After playing his first two songs, Ben Folds looked out on the crowd and smiled.
"I remember this place now," he said. "There are more d***s drawn on the bathroom walls here than any place I've been in the last year."
Folds' spring tour brought him to Columbus, where he played to a sold-out crowd in The Newport Music Hall.
Eef Barzelay, front man of the band Clem Snide, opened for Folds with a solo singer/guitarist act. He lead off with Clem Snide's "I Love the Unknown."
Barzelay appeared onstage in his trademark rockabilly white suit and thick-rimmed glasses. His voice was reminiscent of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Alec Ounsworth's: nasally and full of cracks but somehow inoffensive in its sincerity, like something one would hear in a dive bar at 3 a.m. when the house band has had a few (dozen) too many.
Folds filled his set with old favorites, such as "Brick" and "Rockin' the Suburbs," but he also introduced several songs from the album he will soon be releasing. "Effington," "Free Coffee" and "Errant Dog" had poppy three-part vocals, and were fueled by driving rhythms that will remind the Ben Folds faithful of the livelier, if a little more angry, "Song for the Dumped" and "Jackson Cannery" era.
Folds had a microphone set up on stage to record a crowd part to be mixed into one of the new songs, "Hiroshima," which is about a concert he played in Japan where he accidentally walked off the front of the stage, hit his head on the ground, and had to play the rest of the show with a
concussion.
The crowd was also the first audience to hear the spoken-word intro Folds had recorded for his new song "The Bitch Went Nuts." Folds had bassist Jared Reynolds play the track for the audience from his iPhone.
Midway through the concert, Folds's drummer, Sam Smith, and Reynolds stepped off stage, leaving Folds to perform several songs solo.
When Reynolds and Smith returned to the stage, Folds attacked the keys with renewed intensity. Folds' performances are famed for their crowd participation songs, and Wednesday night was no exception. He played "Army," a Folds concert standard in which he instructs the audience to sing the two horn parts that were played in the recorded version on "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner."
Folds also called for crowd participation in his cover of Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Sh-t," and his encore performance of "Not the Same." He ended the night with a rousing performance of "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces," which descended into an extended rock-out session before Folds retired from the stage, leaving the crowd cheering and
clapping.
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