Ben Folds: One In Five.

Ben Folds

Ben Folds plays the Tivoli Theatre on April 23.

For a few years now American musician Ben Folds has been calling Adelaide home. In spite of the near destruction of the Ray Martin Midday Show piano a couple of years back… Since tying the knot he’s settled into Aussie suburban life, you know the drill, raising a couple of kids, putting out internationally successful albums, touring the world… Well maybe that’s not something every dad can claim, but Folds is, as the title of his most recent release suggests, still Rockin’ The Suburbs.

“People in the States just kind of look at me as living in Australia somewhere. Living in Adelaide gives me distance from the things that push all my buttons, you know. It allows me some time to kind of… When someone makes a ridiculous business proposal to me at nine in the morning my time and they need an answer, then I basically have ten hours to figure out how to say no. That’s the biggest thing. I can be a little more independent.”

Rockin’ The Suburbs once again finds Ben Folds in top form. After the release of a couple of acclaimed albums with his trio Ben Folds Five, and the overlooked but equally brilliant Fear Of Pop album a couple of years back, little had been heard from the remarkable pianist.

“The inspiration and motivation for me is usually deadline,” Folds explains of his less than breakneck pace. “I have to have a batch of songs for an album. For me, if I was going to play a gig it was just motivating for me. The first gig I ever did was all songs that I had written when I was just ten years old. In order to get to the gig I had to finish the songs, so I had a deadline. That’s the way I still am now. Otherwise I just wouldn’t finish things. I’d have them in my head in some sort of half finished vague fantasy thing.”

“I only work when it’s time. Yesterday I was walking around with two great songs in my head, but I don’t have a deadline at the moment, so I’ll just forget them. Sometimes you start to worry about how many songs you’ve actually got, so you should latch on to them… It was a good day yesterday, I was just cruising around. So often I’ll have songs in my head, but then something else in life happens and I’ll just loose them. I have to sit down and think ‘I’m a songwriter now’. It happens about every two years, and that’s when I’ll take it seriously. I’ll write notes on menus or whatever, carry a notebook with me, keep a little Dictaphone. That happens for a month or two. It’s like an assignment.”

“Things just happen simultaneously, but not always for the same songs. I’ll just be walking around thinking of themes, things that are going on in my life. At the same time I’ve got different musical things coming up, and I just realise they tend to fit together.”

It’s the single Still Fightin’ It that finds Folds taking the time to get out on the road and tour. A very different track from it’s predecessor, the albums title track, Still Fightin' It shows yet another side of Folds dynamic style.

“I this case when we made the album there was a plan for the release of the singles. We were going for Still Fighting It as the kind of single that they wanted to work with. We wanted to launch the album with something a little more light-hearted, give me something I can tour on. It’s basically a good idea, but the songs are all so different that it’s hard to represent the album with just one song.”

The record company guys must just love you coming in with an album full of totally different tracks and no obvious way to market it…

“I think it’s a problem,” he laughs. “I don’t say any way around it. I’m in a weird place, because I’m kind of in the pop mainstream but I kinda don’t belong there. I’m not like a too cool for school kind of indie artist and I’m not exactly a country band. Where do you put something like what I do into something as narrow as the way the music business works right now? They work it out. I’m still doing it, so something’s working.”

If you have a glance at the lyric sheet for Still Fighting It, the latest single from Ben’s last album, there’s a handy conversion from Aussie to US dollars. Can’t have the American listeners thinking we’re ripping people off with our pub counter lunches.

“I just want people to know a roast beef combo isn’t that expensive.”