Ben Folds - an appreciation

'Twas recently announced that Ben Folds is going to release a retrospective album in the autumn.
Note retrospective rather than hits album as, in the UK at least, he's always been a bit of a cult figure only really troubling the charts in the late 90s with Battle of Who Could Care Less.

Here in Britain it was probably a case of bad timing. Ben Folds Five were competing with Britpop, which obsessed the media so.
Also, whilst they were championed by Simon Mayo on Radio 1, I think today's Radio 2 and 6Music would have allowed BFF to make more of an impact.

So, why is Ben so great?
He's an excellent pianist. There isn't enough indie-piano.
The lyrics are offbeat as well as incredibly sad (witness ballad Brick - about an abortion, such an emotional start to an emotional song).  There's also Army, the upbeat music underlying a bleak song about crushed ambitions.

There's an emotional core to his work as well as a playfulness. Few other performers would do improv songs to strangers on Chatroulette (and in the unlikely event that it's starting to get samey, stick with it to the 3:30 mark when it becomes AWESOME).

When last we saw him play in London, on his Lonely Avenue tour, he vowed to do a cover of the at-the-time iTunes #1 song... it happened to be a Ke$ha track. He made it wonderful.
Epic sing-a-longs like Annie Waits, moving expressions of love like The Luckiest and wonderful-ness like Adelaide : Ben Folds has a great range. It is for that reason, he is awesome.