I hope you're great.

I'm Brett Sonders.

Welcome to the podcast.

This week, my guest is Ben Fold.

Do you know him from songs like Brick and Rocking the Suburbs.

He's also served as the first ever artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra.

He resigned in February, and he'll tell us why here on the Brett Sonders Podcast.

Hi there, genius.

That's very sweet.

Yeah, Hey, how you doing.

There's a lot going on with you in conjunction with Colorado.

There's also a new live album.

You'll be in grand junction on August the eleventh, and performing with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra at the Betcher Concert Hall September twelfth through the thirteenth.

I mean, I love the symphony, and I mean I really think that everyone flourishes when we have a symphony orchestra.

So I'm always out there making that nun.

Your sound has always been piano based, not that that's controversial going back to Jerry Lee Lewis, but you've always had a different approach, and I'm wondering if that different approach didn't help influence you when it came to working with the symphony, like someone like, for instance, Randy Newman.

Yeah, well, I mean I think we uh, I don't know to what extent, uh Randy was trained.

He certainly grew up in a musical family.

You know, there's there's there's a there's a way we kind of our brains have to sort of work in order to orchestrate as opposed to just play a song.

Both of them are different sort of our forms.

And I've always I've always approached rock music a little bit from an orchestration perspective, not in the way that an orchestra is added, but in the way that the instruments locked together.

It's it's a language.

You know, most rock musicians don't don't really operate there, but some of us do.

You know my friend Regina Spectrus on the NSO album with me, she she's like that, like she's she's very arrangement orchestration or oriented.

And then I mean that would be its own hour half a podcasts.

I won't go there.

And in turn, I would say that artists like yourself have also helped the orchestra scenario in America by drawing people who might not otherwise go to a concert hall to see an orchestra perform.

Yeah, and I'm greedy about it.

I mean, I want you know, I realized early on a couple of decades ago when I started playing my music with orchestras.

I mean I grew up with orchestras when I was a kid, because I played in a youth symphony when I was ten years old, and that kind of burned it into my brain.

But you know, touring and also being on the board of like the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, seeing under the hood, I realized that bringing a new audience in was a step, but keeping them there and sending them over to the programming that the orchestra probably prefer to do.

I think is not only just good manners.

It's like it's it's good, it's good business, and it's good for civilization, you know.

So I started to try to develop a method by which people who come see my concerts with the symphony or the ones that I curated, say at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra, to try to make sure that people came back.

You know, My method comes down to begging sometimes the simple to please please come back.

But it's it's it's people are just so you're so it does really just make your life better.

You know.

I tell people going to the symphony orchestra will get you laid.

And I say that because it's not something people I think about taking a date out to the symphony.

They're racked their brains, you know, like when they're in their twenties and thirties, Like, what can I do to cool with a new date?

Go to the symphony.

You don't even have to dress up, you know, just go to symphony because just sitting there for all that, for all that time, still living in perhaps the nineteenth century composer's head, and hearing that surrounding you, now what you think it is.

You need to go.

You need to go experience it.

It's amazing, not only that it helps us get away from our short attention spans.

When you sit down and you listen to a Stravinsky performance and you really pay attention to be rewarded sonically and intellectually, you don't have time to be checking your phone.

Yeah, yeah, And it's it's a developed and a delayed rewards as well.

Sometimes, you know, pop music is is based on the best three or four notes that you can that you can make that's the heart and it's wonderful.

I mean we repeat it, and we repeated and repeated.

We're so happy about it.

It goes over and over again.

In classical music, those wonderful three or four notes are developed more change and become a bigger story.

But you know, you got to sit there for twenty five thirty minutes, god forbid, without taking a picture with your phone or checking your mail.

And that is good for your head.

We all need that.

So we're going crazy right now.

We could use that.

In other words, you go see Ben Folds when he plays with the Colorado Symphony in September or in Grand Junction on August eleventh.

It will literally make you a better human being on the planet.

Yeah, San, we'll get you laid that too.

You have a new live album.

It's Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra.

It was recorded last year at the Kennedy Center.

That place has been through multiple changes, that Kennedy Center.

Ben, Yeah, I went through a single change, and the change was as significant as its inception in the early sixties, I mean late sixties.

It was you know, it was a sort of a uh, I hate to call it this, but it was sort of the coup the president.

No, no partisan politician is supposed to by design, have any say in programming the arts.

Anything that's that's in the federal arts system.

That's for the people, not for the president, and not for politicians or politics.

And that was breached when he had himself installed as as the head of the Kennedy Center, and and and weighed in on it very very big publicly that that's that's a that's a breach, that's it's hard to hard to overstate how tragic and scary that is for freedom of expression in general.

I have been saying, you know that we've all been pulled for so long that arts funding should be small because it's not the most important thing, that the other things are more important to put food on the table, which is really at odds with what the arts do, because the arts actually do stimulate the economy in a way in terms of investment that's really unparalleled by anything else.

But that aside, the small amount that we put in the arts is a testament to how how little that we've been told it means.

And yet this administration came in and within a month with skin to take over our premier Arts Center that was really on the front of their priority list.

So is it important or is it not?

Seems to be very important if you look at their actions.

I guess you will be working with Lee Greenwood at the Kennedy Center any time soon.

No, I mean, I don't think so.

You know, I don't know anything about Lee Greenwood.

I really don't.

