The Daily Campus

Issue date: 9/29/08 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Ashley Pospisil Ben Folds performed nearly every song off his new album - and a few from the intentionally leaked B-side - at his concert Saturday night, but left little room for his older hits.

Being a touring artist has to be a real pain sometimes, especially if you're doing a new album tour. Chances are, 90 percent of the audience really only wants to hear your old stuff. And you can cater to them a bit, but man, you just wrote all this music, and someone's going to listen to it. Why go on tour if you're just going to play the same thing that you played last tour?

Because the stuff you played last tour was fantastic.

Unfortunately, what went on in the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts Saturday night was not.

The show opened with Folds and his band (Sam Smith on drums, Jared Reynolds on bass and Andrew Higley on "everything") blasting through the chintzy operatics of "Way to Normal," a song which has the same title as Folds' upcoming album but is not, in fact, on the album. As they played, rushing images and light-show theatrics adorned the back of the stage: angelic blue figures, Sauron-esque burning eyes and giant spinning skeletons.

Huh? Is this Ben Folds, or is this the Queen musical?

"The graphics were a little gratuitous," said Lisa DelCegno, a 1st-semester theater studies major. "And the lighting - the whole thing was really unnecessary."

"I will explain," said Folds, a few songs later. Apparently, after finishing the new album, he wrote, composed and produced a second album - a "fake" version of "Way to Normal," created in a single day, and "leaked" intentionally by Folds.

And then Folds played a whole bunch of it, live, for us. Thanks, maybe.

Again, if he wants to play new stuff, that's great. We can only hear "Brick" so many times. But going out, telling the audience that he basically made all this stuff up in five minutes, and then making us sit through it - was that just narcissism? Was he trying to say something ironic about concertgoers there? A big joke about the music industry? The goofy projected images combined with the flimsy "fake" material made the first half of the show feel as if Folds were just making fun of the audience. Adding insult to injury, the projectors blocked an awful lot of the stage for anyone on the margins of the crowd.

Continued...

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