Ben Folds speaks out on Kennedy Center — and drops an album he made there

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Ben Folds didn’t want to quit.

“There wasn’t a bone in my body that wanted to,” the singer-songwriter said. But minutes after President Donald Trump’s newly appointed Kennedy Center board of trustees voted both to appoint Trump as the center’s chairman and fire its longtime president, Deborah Rutter, both he and fellow artistic adviser Renée Fleming tendered their resignations.

“Renée and I were on the phone, and we were just sad,” Folds said. “So sad, because we loved doing that work.”

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But he considered Trump’s Truth Social post decrying drag shows at the center. He considered the aggressive nature of the takeover. He considered the patrons who said they would frequent other theaters and the artists who refused to perform there until it was bipartisan again.

And he considered the wide berth that Rutter, the head of the Kennedy Center during his tenure, gave him to achieve his artistic vision.

Folds tried holding out hope that “maybe something good would come from this administration” because they were in charge, after all, and “I want the world to be a better place.”

Maybe they knew what they were doing. Maybe they had studied the country’s institutions and had a solid plan in place to make them better, to help them more efficiently serve all Americans. Maybe, in other words, Folds’s initial instincts about Trump’s return to the White House were wrong.

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“But then you see it happen in your backyard to something I’m an expert at,” he said. “And I’m like: ‘Oh, my God. They either don’t know what they’re doing, or they’re trying to make this fail.’”

“It’s incompetent to take over an arts administration when you do it in a way that’s going to run off artists and audiences,” Folds added. “They’re running off their product, and they’re running off their customer, if they want to look at it like the private sector.”

Folds — the former leader of Ben Folds Five, who’s gone on to a long and varied solo career — hasn’t spoken extensively about the Kennedy Center since leaving. On Friday, he released an album he recorded with the National Symphony Orchestra.

The line at Byrdland snaked onto the sidewalk. - (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)Ben Folds answers questions at the event. - (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)

Folds held an album-signing and question-and-answer session at Byrdland Records in Washington on Friday to celebrate the record’s release. Folds insisted the event be held at a local independent record store.

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The line snaked out the door and onto the sidewalk, where fans happily waited in the summer heat for autographs from and photos with the musician. “This is more exciting than fireworks,” exclaimed one fan, 20 people from the door.

Folds signed records for fans of all stripes — even a brown-and-white pit bull named Patch attended, though he was the only patron to climb onto the signing tables — for more than an hour. Fans came decked out in Ben Folds Five gear and brought their vinyl and their memories of seeing Folds perform.

One police officer said Folds’s first solo record “Rockin’ the Suburbs” helped him through his divorce. He said this several times.

At least one member of the National Symphony Orchestra swung by, despite the Kennedy Center’s not having shared news of the NSO’s record release with the ensemble’s members.

Jonathan Murray and his dog, Patch, at Folds's signing at Byrdland. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post) - (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)Ben Folds signs an album. - (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)

After signing, Folds gave a brief interview with a local news outlet and then answered questions sent in via a live stream, where those unable to get to Byrdland could watch.

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Most of the questions concerned the Kennedy Center: Should fans still support it? How? One particularly thoughtful 16-year-old asked how politically involved and open she should be.

Folds didn’t waver: Yes, he supports the NSO. Putting out this record is his way of doing so. As for how to exist in this world, 16 or 60? His message is a simple one: Be honest.

“You can’t let yourself self-edit,” he said. “Your job as an artist — and as a citizen — is to be honest.”

Folds also reinforced some of the things that he told The Washington Post during a phone call ahead of the Independence Day release, in which he discussed why he left and what he’s seen since then.

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He’s watched as the center’s new president, Richard Grenell, decried artists and patrons as being intolerant.

He’s watched as patrons booed Vice President JD Vance and, later, Trump himself during visits to the center. “I was there for eight years, in the building all the time. I never saw any … people booing. … That never happened before. He brought the circus with him.”

He’s rolled his eyes at claims of the building being in disrepair, saying: “Yeah, the HVAC sucks. It probably sucks in the Department of Justice, too. Deferred maintenance of a government building [is normal]. I’m a stupid piano player, and I know that.”

Each new headline has reinforced his decision to resign. “The guy took over and said he wanted to put his fist on the scale. So I had to leave,” he said. Folds knew it wouldn’t be an environment where he felt comfortable working, where he felt comfortable bringing in artists.

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He has hope. But not for now.

“We can have it again,” Folds said. “It can come back. But it can’t come back with the way of thinking that’s currently residing over the center.”

Folds joined the Kennedy Center as the artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra in 2017, after more than two decades as an award-winning, platinum-selling rock artist.

He didn’t join for the money. As he puts it, he could make up his salary in one gig. He felt the center stood for something.

“Even Trump used the word ‘beacon’ in his rhetoric about the Kennedy Center. Well, he got that part right,” he said. “What happens there matters because it’s the Kennedy Center, and all are welcome.”

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Or, at least, all were welcome.

For Folds, “what the Kennedy Center is at its core is education.” And he hoped to share his love of orchestral music with the world, the way he had previously shared his love of alternative rock. He created “Declassified,” a series that usually paired popular artists with the NSO, a way of Trojan-horsing classical music to the masses.

He jokingly calls the series the “young people’s concert for old drunk people.” “They’re getting an education, hearing a Latvian composer next to Sara Bareilles. That was the point,” he said. “Not for Sara to come in and sell tickets. She didn’t give a s---. She didn’t make any money doing that.”

“We were in it because we wanted to educate,” he added, “and we wanted to educate people who were our age and had never been to a symphony orchestra.”

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For Folds, the series represented the mission of the Kennedy Center. There’s “nothing wrong with the performance venues whose capitalistic concerns are to get as many people in the seats as possible,” he said. But the country is already chock-full of those. Folds knows: He’s played at many of them as a solo artist and with his old band.

Folds is no longer associated with the center, and Friday’s Byrdland event was his last (ceremonial) act as the NSO’s artistic adviser.

“Ben Folds Live With the National Symphony Orchestra” was recorded during two sold-out nights last October. He had long wanted to dust off the NSO’s record label and make an orchestral pop record, but doing so was proving prohibitively expensive. So, he figured he would just do it himself, taking his fee from both nights and using it to cover much of the album’s costs.

Though he didn’t mean for it to, Folds said, “It’s possible the album might take on some symbolism.”

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“Not to be cocky,” the singer said, but to him it feels like “the golden age of the Kennedy Center” in some ways: him operating at the height of his artistry, the orchestra creating new music. “We made an album! And maybe they’ll do that again, but I seriously doubt it with the attitude” of the center’s new leadership. For now, the album stands to him as a tribute to when Rutter “gave all these artists a chance to experiment with impunity and to invite wider ranges of people into the Kennedy Center. Never saw a circus. No one ever booed. We had Republicans and Democrats alike.”

But now …

“Now, the head of the Kennedy Center can’t talk for three minutes without having grievances against a political party,” Folds said. “His job is to bring excellence in music to everybody. Not to just say you do it but to actually do it. And that starts with not throwing little hissy fits. He’s a grown man.”