On Sept. 4, Ben Folds Five will release a special box set celebrating the 30th anniversary of their self-titled debut album. The package will feature the Nineties alt-rock band’s 1995 debut, produced by Caleb Southern, plus a bonus disc with Original Shelved Attempt, as they’re calling an early version of the record that was produced by Stiff Johnson. After Folds felt “something didn’t feel right” about that first attempt, he brought in Southern, and the trio of Folds, bass player Robert Sledge, and drummer Darren Jessee re-recorded the album in five days on a meager $3000 budget.
Rolling Stone caught up with Folds to talk about the early days of the band, the audacity of playing clubs with a baby grand piano, and the time a college-aged Jason Sudeikis carried his piano onto the stage. In this exclusive interview, Folds also talks about Ben Folds Five‘s initial breakup, the reunions in 2008 and 2012, and reveals a little more about their touring plans for the future. He discusses what it was like to be one of the few artists touring immediately after 9/11, his solo debut released that day, and how both impacted his career.
At the moment, Folds is focused on his current project as a producer and musical director for Lindsey Kraft’s one-woman musical, We’re Been Here Before. This isn’t the first time Folds has done musical direction; in 2006, he worked on music for the DreamWorks film Over the Hedge, and he composed the theme music to the 2022 Apple TV+ special It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown. In 2025, Folds worked as music supervisor for Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, also on Apple TV+, and the first animated Peanuts musical special in 35 years.
A few days after the short New York City performance run of We’ve Been Here Before, we caught up with the pop pianist from his home in North Carolina.
How was the off-Broadway run of We’ve Been Here Before?
It was great. I think it got steadily better, which is the idea. We didn’t even have a complete tech run-through. We met everyone there on the first day. It’s not like we went and workshopped it. We crash-landed it. We’ve just been learning on the job, which I think is kind of cool. It’s like rehearsals with people watching them. We didn’t want to say it that way because I think every time you perform something, it should be the important one. It was very different every night. Some nights the audience were really, really engaged and loud and other nights you didn’t know. And then at the end you’d hear all these sobs. Instead of applauding, they’re crying.
How did you first get involved with musical direction?
I sort of snuck into this very slowly. I did music for a Dreamworks movie called Over the Hedge. And while that’s not a musical, I had to be involved in the script and what’s happening. Just a little. It’s sort of scary. You don’t control the outcome. You’re not the boss. [Years later,] after doing two of the Peanuts specials, I felt confident to tell a book writer when I could replace eight pages of their writing for the song. “You don’t need that big chunk in the second act. I can take care of that for you. Let me show you what’s being said.”
When I jumped into Lindsey’s project, a couple things were really working in her favor for me. One, [the story] was real. Secondly, neither one of us knew what we were doing, which is super important to me because when I started off in garage bands, you get to be a hack — and you should approach every single [project] the same way. I should jump into a massive production the same way I went into Lindsey’s, the same way as I went into any of the ones before. Dreamworks and Over the Hedge was probably most frustrating to me, because perhaps I didn’t understand that it really is this whole moving-parts thing. But now I feel good about jumping into a variety of stuff.
Folds and Kraft onstage during a performance of We’ve Been Here Before.
MIchaelah Reynolds*
You resigned as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra last year. How do you feel about everything that went down with the Kennedy Center a year later?
I’m proud of and stand by my decision, but it was a fucking bummer. They came in first to the Kennedy Center before they tried to roll over all the rest of the agencies and monuments. I was watching how it was being done, watching the ignorance and the arrogance of the whole thing. It dawned on me that everything that I worried about, about all the other parts of government that they were going to do that to… that they didn’t know what they were doing and they were incredibly mean and greedy, just arrogant.
I don’t regret my decision at all. It went exactly like I thought it would. There was nothing surprising about it. There were those who said, “You should stay, and that way you can be there to help.” You can’t help someone if everyone’s dying on a ship. It’s just going down. It would’ve been like, “Ben Folds loves Trump.” I was going to be used as a pawn.
