Snoopy is the celebrity of the “Peanuts” world, however Ben Folds is loyal to Charlie Brown. “I’m going to have to go with Chuck because he’s so emotionally compressed,” the singer-songwriter stated when requested for a favourite.
Folds didn’t develop up poring over the Charles M. Schulz comics or memorizing the TV specials — “I can’t think of anything I really was a fan of outside of music” — however he cherished Vince Guaraldi’s music for the animated specials.
He began finding out Charlie Brown and the gang when he was employed to write down the title music for “It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown,” sung by Charlie’s sister Sally within the 2022 Apple TV particular. And he lately dove again into the world of those iconic characters when he returned to write down the ultimate three songs for “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical.”
“I think it’s good that I came to fully appreciate the world of ‘Peanuts’ as an adult,” says Folds, though he provides that he was nonetheless starstruck about writing for Charlie Brown. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” he says. “I was asking the Schulz family, ‘Can I say this?’ and they’d say, ‘Yes, it’s yours.’”
Ben Folds performs in live performance in the course of the “Paper Airplane Request Tour” at ACL Reside at The Moody Theatre on December 11, 2024 in Austin, Tx.
(Rick Kern / Getty Pictures)
Folds’ best-known songs, equivalent to “Brick,” “Song for the Dumped,” “Army,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and “Zak and Sara,” could appear too sardonic or darkish for the candy world of Snoopy and firm. However he sees it in a different way.
“There’s a lot of deep stuff there. ‘Peanuts,’ like ‘Mister Rogers,’ presents an empathetic and nuanced, not dumbed-down view of the world, and that is rare for kids programming,” he says. “I was able to say stuff in my songs that kids will understand but that will go over the heads of many adults.”
He additionally is aware of learn how to strategy the storytelling facet of musical writing pragmatically.
Throughout the present’s parameters, Folds is grateful to the creators for giving him his inventive freedom. “They give me carte blanche and don’t push back” Folds says, including that when he places in poetic imagery — ”I’m not calling myself f—ing Keats or something,” he provides as an apart — director Erik Wiese would weave these concepts into the animation. “That’s really cool to see.”
“My ambition is to have them tell me that my lyrics meant they could delete pages of script,” he provides. “That’s what these songs are for.”
Wiese says Folds was the perfect individual to “take the mantle” from Guaraldi: “He brings a modern thing and his lyrics are so poetic; on his albums he always touches your heart.”
Author and govt producer Craig Schulz, who’s Charles’ son, was impressed by each Folds’ songwriting and the duty the musician felt to the “Peanuts” model. “He has a unique ability to really get into what each of the gang is thinking and drive the audience in the direction we want to,” says Schulz, including that there was in the future the place the writers received on the cellphone with Folds to clarify the feelings they wanted a scene to convey “and suddenly he says, ‘I got it, I’m super-excited’ and then he hangs up and runs to the piano and cranks it out.”
The primary music Folds wrote for “A Summer Musical” was when Charlie Brown realizes that the camp he holds pricey “is going to get mown over in the name of progress. I wanted him to have the wisdom of his 60-year-old self to go back to ‘when we were light as the clouds’ to let him understand the future,” he says. So it’s a poignant music whilst he’s writing about Charlie Brown wanting by “old pictures of people he met five days ago. That’s the way kids are — they’re taking in a whole world and learning a lot in five days.”
(He didn’t write the present’s first two songs, although you’ll hear loads of Folds-esque piano and melody in them as a result of, Wiese says, “We wanted it to sound cohesive.”)
Within the remaining music, Folds’ lyrics have a good time the saving of the camp (yeah, spoiler alert, but it surely’s “Peanuts,” so you realize the ending will likely be glad), however he laces in the concept that these youngsters are inheriting a whole lot of dangerous issues from older generations, together with local weather change. Nevertheless it’s not cynical, as an alternative including an understanding that their dad and mom did the perfect they might (with a “Hello Mother, Hello Father” reference thrown in for the old-timers) and that this new era will do the perfect they’ll and make their very own errors.
Franklin, Marcie, Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock and Sally in “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical.”
(Apple TV+)
Folds says it’s necessary for individuals within the arts and on the left to carry a sensible view however to not change into doomsayers.
“I see how bad it could get, but there are two stories you can always tell that might be true — one way to talk about climate change will leave people saying, ‘We’re screwed anyway so I’ll just drink out of plastic bottles and toss them in the garbage,’ but the other way is to motivate people, to tell a story that shows an aspiration towards the future.”
That doesn’t imply, after all, that Folds is blind to the perils of the second. He stepped down because the Nationwide Symphony Orchestra’s inventive advisor on the Kennedy Heart to protest Donald Trump’s energy play there.
“I couldn’t be a pawn in that,” he says. “Was I supposed to call my homies like Sara Bareilles and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come play here?’” However he’s specializing in the optimistic, noting that he’s now working with different symphony orchestras with that free time.
Folds has lately additionally tried countering the turmoil of our present period: Final 12 months he launched his first Christmas album, “Sleigher,” and his 2023 album “What Matters Most” opens with “But Wait, There’s More,” which gives political commentary however then talks about believing within the good of humankind, and closes with the uplifting “Moments.”
And clearly, Folds is aware of {that a} present that stars a beagle and a small yellow fowl that defies classification just isn’t the appropriate place to get slowed down within the problems with the day. Even when the lyrics dip into melancholy waters, they discover a optimistic place to land.
“In this era I don’t want the art that passes through my world to not have some semblance of hope,” he says.
