Concert review: Ben Folds at The Peace Center
The Peace Center is a weird place to have a rock concert. Home to a steady stream of Broadway productions and laid-back live music, the top-notch Greenville, S.C., venue all but necessitates audiences remain seated throughout the performance at hand. The set-up also nixes pretty much any plans for dancing and noisy conversation when groups like Dawes come to town, as they did earlier this year.
But for music lovers who crave as pure of a listening room experience as possible and prefer sitting to standing, the Ben Folds and a Piano show on Sunday, Oct. 27, wound up being a near-ideal event. Following reports of rowdiness at soft-spoken Ray Lamontagne’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium show and Folds being prompted to lecture chatty attendees at The Ramkat in his hometown of Winston-Salem, the combination of a rapt, near-capacity crowd and a space that kept immature behavior at a minimum was likewise appreciated by the evening’s entertainers.
Fellow Nashville-based singer/songwriter Savannah Conley was visibly moved during her opening set, complimenting the audience’s manners while also cheekily chiding their attention’s power to make her “scared shitless.” Accompanied solely by her acoustic guitar, Conley’s smooth voice carried nicely across the room, sharing catchy stories of heartbreak and resilience. The set additionally included a guest appearance by the headliner, who contributed piano to “All I Wanted,” arguably her best song — with or without all-star accompaniment.
Shortly after 8 p.m., Folds took to his primary instrument (as advertised) and launched into yet another well-curated collection of tunes from throughout his career, each in a permutation slightly different than the last. Opening with a trio of recent (“Capable of Anything”), mid-career-thus-far (“Sentimental Guy”), and early (“Alice Childress”) works that would have made for a fine 10-minute retrospective, he then likewise complimented the crowd’s respectful volume — as well as its apparent good health, evinced by its lack of coughing — also noting the group’s complexity and that he’d yet to figure them out.
Reaching into each of his albums — with the exception of Supersunnyspeedgraphic, Lonely Avenue, and The Sound of the Life of the Mind, that is — Folds earned claps and whoops of recognition within seconds of nearly every song. Still funny after all these years, he also drew plentiful laughs recalling the story of Kesha diving into a swimming pool to save the phone he’d just discarded, an appropriate segue to “Phone in a Pool,” on whose backbeats the audience spontaneously clapped with impressive precision.
Additional opportunities for crowd participation arose with an invitation to sing four-part harmony on “Bastard” and complete the “and our football team” line from the a cappella start of “Effington.” Feeling immense support, Folds gave fans an inside peek into his path out of a song publishing contract, during which he “shat out” tunes to reach his required 4.6 compositions. While sharing two full tracks (“The Secret Life of Morgan Davis” and the meta-friendly “One Down”) and the .6 (the unfinished “Girl,” intended for a future boy band to complete once such groups inevitably become popular again), he also revealed that one song from those sessions has gone on to become one that fans adore, but, to protect their fondness for the piece, he wouldn’t reveal its identity.
The experiment over — a tangent that may or may not have prompted a couple sitting in the first few rows to split, and get an empathetic comment from the musician himself — Folds returned to audience recruitment mode, letting the remaining listeners sing the Regina Spektor parts from “You Don't Know Me.” In one of the evening’s cheeriest moments, his “I'm trying to tell you” became a sassy retort to the crowd’s multiple “What”s and his comedic acting in the moment suggests he could have a splendid career in theater, television, or film, if he so chose.
Entering the night’s final act, Folds further flexed his dexterity with two of his loveliest anthems (“The Luckiest” and “Landed”), the one-two punch that kicks off his still potent solo debut Rockin’ the Suburbs (“Annie Waits” and “Zak and Sara”), and the gypsy kicker “Steven's Last Night in Town” from what still may be his best collection thus far, Whatever and Ever Amen.
Then, after praising what he’d now deemed a “complex crowd,” he was joined at his piano by a stagehand wielding a snare drum, on which Folds began to tap. Walking with the new addition to the left of the piano, Folds was soon joined by other technicians with the rest of the drum kit in their hands, assembling it to much fanfare from the audience.
Reaching back to his college percussion days, he laid into a rousing drum solo that utilized each component to a thrilling degree — a fitting ending were if not for the expected encore, for which he saved arguably his catchiest number, “Army.” Reunited with the latest batch of fans who know and love his entire body of work, Folds reveled in the mutual joy of hearing and performing the now-standard brass-substitute sing-a-long to the song’s bridge.
The cherry atop an already wonderful night, the synchronicity of artist and audience was so thorough that it made one wonder if such a connection would have been made with the same crowd in a different venue, or if The Peace Center is indeed the perfect venue for the proper musical combo. More experiments are clearly necessary.
(Photo by Joe Vaughn)