You’re releasing the previously unreleased shelved first attempt of Ben Folds Five’s debut. Was there any thought in your head while doing that first attempt with Stiff Johnson that the album wasn’t right?
I think so. You’re trying to love something, you know you love things about it, you put your heart into it, you’re down the hole. And you just keep talking yourself into that it’s good. But the indicator is always in the body. Something in your nervous system doesn’t feel right. I recall that feeling a lot of the time. I guess I chalked it up to, “Well, this is a big important thing. We’re spending our entire budget on the only album we’ll probably ever get to do for the first time.” My friend Kerry [McCarthy] came in and she listened to maybe two songs. When I found her, she was crying. I was like, “Are you OK? What’s happening?” She’s like, “Who is that I’m listening to? It’s not you guys. Are you OK with this?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we’re fine.”
I explained to the guys, she didn’t like the record. Then we went back home and I remember sitting at my house, we had a floor full of board cassettes from all the shows we played. Shit was everywhere and Darren was like, “Why don’t you put in the show we just did in Kansas?” We put it in. He’s like, “That’s pretty great,” and we agreed. Then I put the record in and it wasn’t. We’re like, “How do you get that in the studio?”
Our friend Caleb [Southern], who’d been making lots of indie punk-rock records, thought he had an idea of how to make that work called parallel compression. And in an era where you couldn’t get your hands on that kind of equipment all that easily, especially in North Carolina. So he drove around in the car, borrowed, begged, stole, rented all the compressors he could get to do this. That allowed us to play bombastically. Before that, if we played bombastically while Stiff Johnson was recording, he was like, “Guys, guys, guys. Eh.”
Did you feel like he was suppressing your sound?
He was doing the responsible thing. He was like, “This doesn’t sound good. When you guys play like that, you might think you’re doing something, but it sounds like mud and you’re rushing.” And it did. So we didn’t rush and brought the tempo back, but then his job became more difficult because he had to get the intensity back in.
Do you have any plans set for a tour around this anniversary?
I’m seeing vague windows pop up for next year. Robert and Darren and I signed 1,000 of those records one afternoon, and it’s as close to a group talk as I can ever imagine having between us. If you’d been listening in the room, you might not have known, but we agreed to tour. It has gone from doing three or four shows, maybe seven at the most, to now doing multiple weeks. That’s what I know right now. And it’ll probably be in a couple of chunks, still a lot of planning to do. But we’ll be out.
Last time the band toured it was in support of an album. Is there any new Ben Folds Five music coming?
No.
It’s also the 25th anniversary of Rockin’ the Suburbs, your first solo record, which was released on Sept. 11, 2001. What was that like?
There’s nothing that overshadows imminent record failure more than a catastrophic terrorist event. I didn’t start to think about what that had done to the album until months later. Bob Dylan was on the same label. [Ed. Note: Dylan’s “Love and Theft” was also released that day.] He got a re-release, and then I was like, “Oh, I didn’t get one of those.” There’s no press. There’s nothing happening. I’m riding around in a van with a sound man by myself touring that record.
You were also one of the only artists touring at the time, right after those events.
Immediately after, the next day. I had this highly produced record on the biggest record label in the world with all the help that I could possibly get, and suddenly a lot of that was yanked from underneath. So I just toured solo with the piano. The band had been playing for thousands. I was back to playing for 100 people — but about 18 months later, I was exceeding the band’s numbers, just playing solo piano. We’d usually rent a Cadillac or a van, just me and one other guy. Play Beacon Theatre twice in a row, then play Letterman, get back in my own van that I parked next to 30 Rock somewhere with quarters in the fucking machine, come out, sign stuff, and then get in a van and drive off. It’s very un-rock-star. I just didn’t know where the whole thing was headed, and we scaled everything down because I was told that I wasn’t going to have a career probably. So I was just doing things really small and things were building up again.
