Ben Folds & A Piano Tour at the Schuster Center in Dayton this weekend

His latest tour, Ben Folds & A Piano Tour, exactly what it sounds like, will be making a stop at the Schuster Center on Oct. 5. Multi-faceted artist Lindsey Kraft — who you may recognize from Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie” and “Obliterated,” and HBO’s “Getting On” — will be a special guest on this tour, performing her brand of theatrical pop songs.

While it seems Folds may be stripping down the show this time around, considering the charting success of his 2025 live album with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, it doesn’t really matter what form Folds’ shows take — be it solo, or with a band or an orchestra — because each form informs the other. What really matters are the songs.

“When I’m really on it, I’m pushing towards some sort of discovery in real time,” Folds said. “And they could be different things. I mean, last night was very much about that, where maybe the night before was more about getting through. But even if you’re getting through, if you’re executing a song faithfully… yay. I mean, that’s great. I love to see an artist do that, but I’m kind of trying for something else sometimes.”

Folds says there’s often a fear around putting a down-to-earthness on things, like the idea of whispering a joke to a sibling at a funeral, or laughing at the dark side of something political. In his catalog, he sometimes finds profundity in nothing, the humor in taboo situations. In his music, he captures the messy, visceral details of humanhood.

“We’re just on the edge of having any idea of the absurdity and the irony in the world,” Folds said. “I think the humor in there is what takes it out of the limbic system. To me, it’s part of life. The reason we start laughing is because we all understand together that we don’t understand. That is also a bit of humility by allowing yourself to have a sense of humor.”

And though this writer sort of suggested that there is a balance of humor and emotion in his music, Folds clarified that humor is one of the emotions, too, and is just one aspect of the 360-degree feelings we humans feel, merely a salve in our toolbox. That poignancy often finds its way into his character-driven songs.

In his song “Fred Jones, Pt. 2,” from his 2001 debut solo album, “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” Folds sings about the titular character on the day of his retirement:

“25 years he’s worked at the paper / A man’s here to take him downstairs.”

Fred’s life is painted as mundane and painfully anonymous. Yet the man who inspired the song won a Pulitzer Prize for his civil rights reporting as a white journalist in the South during the early 1960s. That tension between the ordinary and the historical reflects a thread running through much of Folds’ songwriting: characters, who are overlooked, reveal deeper truths.

“At some point,” Folds said, “probably all of it gets crunched up there in the frontal lobe somewhere and falls out as an image.”

Folds released a pop record in 2023 called “What Matters Most.” With neither of us sure what “pop music” means today, we reflected on whether or not the genre still leaves room for unconventional storytelling.

“I’m sure the room is there if that’s where someone wants to express it,” he said. “I think you ought to be able to make something and not really know what you’re saying. You’re just going for what you’re feeling as you filter through your brain.”

Folds, who served for eight years as the first ever Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony

Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, stepped down from his post when President Trump announced his takeover of the Center. In 2022, Folds launched a music education charitable initiative “Keys For Kids” in his native state of North Carolina, which provides funds and keyboards to existing nonprofits that offer free or affordable piano lessons to school-age children from economically-disadvantaged households.

He continually advocates for improving public policies for the arts and arts education on the national level as a member of Americans For The Arts and the Arts Action Fund.

“Art will… you can’t squash it,” Folds said. “The question is can people below a certain means have any hope of having their kids be exposed and encouraged to be artistic, and have that be part of their education. The issue is not the quality of art or the amount of art, it’s the access to it. It doesn’t cost so much. And there’s no parent that doesn’t want their kids to have a little bit of art.”

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