Ben Folds on Keeping Arts Alive and His Holiday Shows at SFJAZZ
Ben Folds has spent three decades proving that pop music can carry the weight of an orchestral score and the sting of a short story. This winter finds him in one of his busiest seasons yet: touring an ambitious live album with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), reflecting on his eight-year tenure at the Kennedy Center, and turning his sardonic new Christmas record Sleigher into a pair of holiday shows at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium. (Ticket info below.)
Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra
Best known as the pianist and songwriter behind Ben Folds Five, Folds has long moved between rock clubs and concert halls with unusual ease. He has written hits like “Brick,” composed for film and television, served as the first Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra, and emerged as an outspoken advocate for arts funding and music education through his Keys For Kids initiative in North Carolina. The new live album Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra documents that orbit from a vantage point few pop artists ever reach: two sold-out nights at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., recorded just before he stepped away from his role with the orchestra.
“Every time I play with an orchestra, I kind of pinch myself,” he says, remembering those concerts in the tense days leading up to the 2024 election. “It’s an incredible achievement to have that many talented musicians on stage at once… There was something in the air. It’s DC, right before the 2024 election. It’s a time in history when I think you’re capturing those moments.”
The recording felt, to Folds, like standing in the musical equivalent of magic hour. “I’ve had a few times in my career where the record light goes on for something important, and I feel a calm come over me,” he explains. “It’s almost like I’ve done it before… It’s a little bit like magic hour when you’re at the beach with your camera, and there’s that moment when suddenly the light changes. It’s perfect, and you just seem to make anything you shoot look good.”
Christine From The Seventh Grade
One of the album’s touchstones is “Christine From The Seventh Grade,” a song first heard on his 2023 studio release What Matters Most and now expanded into a full orchestral setting. For Folds, not every tune earns that treatment. “Not all music is best suited for an orchestra,” he says. “It’s not there to make you sound more important… You really have to choose carefully what you’re doing.” Jherek Bischoff’s arrangement, which builds on Folds’s original string-quartet chart, lets the narrative swell without losing its intimacy. “All I have to say is that it’s a big idea,” Folds continues. “It has significant harmonic movement suitable for the orchestra, and it can stand up to, and even thrive amid, a bit of drama.”
His years curating concerts for guest artists with the NSO taught him to treat orchestration as storytelling rather than decoration. Sometimes the most honest answer was to leave a favorite song off the program. “They say, ‘I love your song, but this doesn’t work for the orchestra. There is no reason for it. Why do you want that?’” he recalls. “If it tells a story, the orchestra can tell stories very well… if all you needed out of the orchestra was the oboist and the percussionist, that’s what you should use.”
But Wait, There’s More
Another highlight of the live album, “But Wait, There’s More,” turns his fascination with information overload into a kind of symphonic funhouse mirror. The piece began years ago as a minimalist chamber work before migrating to piano and, finally, to its full orchestral form. “Making it into an orchestral piece is like it finally gets to have the home I hoped for,” he says. “It tells the story, which is: we live in a time dominated by this sort of dangling carrot and escalating weirdness.”
The lyrics spiral through political conspiracy theories, media spectacles, and the numbing pace of the news cycle. Folds imagines the song’s narrator wandering an endless Atlantic City boardwalk of late-night pitches and push notifications. “‘But Wait, There’s More’ has a real Atlantic City boardwalk vibe—selling stuff, Ronco, Trump-style,” he explains. “You can’t even digest it. It’s like my dog when I give him something from the table… By the time it settles, he’s forgotten about it. He wants his next one, and we’re being treated that same way.”
Keeping The Arts Alive
That concern for how people absorb culture runs through his work on and off the stage. For the past fifteen years, he has lobbied for arts funding and music education at the national level, while Keys For Kids funnels instruments and lessons to young students who might otherwise never touch a piano. “People are inherently artistic, creative, and expressive, and that’s what distinguishes humans from other species,” he says. “Civilization runs more smoothly when everyone communicates… At the highest level, you can help kids understand that they are inherently expressive and creative, which means they make better decisions and communicate more effectively with others.”
Fold says of the kids who find their way to pianos through Keys For Kids, “Whatever you do in life, you’ll now understand that when you have an idea that can enlighten others, you know how to do it to some extent. You have a voice, ideas, and the ability to communicate them… Life is a short little ride.”
He sees that artistic spark not as a luxury but as a civic necessity. Art functions like an encrypted language that reveals who we are to one another. “Language goes a long way, but art is, like, true poetry,” he says. “The whole point of poetry is exactly that—a word can be worth a thousand words. It’s like a zip file that you assemble. No other communication is quite like it; it requires art.”
Ben Folds Brings His Quartet To SFJAZZ For The Holiday Season
Folds brings that same sense of purpose to Sleigher, his gleefully off-kilter Christmas album for New West Records and the centerpiece of his upcoming SFJAZZ debut. What began as a reluctant response to perennial “you should make a Christmas record” suggestions turned into a meditation on time, memory, and the strange rituals of late-capitalist holiday culture. Christmas, he realized, acts as a temporal measuring stick: the decorations hardly change, yet the people inside the houses do. “Christmas is kind of like a little time machine,” he reflects. “Everything’s the same… but every time you reconnect with family, friends, your life, it’s really changed a lot.”
For the Miner Auditorium shows, he leans into that mix of humor and reflection with a small, flexible band. Actor-songwriter Lindsey Kraft, his co-writer and duet partner on one of Sleigher’s key tracks, adds vocal counterpoint. Harmonica virtuoso Ross Garren brings another distinct color. “We’re playing the songs on that Christmas record, plus a few others,” Folds says. “Anytime I’ve ever said ‘Christmas’ in a song, the song gets in the setlist… It’s gonna be really informal, and it’s not like a massive light show and a script or anything. It’s just pretty chill.”
He talks with particular affection about a song inspired by walking his dog through a snow-blanketed suburb where rows of inflatable Santas collapse at dawn, and about “Christmas Time Rhyme,” which he sees as the album’s thematic anchor. The record also includes a Mills Brothers’ tune, “You Don’t Have to Be a Santa Claus,” whose Depression-era message feels pointed in the present. As Folds puts it, the song reminds listeners that generosity does not require a holiday deadline; people can step in and help one another throughout the year.
In these SFJAZZ performances, Folds treats Miner Auditorium less as a formal concert hall than as a neighborhood living room, a place where orchestral reflections, political satire, and bittersweet Christmas scenes can share the same stage. It is hard to imagine a better reason to keep gathering in rooms like Miner Auditorium, waiting to see what kind of beautiful noise Folds conjures next.
Ben Folds Quartet Ticket Info
Ben Folds brings his holiday program to SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium on Monday, December 8, and Tuesday, December 9, 2025, with both shows beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and full event details are available at https://www.sfjazz.org/tickets/productions/25-26/ben-folds/
Artist Website
For more on Ben Folds’ music, projects, and tour dates, visit https://www.benfolds.com
