Ben Folds Brings What Matters Most To Collaborate With Dallas Symphony Orchestra

An old axiom says that “growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.” It’s a sentiment with which Ben Folds probably agrees.

After all, this is an artist who, in his precocious youth, performed concerts that often culminated in his flinging his piano stool at his instrument, and the same artist who covered Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” in entirely unironic fashion.

While he hasn’t completely abandoned his antic ways – as recently as 2018, when he performed at Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall, Folds was still indulging audiences in impromptu renditions of “Rock This Bitch” – the now 57-year-old singer-songwriter, pianist, podcaster, author, arts advocate, photographer, occasional actor and educator has found a way to reconcile his impish impulses with a maturity born of many years lived.

It’s how Folds, currently touring behind What Matters Most, his fifth studio album and first true solo effort in 15 years, can speak eloquently about the intent behind a collection led by a wryly comic single (“Exhausting Lover”). It’s a song about the dangers of romance on the road and features the lyric, “Then she handed me a Hot Wheels track/I said, girl that’s pretty weird.”

The North Carolina native will return to North Texas for his second appearance of the year – the first was an intimate, sold-out stop at Oak Cliff’s Kessler Theater for KXT 91.7 FM listeners – to perform alongside the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Oct. 20-21. The Dallas dates are, for the moment, his final scheduled U.S. appearances of 2023.

“Part of the reason I really felt motivated to make the most recent album was – it’s just a fact that the kind of craft, the type of craft, style of craft that I do, that I grew up in, was a student of and have practiced for a good 30 years of my adult life is waning, is moving out,” Folds says from a Minneapolis tour stop. “If I have something to say, I should really double down on the craft … and just go, ‘Look, this is an example of craft; it’s just an offering.'”

That focus on making the songs as sturdy as possible resulted in Folds’ most stirring record in decades, arguably since 2005’s Songs for Silverman. Tucking political commentary amid the black comedy of “Kristine from the 7th Grade,” or casting a nostalgic backward glance in the gorgeous “Winslow Gardens,” Folds makes the most of his latest album.
He does allow that this new LP may be the last such effort from him for the foreseeable future: “Back in my day, you could make a record that littered the world,” Folds says, “but that’s not really that easy to do for anybody now – you tend to make a record [and] that’s just a drop in the ocean.”

Even in Ben Folds Five, the trio that first catapulted Folds to fame 30 years ago, he was able to move easily between the sober (“Brick,” the band’s inescapable late ’90s hit, alludes to a young couple’s furtive trip to an abortion clinic), the sneering (“Song for the Dumped”) and the deeply silly (“Army”) with relative ease.

But as Folds readily notes, pop music has moved away from smart, sharply rendered material, becoming more enamored of mood than melody and fascinated by the face out front and less concerned with what it may have to say. To reach for another axiom, to everything there is a season. Or, to put it more plainly in music business terms, what begins with a focus on sales can shift in favor of self-expression.

“I spend my time making sure that part of my audience [is] actually willing and ready to talk about songs, and songwriting, and the making of records in a way that’s not built around selling it, but is rather built around helping them, should they want to employ any of this stuff that takes a lifetime,” Folds says.

In the last 20 years, Folds has become a passionate champion of the arts broadly, but specifically civic orchestras across the country, frequently performing multiple nights with them and exhorting concert attendees to patronize the ensembles at times that acts like his aren’t sharing the stage.

“The miracle of the organization of, like, 80 players who are virtuosos, essentially – it’s pretty great,” Folds says. “It’s really powerful, and it’s very civilized. I mean that not in the fancy connotation of civilized, elitist, but as actual organization. … What I love about the orchestra is it is this great symbol of civilization, like it has to work that way. … Ultimately, they want to resolve dissonance, which is what music does. They want to play in concert, they want to play in harmony.”

Folds’ greatest strength is arguably taking such heady concepts and making them both palatable and relatable for his audiences, which teem with diehard fans who’ve come of age alongside him and might now be bringing children of their own to such showcases.

In that way, Folds has smoothly pivoted from provocateur to professor, providing the sort of enlightenment in these austere settings he’s long been sharing on record – if only you cared to look and listen beyond the witty punchlines and arresting melodies. As Folds has matured, so, too, has his perspective on being acknowledged – or not – as a songwriter.

“I really didn’t see a lot of recognition of my songwriting, especially when the band was around,” Folds says. “It really wasn’t what was talked about – the piano got talked about a lot; there was cuss words in [the songs]; the name of the band’s Ben Folds Five; it wasn’t grunge – there was a lot of things that were talked about. … When you’re writing properly, it should be seamless and thankless, the same way as parenting anything, parenting songs the same way.”

But then, as now, Folds knows enough to understand once the songs are out in the world, they are no longer fully his. What he can control, and strived to do with the 10 tracks on What Matters Most, was to make the material worthy of the audience’s attention.

The days of gleefully smashing 88 keys for attention have long since passed – what most matters now to Ben Folds is the ability to provide a substantial return on fans’ emotional investment. Or, as the axiom goes, “Art is man’s expression of joy in labor.”

“There’s not really a world in which you can just walk out and ask for people’s attention and time all the time,” Folds says. “If the listener isn’t getting some sense of entertainment, talent, storytelling, something that they can reflect on, then it’s not worth their time and they don’t pay attention to it, right? So, how do you deliver that? Well, you have to deliver that with some craft, and that should be on your shoulders.”

Ben Folds performs with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on Friday, Oct. 20, and Saturday, Oct. 21, at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. Tickets start at $51. Folds will also hold a meet-and-greet and autograph session at 3 p.m. Saturday at Good Records, 9026 Garland Road.