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July 17, 2025 • 16 mins
Singer-pianist-bandleader Ben Folds called Bret to discuss his new live album with the National Symphony Orchestra and why he left his position at the Kennedy Center.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's very sweet. Yeah, Hey, how you doing.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
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

(01:25):
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

(01:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
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

(02:43):
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.

(03:03):
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

(03:26):
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

(03:49):
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,

(04:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
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.

(04:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah, San, we'll get you laid that too.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
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,

(06:07):
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

(06:29):
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

(06:50):
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

(07:12):
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

(07:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
I guess you will be working with Lee Greenwood at
the Kennedy Center any time soon.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
And that is tragic to say the least.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
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.

(09:18):
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

(09:42):
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,

(10:03):
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,

(10:24):
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

(10:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
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

(11:27):
the last quarter century, which is has been Thank you.
You're welcome.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
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

(11:55):
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

(12:17):
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

(12:38):
edge of space and the Jeff Bezos thing.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
I'm sorry I missed that. That has to be on
a line so I can see that.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
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

(13:07):
it debuted at number two on the classical charts today.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Congratulations, thank you.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
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,

(13:36):
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

(13:59):
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

(14:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
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

(15:07):
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,

(15:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Thanks pal, I can't wait. They're a great orchestra. To
see you there.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
I appreciate that you listen to the Brett Sonders podcast.
Thank you, See you next time.
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