At the Bergen Performing Arts Center, in Englewood, New Jersey, the singer-songwriter Ben Folds sat at a piano and picked out the opening bars of “Kristine from the 7th Grade,” a delicate, mordantly funny ballad about a former classmate turned MAGA troll. (“The misspellings, they must be on purpose / We went to a good school, Kristine.”) Then he swiftly ran his fingers down every key, pointer over thumb, hard, testing for trouble. “Two keys are sticking,” he announced.
Offstage, a sound engineer yelled to him, wondering if the piano sounded “bright”—too brassy for the sound system.
“Icepick!” Folds, a slight figure in bookworm glasses and with haystack hair, called back.
It was musician code: he suspected that a technician had applied lacquer to the instrument’s felt hammers, producing a shrill sonic overkill. Folds, a virtuosic keyboardist who broke out as an indie-rock singer in the nineteen-nineties, first in the band Ben Folds Five, then as a solo artist—and who, during a mischievous Andy Kaufman-influenced rise to fame, had a phase of tossing stools at pianos—was unconcerned. The sound was “pretty awful, but I pretend it’s a clavinet”—a sturdy nineteen-seventies funk keyboard that could take some abuse—“and get on with it,” he said later.
Just before Folds stepped onstage for his show, his tour manager held up his phone to show him the news: the U.S. had bombed Iran. The set that followed was cathartic and percussive, full of ballads that split like piñatas into cascading arpeggios, often concluding with a crashed elbow or hammered fist. The Gen X audience knew every word; whenever Folds side-eyed his congregants, they chimed in with the next line.
Afterward, in the dressing room, Folds sipped a ginger ale. He wore a beige T-shirt that read “24th Annual Derby Cholla Bay Sportsmen’s Club 1979,” with a cartoon of a pelican in a sombrero. Nearby, on a folding chair, sat Lindsey Kraft, a TV actress who was Folds’s opening act and is also his girlfriend; he’d been helping her create a one-woman confessional musical called “We’ve Been Here Before.”
“We’ve known each other for six years and gradually realized we were a couple,” Folds explained, dryly, with a trace of his native North Carolina in his voice. “Which made our significant others mad as hell.”
The revelation wasn’t a surprise; Folds, who has been divorced five times, has long specialized in bleak, candid autopsies of failed love. (Before performing his song “Fragile,” he told the crowd, “There will be quite a few people here tonight who are in an abusive relationship—and you’ve come together to the show. In which case, this song is for both of you.”) In middle age, he’s diversified, writing a memoir, mentoring a-cappella groups on NBC’s “The Sing-Off,” and scoring Peanuts specials on Apple TV+. Collaboration wasn’t always easy, though; Folds had struggled to write an upbeat final anthem about Charlie Brown saving his summer camp. “I tried a disco version. They turned that down,” he said, with a shrug.
He was most proud of his eight years, starting in 2017, as the Kennedy Center’s first artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra, bringing in pop artists and introducing new audiences to classical music. When Donald Trump took over, he quit. “Not for me,” Folds wrote on Instagram, later decrying the President’s “authoritarian instinct.” Since then, he’d beefed up security.
He marvelled at how dark the landscape had turned under a reality-TV-judge President. Folds’s own time in the reality mines was a mixed bag, although he was glad he’d been able to sneak music theory on to “The Sing-Off.” “Everyone was, like, ‘Bring it!’ or ‘You’re pitchy,’ ” he said. When the network pressured him to eliminate certain contestants, the producer Mark Burnett became his unlikely hero: “He came to my trailer and said, ‘You won’t have to hear a single word from NBC ever again.’ And then he started talking about the Bible.”
Kraft loves reality shows, but they aren’t Folds’s jam. “ ‘Wings of Voice’ was a good one,” he joked, about Nathan Fielder’s fake competition on his series “The Rehearsal.”
Folds was looking forward to doing an upcoming live stream from Washington, D.C., critiquing Trump’s crackdown and releasing a new orchestral concert album recorded at the Kennedy Center. Heading to his tour bus, he expressed frustration with pop stars who are too detached to take a stand. “They’re just, like—babies,” he said. “Dead behind the eyes, you know?” Lately, he’d been dwelling on an old favorite, Joni Mitchell’s “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” the jazz experiment that pushed her beyond industry acceptability. “It’s been in my head all month now,” he said. “Not just one song—the whole album. It’s so unusual, her piano playing, all those nines.” ♦
