Ben Folds, House of Blues - April 24, 2009

I’ve been trying to see Ben Folds perform live for about ten years now, and just like my attempts to score Chik Fil A breakfast, I have been consistently thwarted.  Until last night, when a friend and I watched him hammer on his piano for two hours at the House of Blues in Atlantic City.

The setlist for the night was mostly material from Way To Normal, or the fake version thereof, with most of the older material coming from Rockin’ The Suburbsand Songs For Silverman, though a few classic Ben Folds Five songs snuck in as well.  The show kicked off with “Bitch Went Nutz” the ‘fake’ (and I know some who say ‘better’) version of Normal’s “Bitch Went Nuts,” and then played through “Effington,” “Sentimental Guy,” and “Annie Waits” (the first instance of the audience - who was pretty energetic all night - just really going nuts over a song) before pausing to say hello to the crowd.

I don’t remember the exact order of what came next - blame it on driving back to NEPA after the show and then falling into a coma until around noon today - but I think I’ve got most of it, though I know the order is off:

Alice Childress
Cologne
Bastard
Still Fighting It
Lovesick Diagnostician/Dr. Yang (with the former going directly into the latter, like he’s been doing at basically every show this tour)
Free Coffee (along with a demonstration of how he creates the 8-bit kind of sound the keyboard has on that track by putting Altoids tins inside his piano)
Kylie From Connecticut
Landed (which seems like a very odd follow-up to “Kylie”, but the songs are really two sides of the same coin)
Rockin’ The Suburbs
Zak And Sara
Not The Same (which had a huge amount of audience participation - Not only did a group of people near the back shout out the refrain ["You were not the same after that"] at what seemed like sporadic intervals, but Folds split the audience up to do the choral bits in the song, and that ended up being a lot of fun)

In the middle, we were treated to some “fucking scary taxicab stories” - involving an elderly cabbie who started driving erratically when she could not find her oxygen mask and, this one in the form of a “Rock This Bitch”-esque extemporaneous song, a cabbie in Pittsburgh who played the clarinet while driving his cab.

The encore was “Army,” “You Don’t Know Me” (with Jared - and much of the audience - doing Regina Spektor’s vocals), and “Underground,” which made most of the fans sitting around me freak out a bit.

I had a great time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pics worth posting (lots of blurriness).  Folds had a ton of energy, and it definitely transferred to the audience in a cozy venue like the House of Blues.  Our seats, which weren’t the best, still gave us an awesome view of the stage and we could see everything without needing to watch the monitors.  In particular, being on the right side of the room, I could actually see Ben’s face as he was singing, and most of the time, he was smiling.

Last night was easily one of the best shows I’ve been to - maybe not as great as EC was a few years ago, but definitely firmly in my top 5 concerts.  Folds is still touring - he’s going to be in Syracuse Sunday night - and he’s working on a new album with novelist Nick Hornby (another perennial favorite) too.

Here are a few videos from last night that I found on YouTube.  Enjoy: