Ben Folds
QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane
Tuesday 17th May 2011 & Wednesday 18th May 2011
‘Belinda’, the last track on Ben Folds’ most recent album, Lonely Avenue, is possibly the best song Folds has ever written (with lyrics by English novelist Nick Hornby). The chorus of the song ‘Belinda’ goes like this: “Belinda, I love you, I need you, don’t leave me”. Which sounds straightforward enough. Except that Folds and Hornby’s song ‘Belinda’ is about a 1970s one-hit-wonder with a song called ‘Belinda’. And so the chorus quoted above is the chorus to the made-up 1970s one hit wonder, rather than the chorus to the Ben Folds song ‘Belinda’; the only place that ‘proper’ chorus gets sung is in the second line of the first verse. That’s right – it’s a chorus that is not a chorus. Instead, the chorus of the Ben Folds song is the chorus to the song ‘Belinda’ that the song’s character, the 1970s one-hit-wonder, would "prefer" to sing today, forty years older and wiser: “Belinda, I loved you, I’m sorry that I left you”.
Confused yet? Well, there’s a further level of meta involved: Ben Folds himself, commercially, is more or less a one-hit-wonder—his only major U.S. hit was the 1997 ballad ‘Brick’. So, last Tuesday night at QPAC in Brisbane, when Folds sang ‘Brick’ later in the set, you had to wonder how he felt about that song in 2011. Would he change any of the lyrics if he could? Folds has changed lyrics before; he reworked his innocuous 2001 hit ‘Rockin’ The Suburbs’ in 2006 to feature more social criticism, with (prescient) lines about “watching Mommy bouncing checks while Daddy juggles credit cards”. Perhaps, today, he would make the abortion subtext in ‘Brick’ more obvious, or perhaps make what is a profoundly ambiguous song, more transparent.
In any case, outside of the Charlie Kaufman stuff, ‘Belinda’ still happens to be a great, emotional, ballad. Folds’ vocals and melodies very effectively get across the emptiness of the one-hit-wonder and our narrator's regret over some poor life decisions (such as leaving the ‘Belinda’ of the song’s title for a stewardess with “big breasts and a nice smile, and no kids either”). And watching Ben Folds live over two nights at QPAC (he played ‘Belinda’ both nights, and obviously seemed proud of the song, going into a lengthy explanation on Tuesday of the songwriting techniques he used to set Hornby’s lyrics to music), it struck me that Folds’ ability to balance the intellectual and funny against the emotional is his greatest strength. He has the rare ability to make a crowd laugh out loud during fundamentally sad songs.
And it’s not only in his songwriting where Folds is acutely aware of the balance between funny and emotional; his setlists effortlessly segue from sentimentality to cynicism. On Wednesday night, he played ‘Gracie’, an unabashedly sentimental ode to his daughter. A song that strikes many (well, by that I mean me) as way too soppy—as songs about children have a tendency to do. But, of course, he followed up ‘Gracie’ with an anecdote about how, when he was trying to get his daughter to sleep, he would sing her a Randy Newman song, ‘Old Man’, as a lullaby (which he sung a capella to illustrate the point). Of course, ‘Old Man’ is about telling an old man on his deathbed that nobody will miss him; exactly the kind of thing likely to appeal to cynics turned off by the earlier song’s sentimentality.
This was also a concert where (on both nights) he covered Ke$ha’s song ‘Sleazy’, telling the crowd that they had decided at one stage to cover the current #1 song on the US iTunes store, which happened—that hour—to be ‘Sleazy’. However fortuitous the choice of cover, there’s actually quite a lot of similarities between Folds and Ke$ha; both are from the South of the U.S., both make music full of songcraft, both have a certain devil-may-care attitude, and both have laugh-out-loud funny lyrics. After all, one of the lyrics in ‘Sleazy’ goes: “You can’t imagine the immensity of the fuck I’m not giving”. Mind you, I’m not sure the cover worked spectacularly well; Folds’ version of the song seemed torn between highlighting the songcraft of the original and the ridiculousness of the original, ending up not quite nailing either. Perhaps Ke$ha songs are not the best vehicles for Folds’ trademark contrast of humour with sincere emotion? After playing the song on Wednesday night and talking about having dinner with Ke$ha, he then quite sincerely recommended her latest album to an (obviously slightly appalled) audience, largely made up of late-20/early-30-something alternative rock nerds.
The joke in the name ‘Ben Folds Five’ was, of course, that they only had three members. And, for the first time, Folds was touring Australia as a five-piece. There was the usual bass and drums, along with a guitarist-slash-percussionist and a keyboard player-slash-French horn player. The extra musicians—especially the French horn player—added much to some arrangements (especially the newer songs), and generally stayed out of the way when Folds played the old three-piece Ben Folds Five tunes. The musicians were effortlessly able to follow Folds on some of his wilder adventures in impromptu making-up-songs-on-the-spot, though the drummer occasionally seemed uncertain on the slower tunes; caught between setting his own rhythm and playing along to Folds’ piano playing. Support act Kate Miller-Heidke guested on a few songs to great effect in the middle of the set; her uncanny ability to sound like a theremin livened up the Divine Comedy cover ‘Songs Of Love’, while her natural quirkiness made her a perfect fit for the nervy, queasy duet ‘You Don’t Know Me’.
Apart from the balance between funny and sad, between sentimental and cynical, Folds kept a tight balance between old and new. Though many of the crowd were there to hear the old stuff (the couple sitting next to me on the Tuesday night were very excited indeed to hear Folds’ first single, ‘Underground’, and sang along loudly), the show didn’t feel like a pandering greatest hits set. In fact, on Tuesday night, Folds went for most of the show without playing a Ben Folds Five tune, and it didn’t even occur to me that this was the case until he actually played one (‘Lullaby’). That said, between Tuesday and Wednesday night, there was a good smattering of material that he hadn’t played live in Australia in some time, including a piano-pyrotechnics-filled ‘Philosophy’, an impromptu solo acoustic guitar version of ‘Jackson Cannery’, and a furious ‘One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces’, which exploded into the kind of noise that pianos really shouldn’t be capable of making.
But the highlight of the two shows, for me, was a little moment on the Wednesday night. Next to the usual grand piano, Folds had a Nord Lead synthesiser full of retro analog synth sounds, a new toy which he had delightedly explored several times during both nights. After about two-thirds of the concert, Folds realised that the crowd might not be finding the synthesiser quite as fascinating as he did, and so moved the keyboard to the side of stage out of reach. During the encore, playing the finale in the song ‘Underground’, Folds clearly decided he wanted to play a part on the Nord Lead synthesiser. So, during the outro section of the song, he let the band play through the chords while he rushed to the side of stage, picked up the synth and placed it on top of the piano. After taking time to make sure the thing wasn’t going to fall off, he then got back into playing the complicated jazz chords on the piano. As the song tumbled towards the conclusion, his decision to go to the effort of getting the synthesiser seemed more and more puzzling. Why would he go to all that trouble to retrieve the thing if he wasn’t going to play it? Then, suddenly, he switched to the synthesiser to play the very final note in the song.
Tim Byron