In a way, 9/11 allowed me a new start. It killed the record, and then it allowed the record to build on its own momentum. All that in the shadow of the biggest tragedy that we’ll live through. Well, fucking, who knows now? You couldn’t even say at the time, and you wouldn’t have wanted to. Any comment about what the thing did or didn’t do for your fucking career. We were watching pictures of people falling out of the building. It’s in the rearview now, so I can kind of say it, but I feel funny commenting on it.
You’re famous for only playing grand pianos. In the early days you had to load them in yourself. Is there a wildest story or a craziest load-in?
I mean, they were all kind of crazy. The last night of We’ve Been Here Before, my old friend Jason Sudeikis came out. He used to come as a college student to see the band, and he would come out early. He helped me load the piano off the truck one or two times. You remember the kids from early on. I remember all the load-ins, and he was there along with a couple other guys pushing it up a ramp. It was really cold. I remember it being maybe 20 degrees outside. There were a couple times it fell off of a truck.
Was there a lot of damage?
Not as much as you’d think. I mean, there were a couple times where we’re pushing a piano and it fell into the stage. [I remember] playing CBGBs and putting one of the legs on a chair off the stage. Just the audacity of moving that every single night, it was crazy then. It occurred to me at the time that it put us in our own lane because we were going to be on rock stages, punk rock, indie rock, grungy stages with a grand piano playing super loud and fast and happy. That I knew was different. When I saw the same thing and I imagined it with an electric keyboard, it just didn’t seem the same.
You reunited the band in 2012. Was there something that prompted that?
We did a MySpace reunion show in 2008. It was such an event it sold out in a second. We showed up and it was kind of good. Based on that, we thought, “Let’s get back together.” And that was 2008 — it took us four years to do it. We didn’t want to get back together unless we made an album at that time. I believe that it wasn’t our time to get back together, necessarily, at that point. My solo career was cooking along, and I was probably one of the two or three biggest acts regularly playing all the universities.
I think 1787951031 that there’s way more interest in the band getting together than me doing another tour. I think it was inverse the last time. I looked at doing those band things as kind of a liability in some way. Recently I’ve been like, “It really feels right.” And then it was like, “Why don’t we re-release Rockin’ the Suburbs?” I was like, “You know what? I actually don’t think that feels right. I think it’s the time to do the early Robert, Darren stuff. That just feels right.”
You worked with William Shatner on his 2004 album, Has Been. What was that like?
I’ve gotten to make two completely original albums that stand out. We don’t get to do this. You can make an amazing album that’s not necessarily something people haven’t heard before. I think the first Ben Folds Five record is something that I had never heard before. After all these years, I know I was hearing the same thing in the Shatner record.
We didn’t know what the fuck that was going to be. That was insane. There were no rules to making that. We did it in a week. We’re rolling along and in the middle of one day, Shatner was like, “Benny, we’re wasting time.” I’m like, “No, we’re not. We’re working.” He’s like, “In my business, the shoot is at two o’clock. You show up, you get hair and makeup, you walk in the shoot. You do it once, and you fucking leave. We’ve been sitting here, what are we doing?” And I was like, “Well, the band’s at the zoo, and I’m thinking about these lyrics…” And he’s like, “There’s eight o’clock, and I’m going to be here.” A very different way of looking at it. So I got the band in, and a couple of them were tripping on acid, watching the wildlife at the zoo, and just a crazy session. The most drug-fueled record I ever did was with Bill, and it wasn’t him.
What’s the craziest place you’ve ever heard your music played?
A couple times I’ve been on hold [on the phone], and the reason that was strange is because I didn’t expect to hear me. I had this moment of hearing the sound and the vibration of my music from a different perspective. And like, “Man. That girl’s got a weird alto voice there. That’s strange. Oh, wait a minute. That’s me. Oh, it’s a lower voice. Oh, OK. I hear that now.” I didn’t think of myself as having a particularly high voice, but there was something about the timbre of it that sounded more feminine than I knew of myself. And hearing it like that, I was like, “Who is that?”
