Review & setlist: Ben Folds reaches new heights during Paper Airplane Request Tour in Beverly
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Review & setlist: Ben Folds reaches new heights during Paper Airplane Request Tour in Beverly

Concert Reviews

The audience devised much of the setlist, but Folds was very much in command at a stellar Cabot Theatre concert.

Ben Folds performing at City Winery Nashville this past January. Folds took his Paper Airplane Request Tour to Beverly Sunday. Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Ben Folds with Lindsey Craft at The Cabot in Beverly, Nov. 10, 2024

It’s safe to say that ride-or-die fans who turned up to Ben Folds’s show at The Cabot in Beverly Sunday night were glad they picked this particular gig.

Part of Folds’s ongoing Paper Airplane Request Tour — whose entire second half is made up of songs requested by audience members, scrawled onto blank pages that they turn into paper airplanes and toss onto the stage in a chaotic frenzy of flying paper — Sunday’s show kept both fellow fans and the man himself guessing.

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“This is the most challenging and interesting set I’ve been given this whole time,” Folds told the crowd at show’s end, which is saying something given the tour kicked off way back in May. And a few times you could tell he wasn’t kidding about the “challenging” part: “Claire’s Ninth” from “Lonely Avenue,” Folds’s 2010 collaboration with author Nick Hornby, went so off the rails at one point that Folds resorted to singing lyrics from Dana Carvey’s famous unprepared-rock-star “SNL” song “Chopping Broccoli.” (In his defense, before the song started, he admitted, “This could be rough.”)

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But those instances were relatively few, and the audacity of the conceit combined with Folds’s ability to pull it off — this is a man with a 30-year career and hundreds of songs in his catalog — made up for any glitches. Besides, judging from the reaction from the diehards, those glitches were features, not bugs — they just added to the charm. The end result was having the pleasure of hearing rarely performed songs from Ben’s deep bench, along with the fascinating stories that went with them.

Folds, alone at the piano, is an expert storyteller, naturally funny, and a born teacher of the songwriting craft — no “great to be back in Boston” nonsense from this guy. Instead, he talks about how particular songs originated, the ups and downs of individual collaborations, the keys he chose and why … He’s like the music professor you desperately wish you could have had, whether you have any musical ability or not. (Fans of NBC’s a capella singing competition “The Sing Off” will remember that demeanor when Folds served as a judge.)

The result is that you hear even the songs you know in entirely new ways. I’m not going to say that learning about the events that inspired “Phone in a Pool” (a hilarious and apparently true story involving Kesha and a Blackberry) make it a better song, necessarily, but it definitely adds to the experience of hearing it.

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The requests covered everything from 2008’s vagaries-of-stardom ditty “Free Coffee,” much easier to take on solo piano than with the noisy techno background of the original release, to Folds’s cover of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” complete with Elton-esque facial expressions. And “Smoke,” from the seminal Ben Folds Five album “Whatever and Ever Amen,” was exquisite, tapping into the song’s sad, ethereal beauty.

Another highlight: A fan no doubt ruminating on last week’s election results requested “Mr. Peepers,” a song Folds wrote in 2018 about then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as part of a project with The Washington Post. It includes these now even-more-timely lyrics about democracy: “They say it dies in the dark; right now, they’re trying to kill it in broad daylight.”

The requests weren’t all obscurities, though — the achingly tender fan favorite “The Luckiest” kicked off the set, and later Folds actually pumped his fist in relief after unfolding an airplane requesting the often-played “Zak and Sara”: He rewarded the crowd with an array of dazzling finger work as he plowed through it, to thunderous response. And the last request — a rollicking version of ”Kate,” also from “Whatever and Ever Amen” — couldn’t have been better chosen if Ben had picked it himself.

Ben Folds is surrounded by paper airplane requests at The Cabot in Beverly Sunday night. – Peter Chianca / Boston.com

And that’s not even mentioning the moving and dynamic nine-song first set, prior to the requests, which kicked off with a virtuosic run through 2015’s “Capable of Anything” and included highlights like a satisfyingly melancholy “Don’t Change Your Plans” from 1999’s “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner” and a wild roll through 2008’s “Effington” (“Effington could be a wonderful effing place”), which I desperately want to be a real town.

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In what may have been a first-set highlight, “Kristine from the 7th Grade” from last year’s “What Matters Most” — a wry commentary on toxic online relationships with people you thought you knew — drew huge laughs of recognition. He admitted he wrote it in a minor key because he finds the situation so sad, and yet he also somehow makes it undeniably funny, which is classic Folds: His songs are clever, sad, angry, and melancholic, sometimes in turn, sometimes at the same time. 

Folds took the stage in his standard casual uniform of rumpled t-shirt and tousled hair, and you could be forgiven for thinking he looked like he might have just woken up — but he certainly didn’t play that way. All night his feet pounded the pedals and his hands flew over the keys in what felt like an almost symbiotic relationship with his instrument, every note registering on his face as he played. 

His voice may be a little reedier than it was during his ’90s heyday, and some of the higher notes sounded maybe a little too high, but he’s clearly just as invested as ever in the emotional truths behind his songs. And besides being essentially a songwriting master class, the concert was a tutorial in enveloping an audience, one that clearly knew the assignment coming in: Mere nods and glances from Folds prompted perfectly timed claps, snaps, whistles, and “woo-hoo”s that made the crowd feel like part of the show. 

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This was especially true during “Army,” the exuberant encore that ended the concert, which brought the audience in as full-fledged background singers, part of a joyous musical community. Those who came to The Cabot already a part of that community must have been thrilled to be there, and those who were new to it are likely to remain forevermore.

The show opened with the talented and quirky Lindsey Craft — who also joined Folds during the main set on their duet “We Could Have This,” off Folds’s great new Christmas album, “Sleigher” — who did a 30-minute version of her very personal one-woman musical, “love, me.” A little more work (and possibly some intense therapy) and it sounds like it will be ready for Broadway.

Setlist for Ben Folds at The Cabot in Beverly, Nov. 10, 2024

SET 1: 

  • Capable of Anything
  • Sentimental Guy
  • Don’t Change Your Plans
  • Fragile
  • Kristine From the 7th Grade
  • Effington
  • Still Fighting It
  • We Could Have This (With Lindsey Kraft)
  • Annie Waits

SET 2 (paper airplane requests): 

  • The Luckiest
  • Landed
  • Claire’s Ninth
  • Family of Me
  • Free Coffee
  • Tiny Dancer (Elton John cover)
  • Mister Peepers
  • Zak and Sara
  • Phone in a Pool
  • Smoke
  • Kate

ENCORE:

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Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor


Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.


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