Interview Ben Folds

Since Ben Folds Five's breakup in 2000, frontman Ben Folds has distinguished his solo career with curious collaborations, three poignant and goofy records, and, along the way, a good number of pranks. The North Carolina piano-pop wisecracker has had a knack for going where few musicians dare, like recruiting “Weird Al” Yankovic to direct the video for the Rockin' The Suburbs title track, joining forces with William Shatner for 2004’s Has Been, and tricking his fans by recording and leaking an entire set of fake songs posed as his 2008 full-length Way To Normal. Folds’ latest bit of mischief evolved from a fortuitous Internet meme, when many mistakenly speculated that he was the mysterious, hooded piano player named “Merton” who logs onto Chatroulette to improvise songs on the piano for random strangers. The misattribution gave Folds the idea to perform similar Chatroulette sessions live, which quickly became mega-popular YouTube videos. Before Folds’ stint at The Vic tonight through Wednesday, The A.V. Club talked to him about his latest record, Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella, why he finds "Weird Al" endearing, and how mono can save the music industry.

The A.V. Club: Has the Chatroulette thing run its course? Are you finished doing that at shows? 
 
Ben Folds: I did that for a few nights, and we screen-captured a little bit of it, but the computer would crash and we probably lost three quarters of what happened. We got really lucky on the first night and that was the first video. Then the next three nights there were so many dicks that we had to skip over, and then people were "nexting" us a lot, and then the Internet would drop out. [Laughs.] It was fun even when it was not working. Who's going to come next, how are they going to react? It was fun, but I believe this is Merton's genre and I’m a tourist and I’m out. 
 
AVC: How was it suddenly being credited for an Internet meme that you had no involvement with?
 
BF: Yeah, that was part of the whole thing, let’s just do it onstage and people will know immediately. All they have to do is compare him and know it’s not the same person and have some fun with it. I've been making up songs onstage for my whole career, so it really wasn't a stretch.
 
AVC: You have to admit that there is some resemblance.
 
BF: Well, you put a white guy with glasses on and a hood, and there’s not much left to see, you know? 
 
AVC: I thought the voice was a little similar. 
 
BF: Well maybe, but then again, it’s kind of like you put beginners on the guitar, and they play the same thing because that’s where their hands fall. Things fall a certain way, you phrase a certain way because you're left with very few routes of possibilities and escapes melodically. When you sit down, you start to sound a little bit like Steve Martin. [Impersonating Steve Martin.] "Hey, hey! Everyone’s going to have a good time!” That’s what people do when you're rendered melody-less because of your situation. To me, Merton and I don’t seem much alike.

AVC: When you're effortlessly improvising onstage like that, it looks like you could write an album in a day. 
 
BF: Yeah, I have. I was talking to an improv actor, a really good one, Jason Sudeikis from Saturday Night Live, about improv, and we were talking about how it’s a state of mind. When you're an actor or a musician, composing or whatever, when you're in that mode, when you're relaxed and the Zen shit is going on, it can all happen absolutely immediately. Sometimes you can write an album. My joke’s always been, “Well, an album is 45 minutes long, so really it should take—you've got to rewind and mix and stuff like that—it should take three hours to make the record.”
 
AVC: Is there a concept for your upcoming album with Nick Hornby?
 
BF: There are themes one would recognize, but I don’t think there's any conscious attempt to put a thread from one thing to another. Some of the songs at their best sound like they came up out of the ground. They sound very right to me. They don’t sound like we had choices to make. Like when you hear something like The Beatles' “Revolution” and you're bummed to hear an alternate version that’s slower or faster or something. These songs don’t seem like there's anything else.
 
AVC: Have you had any particularly painful recording sessions? 
 
BF: Recording is as painful as you want to make it. I don’t regret my recordings at all, but I’m a fool if I don’t look back and say, “Oh, you know what? This could have been captured this way.” Doesn’t mean that I want to change my records, it just means that I’ve learned something. What I’ve learned is, I have to go through the process of spending a lot of time on a bad idea and having to take the time to decouple myself from it. To be able to say, “I know I spent $20,000 on strings, I know I spent all year on that thing, but it sucks.” I gotta have time to fuck it up, go into a far corner, and then quickly get it back in the road and make it kickass.

 
AVC: Between your recent album with university groups and your time as a judge on NBC’s The Sing-Off, you’ve become a champion for a cappella music. Why? 
 
