“I don’t come here often at all,” said Ben Folds from the stage Sunday night at The Parker in Fort Lauderdale, a few songs into his solo set. It was an accurate assessment for an artist whose last full show in South Florida was in 2009. He certainly made it worth our while, commanding the stage for two hours with a stripped-down set of his singular and impassioned ballads and rockers, hits and deep cuts, all delivered with soul and his trademark wit, as part of his Paper Airplane Request Tour.
But first, the concert opened with one of the more unusual acts I’ve seen outside of a fringe festival. Longtime actor and short-time pianist and songwriter Lindsey Kraft echoed the clever rhymes and wordsmithy of Stephen Sondheim from the first number, and the comparison would prove more than apt. As we learned from Folds later, Kraft’s material was drawn from a solo musical inspired by her life in an open relationship with a noncommittal partner, and she spent as much time monologuing to the audience as she did performing. Whether or not the musical comes to professional fruition, Kraft has charisma and talent to spare, and should be a hit on the cabaret circuit.
Then came the moment we Folds fans have been anticipating for 15 years. Clad in a brown jacket and slacks, and sporting a flat cap and spectacles inching down his nose, the 58-year-old musician could almost pass for someone feeding ducks from a bench in Central Park (this is not an insult)—“back to anonymous” indeed, to borrow one of his song titles. His playing proved to be as virtuosic as his look was unassuming, easily maneuvering between ragtime, blues, jazz and pop styles when the composition or the mood called for it. A solo during fan-favorite “Zak and Sara” even suggested the work of the far-out avant-jazz pianist Sun Ra. Seeing Folds in such a setting, without his occasional trio or the instrumental flourishes of his studio albums, added a more spartan and rugged flavor to the full-band songs we knew well, with cuts like “Selfless, Cold and Composed” and “Narcolepsy” suggesting a new, urgent sense of gravitas.
To the delight of all, Folds proved a loquacious raconteur between songs, especially in his more scripted opening set, reflecting on the conditions of decluttering and mortality that hatched the title song from 2023’s What Matters Most, and sharing the surreal backstory that inspired “Phone in a Pool,” in which Folds, in a fit of pique, chucked his BlackBerry into the pool of a Los Angeles hotel, only for fellow-guest Kesha, of all people, to jump into the water and attempt to salvage it (unsuccessfully).
Folds then took a short hiatus after eight songs, allowing us the chance to indulge in the most idiosyncratic aspect of this tour: writing our song requests on paper airplanes and tossing them onto the stage. Following a countdown—and with Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” pumped through the house speakers—we tossed our handmade creations in imperfect harmony, our aerodynamically questionable constructions raining down like a burst of sloppy confetti.
Folds built the rest of his 11-song set list on the fly by choosing airplanes at random, favoring some of the more impressive tosses: A request for “Song From the Dumped” made it all the way to the back curtain of the Parker stage, and a sadly unfilled request for a Billy Joel chestnut lodged into a nook in his Steinway. “I don’t know ‘Piano Man,’” he conceded, before tinkering with a few bars of it, with alternate lyrics.
Paper Airplane Request Tour Shows are like that—full of spontaneity and good feeling, each set list varying, sometimes drastically, from the night before (not to mention providing for one of the weirder tour riders for a venue like the Parker).
I’ve looked at set lists with more esoteric material than ours, but I was thrilled with the result, and its accumulation of stone-cold classic after classic: “The Luckiest,” “Brick,” “Army,” “Fred Jones Part 2,” a soaring, set-ending “Kate,” and an encore finale of “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces,” Folds’ playing encompassing a spectrum of sounds, from a lissome delicacy to a churning sense of thunderous foreboding. In other words, it was a making-up-for-lost-time set, a play-the-hits set. And with such an exuberant response from the near-sellout house, hopefully we won’t have to wait 15 years for the next gig.
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