such a place of weakness. He's a weak, weak character, and the only redemption he has is to admit that he's weak.
Performers mostly don't want to be seen as that fucking weak, because they have records to sell. You know, you're not gonna have Led Zeppelin up on stage like, [Folds does a remarkably accurate Robert Plant impression] ‘Baaaaaby, baaaaby, I'm a weak, I’m a weak man!” [Laughs]. That's just not marketable, you know. But Randy Newman didn't care.
So you get a song that's not full of fake vulnerability, it's actual real weakness. And I think that that makes for a beautiful song. Plus, the string arrangement is absolutely perfect.
“There She Goes” by The La’s
BEN FOLDS: Remember, at the end of the ‘80s, music on the radio, at least to me and anyone that I knew, was so fucking god-awful.
The ‘80s has great stuff, but right there at the end, when the only thing you find that you’d think was any good, was a song called “I Touch Myself”? We’d really hit rock bottom. And then this album came out and it just sounded like a new thing. I mean, ultimately, we would gravitate towards Nirvana and other stuff, but there were these early outliers of pop music - pop music that was so well composed, so well recorded.
Which is funny, because as far as I know, they were just a band of drunks and heroin addicts. Hang on… I don’t want these guys to sue me ….
Ben’s PR: I can confirm they had issues with drugs.
BEN FOLDS: Well, I saw one of their shows back in the day and… if they were sober, I don't even know what to say about how terrible they were. [Laughs]
But they made this beautiful album, and the legend goes that they barely got it recorded, and “There She Goes” wasn't even finished; it was almost a demo. The producer [Steve Lillywhite] was tasked with taking those tracks and trying to make something out of it - I guess “There She Goes” had to be repetitive, because this dude didn’t have anything else to work with.
But I think that gives it its magic. For a minute, when that record came out, it seemed like The La’s were saving music.
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