Ben Folds

Tabla, New York City’s premier Indian-fusion restaurant, occupies a cavernous space on the ground level of the Met Life tower. Situated along Madison Avenue and overlooking the greenish-yellow puddle that is Madison Square Park, the place radiates comfortable refinement, all deeply burnished wood and exotic tile mosaics. The business-lunch crowd filters through the revolving doors, up the wide spiral staircase, spilling out into the curvilinear dining area in a steady trickle of designer fabrics.

Ben Folds sits across the table from me, looking nerdy-chic in fat-rimmed eyeglasses and old jeans, his pink collared shirt untucked and hanging out below a V-neck sweater. His tousled mop obscures a slightly receding hairline. But while his outfit hardly screams “business” like the knit suits of patrons dining close by, that’s precisely what brings him to town.

April will see the release of Folds’ second full-length solo effort, Songs for Silverman—not to be confused with 2001’s critically horsewhipped Jack Black movie, Saving Silverman. The day before our interview Folds spent 21 straight hours meeting with label folks and indulging the press. By all accounts, his profession doesn’t solely involve pouring Cristal into Jacuzzis overflowing with bikini-clad runway models.

But while Folds has ample reason to be exhausted from being back on the “music business schedule,” as he calls it, you won’t hear him complaining. Things are looking up for the erstwhile leader of piano-anchored geek-rock trio, Ben Folds Five (“Bad math joke,” says Folds of the band’s head-scratching billing). For starters, the music press appears to have finally woken up to his solo career.

“It’s just bizarre how the vibe changes. With Rockin’ the Suburbs, I was a 30-something guy who’d just split with his one-hit wonder band and was on his first dodgy solo record. It’s not a position of strength. People were skipping out on the interviews. I sat in England in an office for eight hours and only one interview showed up. I felt like I’d flown there for nothing. But now everything’s so different from that. Everything’s running smoothly again. I’m older than I was, and I’m still washed-up, and I haven’t changed my music one iota. It’s just much easier to do this when people are being nice to you.”

Folds attributes his fresh momentum to a trio of successful EPs—Sunny 16, Speed Graphic and Super D—all recorded during the interim period between Rockin’ the Suburbs and his newest full-length. While the internet-exclusive EPs sailed to the top of Billboard’s download chart, Folds’ management and label fielded calls from industry suits eager to know how some has-been alt-rock pianist from Nashville managed to boot Ms. Bootylicious herself (and her ubiquitous hit “Crazy in Love”) from the #1 download spot.

Folds is no stranger to Billboard’s loftier altitudes. BF5’s 1997 sophomore release, Whatever and Ever Amen, eventually went platinum, largely thanks to the success of “Brick,” a song whose title couldn’t have been any less appropriate for the commercial radio slam dunk it turned out to be. Folds wrote the song about taking his high-school girlfriend to get an abortion, and on a live CD released in 2002 capped off a rehashing of its backstory by noting, “It was a very sad thing, but I didn’t really want to write the song from any kind of political standpoint or make a statement. I just wanted to reflect on what it feels like.” Over doleful piano lines the song’s jarringly transparent lyrics probe an impossibly tender adolescent bruise, unpacking the loneliness of two kids struggling to comfort one another amid the isolating fallout of a dead-end trauma.

The down-tempo gravitas of “Brick” set up a delightful bait-and-switch initiation for fans just tuning in. After all, most of Whatever and Ever Amen—giddy, Ritalin-munching rock tunes full of piano-banging and layer-cake ’70s-style harmonies—side-steps confessional balladry, taking its cues instead from melodic garage punk. Imagine Jerry Lee Lewis tripping on some of Brian Wilson’s most potent LSD and catching fleeting glimpses of some faraway Nirvana.

“When we came along, the tag was ‘Punk rock for sissies.’ We started playing our first gigs right about the time Kurt Cobain died, and we were playing punk clubs. That’s why we were relevant. It was basically acoustic piano with a grunge rhythm section. Our goal as BF5 was to be the loudest piano band in existence. No one had been doing that so we were competing with rock bands—only on piano. If we’d sucked, we’d have been relegated to high-art, indie music that would’ve been well-reviewed. But the better we were, the more competitive we were in the mainstream.”

Cobain brandished his middle finger in the face of a morally vacuous establishment attempting to cash in on his psychic pain, a world that would later mourn his passing while simultaneously wringing a few extra dollars from his dead corpse. Folds, on the other hand, reserved his signature vitriol-laced Kool-Aid for the maddening drip-torture of childhood romance.

On the opening track to Whatever and Ever Amen, “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces,” he sings, “Jane, remember second grade / Said you couldn’t stand my face / Rather than kiss me you said / You’d rather die / You’ll be sorry one day / Yes you will.”

A few tracks later, on “Song for the Dumped,” he sharpens his frustration: “Wish I hadn’t bought you dinner / Right before you dumped me / On your front porch / Give me my money back / Give me my money back, you bitch / I want my money back / And don’t forget / Don’t forget to give me back my black T-shirt.”

Folds shrugs off rejection’s sting by making a joke of it, and his audience gets a cathartic rush from hearing him sling playground insults at the girls who trounced his heart. But just when you think you’re dealing with some juvenile cut-up who won’t stop kidding long enough for you to establish any real emotional connection, on the album’s final cut (“Evaporated”), he drops his guard and sings, “It seems that all men / Wanna get in a car and go / Anywhere / Here I stand, sad and free / I can’t cry and I can’t see / What I’ve done … I poured my heart out and it evaporated.” And you reel, off-balance from the poignancy of his confessional sucker punch.