Live at Warsaw on Driggs Avenue in Brooklyn
Words by Tony Conte//Illustration by Dan Jircitano
Ben Folds is the goofy trigonometry teacher that all of your friends had in high school, while you ended up with the curmudgenly semi-retired substitute. He comes complete with thinning hair and sporting the glasses that your company’s tech support guy wears as if to prove through fashion that he is myopic and couldn’t care less who knows it. In short, he is a loveable geek.

From the first song to the last you get the sense that his love for music and performing it is so overwhelming that he wants and needs to show you.

As the opening act, Corn Mo kicked off the show with a few grating songs in a Justin Hawkins, hair-metal melodrama. By relying too heavily on attempted humor and lacking the true songwriting ability to back it up, Corn got the laughs he was aiming for…and even a few that he wasn’t—imagine Meatloaf with an accordion. What Mr. Mo lacked in presence and talent, the venue itself made up for with its cozy intimacy. It’s a church rec room with a decent lighting system. I mention all of these things to get them out of the way, they were extraneous when it came to Ben Folds’ performance.

Once the crowd had politely endured the opening act, and each had finished off his second Polish beer, the audience became the kind of rowdy you’d expect in an honor’s fraternity mixer. When Ben Folds took to the stage and launched into “Trusted,” you understood what it meant to not just have talent and charisma, but an otherworldly passion for the music.

This was not a Britney Spears concert. There were no costume changes, no gimmicky light/sound technology, and no backup dancers. Ben Folds only needed his piano, his voice and sometimes the band.

The piano became a percussion instrument, and Folds’ strained falsetto felt like it was always one bead of sweat away from cracking. With equal excitement and experimentation, Folds pummeled his way through the set, peppered with songs from his solo career as well as his time with Ben Folds Five, mixing in equal parts jokester and pop genius.

You couldn’t help but feel, watching his interactions with his band, as if Ben Folds Five had been reincarnated. As a man eternally on tour, he has showcased his songs in every kind of incarnation imaginable, first bringing his earlier albums on tour backed by a standard pop band (minus guitar), then stripping the performances down to just a piano and himself during his tour supporting his first solo effort, and finally complicating the performances by adding arrangements for a full symphony orchestra, yet somehow maintaining the sense of spontaneity that makes each of his performances so unique.

Now, his performance career seeming to have come full-circle, we can all rest easy knowing that so many years in the business hasn’t left him jaded. Folds understands and appreciates that his style of confessional songcrafting requires intimacy. If you don’t feel like you are watching your favorite uncle drunk at a Christmas party, then something of that sense of having a conversation through song can quickly begin to feel like a monologue. Sure, you can get witty banter at a comedy club, or you can sing along with a “performer” at a local karaoke bar, but the level of musicianship that Folds puts on display requires an astute sense of when enough is enough. Think of it as the difference between Yngwie Malmsteen and B.B. King—speed and fancy fingerwork on a string instrument doesn’t guarantee soulful, or even listenable music. Folds can guarantee both.

“Landed” highlighted both Folds’ uncanny jazz sensibility all the while his pseudo-punk performance half-sitting on the bench brought to mind an early Jerry Lee Lewis punishing the keys to percussive effect. He breathed life into melodies, which in the studio had produced lackluster duds like “Jesusland” and “The Ascent of Stan.” Even his cover of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” parody or not, sounded like it meant something when he deftly maneuvered the chords and runs.

“Evaporated” was not a bored recollection of the song he’d written almost 10 years ago, although after having included it in hundreds of shows since no one could fault him if it had been.

He fiddled with his new toy: a state of the art synthesizer, as he recounted a study done by the military in which it was discovered that a tone at 10 hertz could encourage the listener to lose his/her bowels. (Note: As he approached the 10 hertz mark, it became remarkably evident how such an effect could be achieved).

The pleasant surprise of the night was Folds’ organic cover of the oft-reworked, Postal Service hit “Such Great Heights.” The band harmonized adequately while wringing the music from their own instruments. It proved to be a worthwhile cover of an already brilliant song. When he wasn’t rocking out and trading smiles with his bassist and drummer, he was alone on the stage with his piano encouraging the audience to be his backing horn section for the song “Army.”

And for song after song, he nailed each one. Not providing a mere reproduction of the cleaned up studio version, but rather rushing and pacing and throttling each song into submission. The upshot of all of this is that no matter many times or how many different ways he may present the same songs over the years, releasing new material every so often, you should be so lucky to see him live.

Ben Folds