I remember that I released an album that had the you know, the tragic release date of being on nine to eleven, and I recall that the first I had heard of him was that he held the top ten chart positions.

He was certainly making some people happy.

But but no, it's it shouldn't be a partisan place.

You can go to a place like the Kenny Center and express your political views as a private citizen.

That is not a problem at all.

You're booked in there, you want to say what you want to say, do it.

But the problem is is now you you aren't encouraged, let's say, to do that if you don't agree with the president.

And that is tragic to say the least.

It is.

Yeah, it is, it's not it's not what we took for granted, was our you know, born right of freedom of expression.

And I wasn't gonna be, you know.

I I curated shows there and advised and spent a lot of time at Kenney Center for eight years, big part of my life.

And I booked everything, you know.

We booked people from different countries, cultures, shape sizes, colors, genders, and including you know, white guy, big beard country music stuff too.

Like booked at all.

I never I never worried for any any degree of the safety of any of the people that came and expressed themselves in any way.

But now I know that I couldn't continue to do my job because I can't with a straight face book something that might be controversial to the right wing.

I don't know if these people are going to get their addresses, whether they call it docsing or threatened, or the President's going to tweet.

I hate so and so, like you said, I hate Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swifts can take care of herself.

She's got, you know, plenty of people around her.

But the people I was booking in the Kennedy Center and Keimney Centers are a much smaller operation.

It really is.

You know, it's just two thousand and some seat concert halls, the Grand Hall, you couldn't even put Taylor Swift in there.

She couldn't go in there to you know, just use the restroom without filling the place up.

So you know, it wasn't possible to safely book people in there.

It's actually a serious thing.

Now.

If I were to have stayed and to have asked people to come play, I would have been putting them potentially in a spotlight with a circus, and the circus followed into the Kennedy Center, and there's all kinds of crazy booing and stuff going on, just because it's become that that why you don't drive politics into our sort of you know, into our arts environment.

I genuinely appreciate your candor on these topics.

Ben Folds, and I want to mention again Bets your concert Hall September twelfth and thirteenth, Grand Junction, August the eleventh, and our new album with the National Symphony Orchestra, which we were just discussing.

It's Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra.

Before I let you go.

I also wanted to mention you produced one of my favorite albums of the last quarter century, which is has been Thank you.

You're welcome.

Yeah, I think that's a great record.

And I think that I think that William Shinner Bill my old friend of thirty years now.

He was old when I met him.

He's still old and still as wise, if not more.

He Yeah, he really taught me a lot and we made we made a record that was really honest storytelling, right, and you know, I brought him back to the Kennedy Center just to keep things whipped back around to the same old subject and we made one of the first original music records in maybe ever.

I haven't really checked.

I know that they weren't normal in the last two decades for the NSO at the Kennedy Center.

Original music.

Not Beethoven, which is amazing, but I mean actual original music.

And that was the music mostly of Jeric Bischoff, composer and William Shatner's poetry about having been catapulted to the edge of space and the Jeff Bezos thing.

I'm sorry I missed that.

That has to be on a line so I can see that.

Right, you know it is it's it didn't you know.

Classical records are not it's not the most lucrative business, and it sort of went under the radar, but it was a beautiful moment, and we captured it and put it as a record, the second original record that I know of with the National Symphony Orchestra as mine, and it debuted at number two on the classical charts today.

Congratulations, thank you.

And it started from nothing because we really didn't advertise it.

It just came as a surprise release.

But would I would encourage people to support the National Symphony Orchestra.

They are trapped in the Kennedy Center and there are Nation's Orchestra.

They have to survive this for I don't know how long, but you know, because of the way the Kennedy Center's run, they now are down considerably.

Some some programs down eighty percent in subscriptions as the Kennedy Center, So the National symp the Orchestra is suffering as a result.

Puts me in a weird position because I'm you know, I've left the place and I bringing attention to what happened there that was wrong.

It's certainly not encouraging a larger audience there either.

But they're also there are a Nation Symphony Orchestra that puts us all on a pickle.

This is what happens when the government takes over in that sort of way.

But I would say, you know, I'm I gave up all my royalties in my fee the nights that I played to record this.

This is not going to my bank account.

This is to support the National Symphony Orchestra.

So I would say, go out there and get that record.

I can, I can, I can push that.

I can push that with no guilt of being of being overly the salesman about it.

Right, Well, it's important that you, as a human, you're supporting your fellow humans who are also artists.

And that has nothing to do with politics.

No, no, it doesn't, and it has everything to do with with our with our culture.

It's our nation's symphony orchestra, correct, and that's a really important I suspect it'll survive this, but I'm pretty sure morale must be a bit down.

It's not nice to I mean, every single show that I curated at the Kennedy Center for eight years sold out, and now they're looking out at shows where there's just almost nobody out there.

And that's because the people who are the Party of the business Man.

I don't know how they got that, how that came about that They're like, well they're pro business.

They're ruining the business down there.

I hope that they think better of it and step back and get out of the business because it's it's not something they don't have experience in, so that would be the best.

Just go wow, we might not be good at this and just get out.

I don't expect it, but I wouldn't shame them for it.

I would applaud it.

You are an inspiration, ben Folds.

They keep doing what you're doing, fighting the good fight.

And we'll see you here in Denver in September and again the new album ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra.

Thanks pal, I can't wait.

They're a great orchestra.

To see you there.

I appreciate that you listen to the Brett Sonders podcast.

Thank you, See you next time.