For tireless piano rocker , entertaining crowded theaters and arenas night in and night out clearly isn’t enough. When taking the stage, entertaining himself is priority as well. For that reason he has been able to keep producing new music for over 20 years and finding even newer ways to unleash it on his fans.
Folds brought his five-piece band (not to be confused with Ben Folds Five, his wildly popular ’90s band that was actually a trio) to the on Wednesday, and fans settled in for a night of political satire, beautiful piano scale, and an assault on pop music by a sleeper cell embedded in the thick of it.
The concert took a political turn to start the night with Folds’ hysterical “Levi Johnston’s Blues” — a song developed around the true story of the young man from Alaska who “knocked up” then vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol Palin. The song is track three off his album “Lonely Avenue” that was released late last year as a collaboration with English novelist Nick Hornby, of “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy” fame. The night featured many songs off the Folds/Hornby album including “Doc Pomus” and “Belinda.”
The show wasn’t a total push for the new album, though. The crowd was sent into a frenzy with a cover of Kesha’s “Get Sleazy,” a song that the band picked at random, vowing to cover whatever song happened to be at the top of the charts on iTunes on that given hour of the day.
Folds’ music has always succeeded in delivering a back-handed complement to the masses of top 40 drones. The audience cheered as they bobbed back and forth to his 1997 abortion ballad “Brick” and
true story of a failed attempt at military life in 1999’s “Army.”
Then again, he also has no problem lashing out at his record labels and blatantly recording songs just to fulfill contractual agreements, as he explained before preforming “One down and 3.6 (to go).” A song that
gives us the lyric: “I don’t like wasting time with music that won’t make me proud, but now I’ve found a reason to sit right down and sh*t some out.”
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Evan Semón is a Denver freelance writer and photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. See .
Lisa Higginbotham is a Denver photographer and a new contributor to Reverb.
