He’ll be sweeping onto the stage as part of Night at The Barracks on Saturday 26 September. Emmy-nominated singer songwriter Ben Folds is back, bringing nostalgic anthems to crowds spanning generations.

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Looking back, is there a career moment that changed everything for you?

No, not really. You know, career is more boring than that. Or it's less story-worthy than that because it's just a culmination of one thing to the next.

Sometimes there'll be a moment that will stand out. For Australia specifically, it was probably my band's television debut on the midday show, and that was because I threw a piano stool at the piano and upset the co-host of the show. And it made considerable headlines for long enough to get us a top five record.

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What's your favourite concert you've ever played in?

I don't know… It's just that I don't remember. My brain doesn't work that way. I wish it did. But it doesn't really. Things seem too complicated to pick a favourite.

What’s most important to me on a night is explaining why the songs exist. And that sounds like a really small thing, but that's actually a pretty big thing to me. If I can do that, then I'm happy with the show. I can check it off.

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‍For people who don’t know who Ben Folds is, what are the top three songs that you push them towards?

I’m sorry not to give you a good answer, but I don't have favourites and top five stuff and bucket lists or anything like that. My mind just doesn't work that way.

With my career, it's been a really long career. If I were to say how many people knew me from this or knew me from that, I could probably find five or six eras and realise the audience was divided up among those eras, especially the age group that grew up watching a movie called Over the Hedge, which is a DreamWorks movie. I wrote the songs for it.

Now they've come of age and are representing another era. It's almost like I planted the seed and it popped up later.

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Any hobbies outside of music that you picked up when you're in Sydney?

Well, there are birds to watch in Sydney and I love the flying foxes. During my time here, I look out the bedroom window at a fig tree, and it’s like National Geographic or something. It’s awesome; there’s this whole drama every day between six species of birds. I think the birds are great.

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Have you been to Manly much before?

I've been through Manly before, but it was a long time ago. But I know that I've never played here before.

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The Barracks is open air and the nights are pretty crisp. How do you bring what you do to that audience and make it pop on a stage?

If people are game for hearing music, most people are surprisingly committed. I've played stuff where it's pouring rain and people are still standing there. I feel bad for them because, of course, I'm under cover, usually on the piano. I'll play through pretty much anything as long as that's what the audience wants.

I once played when it must have been two to five degrees outside. And I had to play. It was just suddenly a dip down. It was a college show outside in the USA. My fingers turned purple playing that.

For some reason, when you pound a piano and it's really cold, your knuckles turn purple and they stay purple for about three or four days.

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So symphony orchestras, is that the premium level of artistic licence when you start to work with one of those?

Well, it's the most people you’ll work with, that's for sure. And because of that, they have to have really intense planning of the scores, and of being on the same proverbial page. You've got orchestras so big in the 19th century that they had to have a dude standing out front waving a stick, but there's just so much going on with an orchestra.

If you can wield all that and aim it in the right direction musically, it is extremely powerful. But if you swing and miss with it or you just think it's going to do something magical for you because there's a bunch of people on stage, you’ve got a sad moment coming. It's not going to work.

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What’s your favourite instrument to play?

I love playing drums. It's just such an irresponsible instrument. I don't have to know much.

And I've been playing drums since I was a kid. That was my first instrument. I think that you should score, organise, arrange instruments so that when they come in, it's your favourite instrument. You know, that's the real way to move an arrangement along once you're satisfied supporting the story of the piece.

And the next thing is moving it ahead by going, wow, listen to that bass guitar. Never heard one of those before. It makes you happy to hear it.

I think that's how ‘favourite’ works for me in that context. It's making someone feel like that's their favourite thing at that moment.

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To catch Ben Folds in person, book your tickets now for Saturday 26 September before they sell out. With orchestral influence, a piano rock backbone and sprinklings of pop, Ben Folds is the unique sound you don’t want to miss. •

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