Ben Folds: ‘Normal’ guy

It’s been a chaotic couple of years for piano rocker Ben Folds. Since the release of his last album, 2005’s “Songs for Silverman,” he's gotten divorced, relocated from Australia to Nashville, remarried, survived a scary stage accident while on tour in Japan, recorded and released six “fake” songs as an Internet prank, and agreed to the first Ben Folds Five performance in over a decade. Somehow, in the midst of all that activity, he also recorded a new album, “Way to Normal”—which, not surprisingly, is the most energetic and live-wire thing he’s done in years, bristling with pop hooks and his trademark wit.

While home in North Carolina, where he was gearing up for the Ben Folds Five show—a performance of the band’s final album, “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner,” for MySpace’s new Front to Back concert series—Folds talked about the tricky business of reunions, surviving his bloody stage dive, and why he’s learned to embrace bad lyrics and Elton John influences.

How are the Ben Folds Five rehearsals going?
We were pretty down to business. We sat down and started playing and instantly I’m going, uh, I don’t remember these fucking chords. So out with the iPod and notebooks and a lot of discussions about, “Well, don’t you guys remember, when we played live, didn’t we do this instead?” So then we’re on YouTube, trying to figure out how we might have played one song or the other. [Laughs]

Well, thank god for YouTube. You can go back and do research on your younger self.
Yeah. I’m not sure I agree with the way we adapted things for some of the live shows. I have a little different idea of how we should do it. The question comes up, too, doing that album [“Reinhold Messner”] front to back: do you dress and play exactly like you think you would have played then? At what point is that fraudulent? We thought about how funny it’d be to all wear headset mikes and these bad Prada suits and sing everything an octave lower. [Laughs] Just to really highlight the fact that we’ve aged.

“Way to Normal” starts with a bang, literally—you banging your head after falling off the stage at a show in Hiroshima. True story?
Absolutely. I walked out at the very first note of the first song of the first show of a tour in Japan, and the light wasn’t good, the stage was small, and I walked off the stage and took a headlong dive onto the floor. I had a concussion, I was bleeding everywhere, and I got up, pulled myself on the stage and played the set. My tour manager was over with a towel, getting blood off the piano and off of my face and down the front of my shirt. [Laughs] Total “Friday the 13th, Part Seven.”

That’s quite a rock ‘n’ roll moment: the show must go on, despite a concussion and a bloody head wound.
Well, I’m pretty stubborn; it’s more like, “life must go on.” And I was really fucking embarrassed. I mean, that’s just so embarrassing. That’s why I liked putting it in a song—just public humiliation. Four chords and public humiliation.

I like that the song is also sort of a tribute to “Bennie and the Jets.” Was there something about getting a concussion that made you think of Sir Elton John?
[Laughs] The “Bennie and the Jets” groove is an institution for a piano player; at some point, you do it. And I suppose that it presented an opportunity to tip the hat to Elton. He called me about six years ago when he heard “Rockin’ the Suburbs” to tell me that he really liked the way I ripped off one of his songs. [Laughs] I didn’t realize I’d done it, and in fact, I quasi-argued with the man for about three seconds until I realized that I had. “Oh, that song! Oh, fuck.” He goes, “No, no, no…I’m not gonna sue you or anything, ‘cause I’m really happy. I like it.”

That’s really gracious of him.
Oh, it was too cool. You know, as a young artist, you spend your time distancing yourself from anyone that could possibly be an influence, especially if they’re not cool at that moment. The beginning of my career is all about people going, “Elton John! Billy Joel!” and me going, “Fuck you! I’m not them!” [Laughs] I think I feel comfortable with myself enough now to really go out on a limb to give the man a nod.

Are you going to show up on this tour wearing giant sunglasses or dressed as a duck?
[Laughs] No. I mean, I did a cover of “Tiny Dancer” where we used to get the sunglasses out. And then I’d open my mouth way wide and stick my ass out. It was kind of fun.

You released six “fake” songs back in July as a prank—songs you’d recorded in a day and deliberately leaked as if they were actually songs from the new album. Did people take the bait? Did you get a lot of confused fan mail?
Oh, yeah, I think people got really confused. Even now, there still remain some confused people, because we’ve kept some of that stuff up on the MySpace page. I thought that recording session for the fake songs was a total revelation. I was so excited after having gone in the studio and written and recorded songs in a single day. All of them, done in one day. They were conceived, the songs were recorded, mixed, mastered, released to the Internet, within a week. I was just buzzing.

And a lot of them are really good, too.
I think all of them—they all glow. That’s the thing about it for me. I put them on and go, “God, that just sounds like unbridled fun.” What I didn’t count on was that the lyrics suck in a really good way. [Laughs] The lyrics—the ones that Sam [Smith, Folds’ drummer] wrote and the ones that Jared [Reynolds, bassist] wrote—are so boneheaded on purpose that they’re almost a statement on the way people think of lyrics. My favorite line on the whole thing is Sam’s—he wrote the words to the fake “Frown Song”: “A piano’s all I got/And I know that ain’t a lot/But music’s got the power to change the future.” [Laughs] That’s just fucking good.

It’s sort of the idiot savant school of songwriting.
Yeah, without the “savant” part.