Ben Folds

After spending a few hours in Folds’ company you realize that—like his songs—the man is anything but one-dimensional. Fans are understandably better acquainted with the flamboyant showman they’ve seen onstage conducting his audience in three-part harmony sing-alongs. “Not in a Vegas way quite so much as if you’re in church,” Folds says. “White people don’t sing together very often and, when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.”

They’re familiar with the Ben Folds notorious for peppering his set with bouts of tomfoolery (donning gaudy Elton John shades for a note-perfect cover of “Tiny Dancer”) and endearingly twisted humor (think Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, whom Folds covers on Super D). The fun-loving Ben Folds who invariably reminds male listeners of their best friend from college; and female listeners of that long-ago boyfriend who’d have them laughing so hard a few snorts would inevitably surface.

But in the first several minutes following our introduction, I find him sober, mild-mannered and at times almost shy, hinting at the buttoned-up maturity you’d reasonably expect from a 38-year-old husband and father. When he feels as though he’s sufficiently answered a question, he pensively stabs at his salmon entrée, casting frequent glances out the picture window beside us toward the park. Folds maintains a healthy diet and takes his coffee with soy milk. He prefers to keep life simple. When he’s not on the road, he splits time between home and his nearby studio.

“I don’t leave my neighborhood. I don’t go anywhere. There are four blocks I live in and there are two coffee shops, one at each end of the block. My studio at one end, that’s my studio coffee shop, and then there’s my neighborhood coffee shop so I don’t do much driving. … Some people would say they never see me because I don’t go anywhere. I stay in the blue state of Nashville, in my bubble.”

I’m just getting comfortable with my slightly reconfigured notion of Ben Folds—the socially reticent, conscientious musician who slaves away in the recording studio until it’s time to saunter home and help his wife get dinner on the table—when he complicates the picture once again, reminiscing on the shows he used to play with BF5.

“I had one big sort of shtick that always popped on television or in a performance: being absolutely and completely irreverent toward the piano as an instrument. That was the image on MTV News in 1997, right before the end of the broadcast. They showed a piano stool flying from a speaker stack 50 feet away from the stage and landing on the piano. I used to dive off of shit onto the piano.”

“Only because you couldn’t pick up the piano and flip it over,” I joke.

“But I could,” he fires back, matter-of-factly. “I know exactly where to pick it up and flip it over. I was going to flip one on Letterman one time, but we were responsible and did our research and found out the floor on The Late Show is a million-dollar floor and if I turned the piano over, we’d have to pay for the floor. I wasn’t worried about the piano because I knew what the piano would do. 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.” Folds pantomimes with his hands to make sure I fully understand the technique, like a wrestling coach modeling the fine art of applying a half-nelson. “Then you move it this way, and then push it down, and you can get it over in about five seconds. My five-foot baby grand piano, anyway.”

Perhaps I need to start over: Ben Folds is a mature, responsible performer who does his homework when exploring the feasibility of maniacally flipping his baby grand on late-night television. Cerebral Knievel. These psychological extremes aren’t supposed to peacefully co-exist in a human being. Are they?

Folds was born to middle-class parents in Winston-Salem, N.C. His father built houses for a living and frequently relocated the family to different parts of town (“When you’re 10 years old and changing neighborhoods and friends, it may as well be another city,” notes Folds). They’d live in each house a couple years, sell it and move to another one. While this nomadic lifestyle—Folds estimates 13 moves prior to high school graduation—hampered his ability to build close friendships, he found sorely needed continuity in his relationship with the piano, an instrument his father brought home from work in 1975.

“I just started playing, took lessons for about a year. Didn’t like lessons, but just kept making up songs on it. I was making up songs in my head before I got the piano and would always take opportunities to play at school or on a piano when I could, so I always loved the piano.

“I remember listening to a transistor radio under my pillow at night so my parents wouldn’t know I was listening to the radio. I don’t remember if it was FM or AM, probably just AM. But I remember hearing an Elton John song and going, ‘Ah, when I wake up in the morning, I’m just going to play that on the piano.” Folds places his left and right hands on an imaginary keyboard. “OK, that’s low, that’s high—no problem.’ I was so upset when I woke up in the morning. ... I couldn’t figure any of it out. That’s how much unfounded confidence I had in my ability at that age.”

Despite these early setbacks, Folds kept with the piano and cultivated a seemingly hardwired passion for music. He learned bass, drums—anything he could get his hands on—and played in several bands during high school. Still, he hadn’t yet considered music a viable career option. That all changed, however, after stumbling into a publishing deal several years later. “I’d been playing bass in a band. The band broke up, but we had a gig we were supposed to play. So I took a bunch of songs I’d written, found a piano in a practice room at the University of North Carolina, learned them, and went and played the gig by myself. I’d never really sung in front of people, especially not my own songs—I had ’em in my head. I had tapes where I’d be singing really, really quietly so no one in the other room could hear. But I went and played this gig, and the gig happened to be a showcase set up for the headlining band.