Ben Folds
Ben Folds
Benjamin Scott "Ben" Foldsis an American singer-songwriter and record producer. From 1995 to 2000, Folds was the frontman and pianist of the alternative rock band Ben Folds Five. After the group temporarily disbanded, Folds performed as a solo artist and has toured all over the world. The group reunited in 2011. He has also collaborated with musicians such as William Shatner, Regina Spektor and "Weird Al" Yankovic and undertaken experimental songwriting projects with authors such as Nick Hornby and Neil...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth12 September 1966
CityWinston-Salem, NC
CountryUnited States of America
With the a cappella groups, every voice is like one string on a guitar, one note on the piano, or one cymbal, and you don't have the luxury of falling back on anything.
People rush around in the summer to try and find like-minded musicians to put together. Packages are all the rage. I prefer keeping it smaller, having a tour that's manageable -- both for me and the audience -- and Rufus and I go together in certain ways. We're both out of step with any kind of music scene. We don't really fit in anywhere. I think we feel similarly disenfranchised -- in a good way. Also, I can listen to Rufus every night. That's important.
I was pretty much a dork growing up. Going up in front of a crowd and being an idiot was a relief when I was a kid. But talking to two or three people at once and being myself was impossible. And being myself while singing a song was more than impossible; I would've rather died. I get really nervous and tend to want to be an idiot.
My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.
Life barrels on like a runaway train where the passengers change, they don't change anything, you get off someone else can get on.
It's not safe, but yeah, I can flip a piano over. You take it on this side where there's not really as much weight.
The other reason Rufus and I are great together is that we're both really lazy. The rehearsing, the sound checks -- he's actually worse than I am, and that's something. To get us to do anything other than sit in our dressing rooms is a challenge. Who knows what will happen?
The music business is a weird business. Sometimes licensing doesn't happen because some business component that you never knew about stops it.
I'm romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not.
If I'm in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don't need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.
The nice thing about age is worrying less and less about what people think.
I divorce myself from listeners who aren't tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it's all right, and then they go out.
I have manic energy. What can be done about it? I don't know what to say sometimes. I'm professional in public, but I like to stay inside and be a hermit.
I could probably live in Bali the rest of my life and completely live in the sticks and have a f - king moped and make a record every couple of years and not step in public and break even like I do anyway. That's really tempting.