Friday, September 26, 2008

Ben Folds Concert

So I went and saw Ben Folds last night for the third time. His third solo album, Way To Normal, comes out on Tuesday so he has been touring in support of it. It was the last show of this year's WBRU's Dunkin Donuts Concert Series, at the Bank of America City Center (the ice rink).

Ben Folds is always really fun to see live. He talks and jokes a lot between songs and has great crowd interaction, even giving the audience parts to sing in a few songs. I knew he would play a ton of new songs, since the album comes out so soon, but what I was not expecting was the entire set to be new songs. Him and his band spent a day in the studio a month or two ago and created an entire fake album, with different takes on the same track names, and leaked it online to screw with people. So during their hour-long set, they played almost the entire new album, as well as several tracks off of the fake album. The songs were good, some funny, and I was familiar with 2 of them from his MySpace page, but I really wish he would've mixed it up. I mean, when you have a cult following like he does, it takes balls to go out and play a whole set of only new material, so I commend him for it, but I also wanted to hear old favorites.

About 5 or 6 songs in, he explained that they would play the older stuff in the encore, which gave me hope of a really long encore full of classics. But the encore came, he played 4 old songs, only 3 of which I knew, and then finished the night with another new one. It was a great show and a lot of fun, because he always is, but I was kind of disappointed.

What it did do was make me really excited to get the new album on Tuesday, which was probably his goal... so it worked.

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