BF: Well, I’ve always loved vocals. Left to my own devices, especially in the beginning of my career, there would have been more vocals than anyone would have been able to stand. I used to make four tracks of myself signing all the parts. 

I wasn’t really aware of an a cappella movement until I was sent a link to a Columbia University group doing “Still Fighting It.” And it's really good, and I thought, “Something about this is better than what I did.” And I noticed that here were all these other groups doing my music, hundreds of a cappella groups, and so many of the versions were really valid, if not better.
 
AVC: Why don’t more artists try a cappella?
 
BF: Well, it’s hard. You don’t have to know anything about voice leading to play C-G-E-A on the guitar. The human voice, when you put four, six parts in, requires that each voice move according to the way Bach would do it, for instance. It’s half-step, chromatic. Seems very simple in its movement, and very complex to make those chords move around the way you want them to. These kids know more about music than most pop stars.

You know what’s funny is that it’s considered novelty music, when actually there’s nothing more novelty to me than someone shaking their ass with 30 video screens behind them with a bunch of makeup and auto-tuners and computers playing their music. That’s novelty music. That’s fucking gay. But kids getting together and hashing out this voice leading, singing it in tune, and delivering it with no net? [Laughs.] How is that novelty? That’s fucking cool. So I realize that the conventions of a cappella might put the rock stars off a bit. I still haven’t seen Glee, but isn’t it about a cappella groups or singers or something? 
 
AVC: Yeah, I think so. 
 
BF: Well, people seem to be into the idea. And there’s a reason for it: The economy crashes and everyone's going to have to put their instruments up because they can’t afford guitar strings.

 
AVC: You've had a long line of collaborations with people who are perceived as being musical outcasts: “Weird Al” Yankovic, William Shatner, a cappella groups. Are you attracted to proving their stigmas wrong? 
 
BF: It’s possible, but I think I’m attracted to people that operate as islands. They’ve built something on an insistence that what they're doing is right for them. At this point, is there anyone more critically unimpeachable than “Weird Al”? There really isn't. Who's going to say anything bad about “Weird Al”? Who beats up “Weird Al” on Pitchfork? It's not going to happen. And the reason is because he doesn’t give a flying shit what people think on any level. He just continues to do what he does, and it’s goofy. There’s nothing cooler or more endearing. I also like to work with anyone who has a story, because so many really great pop, indie acts, instrumental groups, really don’t have a story.
 
AVC: They're kind of persona-less, at times. 
 
BF: Yeah or, if you think of someone like Beck, or Björk, or Radiohead—we're all old-timers in a way. They’ve been doing it for a long time at this point. I think they’re all great. But their last four or five albums each—could you really say what they're all about? What their stories are? How they've changed in their life? It’s very difficult, because with books or anything, you have themes and then those themes play out. I like to work with people who have a story because I’ve got the vessel. I’m like the dude that’s got the PA system. He gets the band gig because his mother’s got a garage they can rehearse in, and he’s got a PA system, so he gets to be in the band. I love working with with anybody who's still fresh into their story. I’ve got the vessel to help bring that out.  
 
AVC: Is there anybody that you've talked about doing collaborations with that just hasn’t happened yet? 
 
BF: Mike Skinner of The Streets. It was just a scheduling trainwreck and then the moment passed. That was one where I really think we would have had something. It could still happen, but there was a moment where it would have been the most appropriate.

AVC: Anything else you want to talk about? 
 
BF: I like mono recordings. Yeah, I’m a big fan of mono. I think mono would save the music business. What we've got going for us in the music world is ideas. What we don’t have going for us is the complexity in which we choose to put those through, that eats the ideas like a machine before they come out the other end. Mono solves that, because sonically it has complete phase integrity. [Laughs.] If you can’t fit something into your arrangement, just put it in the left channel. Put the other thing in the right channel. But if you were Buddy Holly, and you have a great idea, and you played the idea in a skating rink, and they recorded it and put it on the radio, then your album’s done. That’s why mono is good, because you don't begin to make choices.

Technically there’re a lot of reasons why mono is really amazing too, it just has to do with space linearity and polarity and all this kind of shit. Which just means on a cheap system, it sounds fucking great. You listen to an old Elvis record on your computer speakers—it’s gonna rule. You got all these guys spending literally $500,000 on mixes to make it sound good on your computer, and it sounds like ass. So, I’m taking mono. [Laughs.]