Category — Music

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:

As excruciatingly hard as it can be to craft the perfect mixtape for a girl that you desperately want to sleep with, crafting a mixtape for a girl that you don’t want to sleep with is even harder.  It certainly seems at the outset to be easier - just pick a bunch of songs you like and then put them on a tape - but one thing that my life (and Star Wars) has taught me is that nothing will ever be as easy as it appears to be.

If you’re making a mixtape for a girl that you like, song selection is important.  The mixtape is a block of wood and the playlist is a lathe that you’re using to turn out the elegant ups, downs and flourishes of the emotional journey that you’re sending l’objet d’amour on (or, at least, like, hoping to send them on).

Using a lathe isn’t easy.  There’s a reason you have to sign that waiver on the first day of wood shop.

The problem in making a mixtape for a girl friend that you don’t experience painful, unrequited pangs for, is that every song placement, every lyric, every hand clap needs to be analyzed endlessly to ensure that The Wrong Message (TM) isn’t being sent.  That the tone is, “This is some cool music that I like,” and not “I’m giving this to you under the guise of being some cool music that I like, but there’s a secret, Dan-Brown-esque code embedded within this tape that will show you the true and unerring map of my heart.”  The potential for misinterpretation is huge and anxiety-making.

Maybe I should close with a song that is unromantic.  Antiromantic.  Maybe the whole thing should be antiromantic.  “Here’s a tape I made about how little I like you.”  It would probably have lots of Misfits on it, and some old school Metallica.  Some Gregorian Chant.  Some Christian rock about celibacy and how badass it is.  Bits of the Star Trek score.

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

So I was out last night and my buddy John and I started waxing poetic about mixtapes.  Not mix CDs.  Making a CD for someone is cool, or filling up a jump drive with music, or beaming a song straight into their brains via nano-powered Song Guns, but it’s not a mixtape.  Sharing music in any format is a soul-affirming experience, but there’s something about the effort involved in crafting the perfect mixtape and producing the actual tape - a much more labor-intensive process than making a CD.

We did an impromptu survey and - shockingly - none of the girls in our group had ever received a mixtape from a boy.  So now we have a project: we’re each going to craft a mixtape for about five of our coworkers and also probably for the waitress.  This is going to mean dusting off the dual-deck tape recorder and buying some blank tapes for the first time in years, but I think it’ll be a fun diversion.  And I’ll probably blog some more about the mixtaping as it’s going on or after it’s done - one of the two.

So, Single Reader, tell me about the last mixtape you received/gave.  What was on it?