Ben Folds did not go quietly.
When the Trump-installed leadership swept into the Kennedy Center like a cultural wrecking ball, the longtime artistic adviser—who had spent eight years carefully nurturing orchestral innovation and programming with actual purpose—saw the writing on the acoustically treated walls and noped out at 1:59 p.m., one minute before the administrative regime-change officially took hold.
“I had my statement up by 2:01,” Folds tells me. “The takeover was at 2:00. I wanted no part of what was coming.”
And what was coming wasn’t just a reshuffling of jobs or a new marketing campaign. It was a betrayal of mission, a hostile remodeling of one of America’s most vital artistic sanctuaries. And now, in a plot twist worthy of its own libretto, Folds is releasing a live orchestral album recorded at the Kennedy Center—Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra—mere months before the hammer fell. Out July 4th, naturally. Because if you’re going to throw a musical middle finger at creeping authoritarianism, you might as well dress it in strings, woodwinds, and a touch of patriotism.
“This album suddenly now feels much bigger,” he says. “I knew we were making something special with the NSO. I didn’t know it’d be a time capsule of the last moment before it all got torn down.”
The record opens with “But Wait, There’s More,” a track that manages to be both searingly sardonic and spiritually hopeful—a summary not just of the album, but of Folds himself. “I still believe there’s more good than not,” he says. “But you have to work for it. You have to say something. Especially now.”
That belief was tested during the Kennedy Center upheaval, when the incoming leadership promptly canned longtime president Deborah Rutter, an arts administrator Folds describes as “one of the best to ever grace the field.” She was supposed to help guide the transition. Instead, she was shown the door in the kind of petty power move that signals exactly how little the arts were valued under the new regime.
“The trust was broken,” Folds says. “A government honorarium is not much. It's symbolic at best. You don’t ask artists to take pay cuts, fly across the country, rehearse with an orchestra for two hours, and then walk into a situation where they might be targeted for having an opinion. I couldn’t look my friends in the eye and say, ‘It’s cool. Come play here.’ It wasn’t cool anymore.”
And that trust—between artists and venue, between institution and public—was everything. The Kennedy Center was never just a concert hall. It was an engine for civic and artistic connection, a place where Folds had helped pilot programs like Declassified, which introduced modern songwriters to orchestral arrangements without dumbing anything down or blasting the orchestra through a PA system. It was, as he puts it, “about story, not spectacle.”
Folds brought in young orchestrators, gave them a platform, and made the orchestra the storyteller—not just the backdrop. “We weren’t using the orchestra as props" he says, "we were challenging them to bring new music to life, while giving the orchestra a one size fits all role. Our experimentation was a beacon for other orchestras throughout the private sector."
It was a mission rooted in access and equity. Thousands were enticed to come to the Kennedy Center - many for the first time - to experience all forms of art and music. “You’d see someone on that stage who looked like you, no matter who you are,” Folds says. “That’s a part of what the arts are supposed to do. Being mission driven, not profit driven, makes that possible.”
Which is also, not coincidentally, why the arts are often one of the first targets in any authoritarian soft launch. “They don’t come for the tanks,” he says. “They come for the orchestras. They come for the books. That’s what tells you what’s really happening.”
And what happened next was something Folds calls “textbook.”
“You start by laughing at Dmitri Shostakovich from the presidential box,” he says, referencing Stalin’s infamous intimidation of the Soviet composer. “That’s the tweet. ‘I hate Shostakovich.’ Then the arrests come later.”
Folds reminds me that the Kennedy Center’s own National Symphony Orchestra has a direct lineage to Soviet defiance—Mstislav “Slava” Rostropovich, a dissident who defected to the U.S., conducted the NSO for a decade and brought Shostakovich’s censored work to American audiences. “The Kennedy Center was Slava’s sanctuary. And it became mine,” Folds says. “So when that firewall was broken, I was out.”
And now, with Live with the NSO, Folds leaves behind a document—part protest, part celebration, entirely earnest in its ambition. It features lush reimaginings of old favorites like “Still Fighting It” and “Capable of Anything,” the latter of which he describes as a warning shot. “We’re all capable of terrible things,” he says. “But we’re also capable of doing better. That’s the choice.”
He’s especially proud of how the orchestration came together. “I don’t do the arrangements myself, but I’m all over them,” he says. “It’s like assembling a web of orchestrators until it comes alive.”
“Capable of Anything” gets a bridge that’s very John Williams-esque. “That was passed around like a sitcom plotline,” he laughs. “Finally landed with Jherek Bischoff, who nailed it. It works because it’s not pretending to be something else. It’s using the orchestra as it should be used—to elevate, not decorate.”
Folds is quick to point out that, without the support of the Kennedy Center, the efforts made to bridge pop music and orchestral music while retaining the dignity for the orchestra would not have been possible. “No PA system for the orchestra. That was the rule. If the music can’t sit next to Prokofiev and hold up, it was back to the hotel for rewrites.”
And yet they did. Again and again.
He tells me about Sarah Bareilles’s first orchestra show, about bringing Jon Batiste to the Kennedy Center for his orchestral debut, about giving young orchestrators the chance to hear their charts performed by world-class musicians. “They'd walk into rehearsal thinking they’d nailed it,” he says, “and then hear their piece sit next to Stravinsky and realize… nope. Time to rework. And that’s how you get better.”
That mission—education, exposure, innovation—can’t be replaced by water taxis or a second cafe. “It was never meant to be run like a business. It was meant to be a beacon.”
And those who’ve tried to argue that stripping arts funding is about fiscal responsibility? Folds isn’t buying it.
“I’ve heard this argument my whole life,” he says. “‘We’re just cutting waste.’ Really? The Kennedy Center ran a surplus under Deborah Rutter. That’s what it looks like when people know what the hell they’re doing.”
And as for the feds footing the bill? He says that’s always been misunderstood.
“People think the Kennedy Center is 100% government-funded,” he says. “Try 16%. That’s it. Same with NPR. Same with the NEA. We’re doing the rest with ticket sales, donors and pledge drives. That 16% is symbolic. It says the government believes this matters.”
It’s a message that seems increasingly lost in the noise of manufactured culture wars. Folds recounts how inclusivity itself became a target. “It’s been weaponized,” he says. “And I get it. If you’re a white guy and suddenly you’re not the default anymore, that can feel like a threat. But it’s not. It just means more people get to play.”
He laughs recalling times he scrambled to find a female conductor or a Black mastering engineer. “We were always course-correcting,” he says. “Not because President Biden called and told us to. Because we knew better. And when you work with someone who’s had to climb twice as hard to get there because of gender or skin color, you learn something. Every single time.”
Folds comes by his inclusivity honestly—he’s a proud public school kid who grew up in a desegregated South. His heroes were his teachers: Mrs. Brown, Miss Jackson. “I didn’t need DEI training to know they were the smartest people I’d ever met,” he says. “They were my foundation.”
That foundation shows up in his music—and maybe never more poignantly than on this record. “Kristine from the Seventh Grade” is a tender gut-punch about misinformation and fractured friendships. “Fragile” borrows its arrangement from Mozart but sounds utterly modern. And “Still Fighting It,” with its newly restored orchestral intro, manages to sound both bigger and more intimate—an anthem turned lullaby, then turned back again.
Taken together, the album plays like a requiem for a moment and a love letter to everything that moment made possible. There’s humor, heartbreak, and conviction in every arrangement—and it all lands with the clarity of a final bow before the curtain drops. Except it’s not the end. It’s a rally cry.
Because the show, despite everything, must go on. And Folds isn’t going anywhere.
Not quietly, anyway.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
