Not By the Numbers

Ben Folds, the lead singer and pianist for the fast-rising rock group Ben Folds Five, is described by bandmate Robert Sledge as “the squarest guy I’ve ever met.”

Arriving for lunch at a midtown Manhattan restaurant--accompanied by the cherubic, wisecracking Sledge, who plays bass, and the band’s drummer, Darren Jessee--the 31-year-old Folds does little to challenge this assessment.

Wearing a collared shirt under a jeans jacket, his close-cut hair neatly combed and his manner shy and polite, he looks more like a computer technician than an aspiring pop star. In fact, for most of his life, Folds never considered such stardom an option.

As a youngster, he was too embarrassed to tell friends of his songwriting endeavors. Even when he summoned the courage to join bands in his teens and early 20s, Folds preferred to stay in the background, playing drums and bass while other vocalists sang his tunes.

“For me, the idea of singing seemed a little scary,” Folds reveals, while negotiating a fussy salad. “The first time I sang and played piano before a live audience, I thought I was gonna throw up all over the piano. I thought, ‘I gotta get off this stage!’ But there was no way out. I mean, my parents were sitting in the front row! What could I do?”

Fortunately, all that suffering seems to have paid off. Last March, Ben Folds Five--actually a trio (“Alliteration just sounds better,” Folds says)--released its major-label debut album, “Whatever and Ever Amen.”

Supported by a loyal cult following that the band expanded on by touring, the album sold about 150,000 copies even before it spawned a hit on radio stations with a modern rock format, the gently disturbing ballad “Brick,” in December.

Fueled by the success of that single, and by appearances the band has since given on “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night With David Letterman,” the album was recently certified gold (sales of 500,000).

And that’s to say nothing of the drooling reviews that “Whatever” has garnered. “This is about as close to bliss as radio gets,” raved Rolling Stone.

Numerous critics are impressed by Folds’ wry sensibility as a lyricist, reflected in song titles such as “Battle of Who Could Care Less” and “One Angry Dwarf and Two Hundred Solemn Faces”--as well as his sharp, sophisticated melodies and the band’s lean but richly textured arrangements. The latter have evoked comparisons to pop savants ranging from the Beatles and Elton John to Todd Rundgren and Randy Newman.

“I always say that influence and inspiration are two different things,” says Folds. “I mean, we probably listen to Rage Against the Machine more than any of the people who are tagged as our influences. As a songwriter, I’m inspired by things that sound different.”

Granted, there are those who find Folds’ cleverness a bit glib or self-conscious, though his songs also deal earnestly with issues ranging from romantic alienation to a woman’s abortion (the subject of “Brick”). With his penchant for melodramatic piano chords and sometimes esoteric word play, he has been likened more than a few times to Billy Joel--never a critic’s darling.

A recent article in Details called “Whatever and Ever Amen” a musical version of “St. Elmo’s Fire” . . . “a full portrait of post-college confusion, complete with breakups that drag on, unspoken crushes on cool girls . . . , high school geeks avenging their unpopularity, and jaded hipsters who used to like the Cure.”

“I don’t mind the term ‘pop,’ if it means being popular,” Folds observes. “But when it’s applied to us, sometimes it’s like, ‘Middle-class white guys go into the studio with nothing to sing about and make a bunch of pretty chords.’ But to me the lyrics always come out of the melodies. You just try to get your point across using whatever tools you can find.”

None of the success of Ben Folds Five comes as a surprise to Polly Anthony, the president of Epic Records and 550 Records, which signed the band in 1996.

“I heard their tape and liked it,” says Anthony. “Then I flew down to North Carolina to see them play live, and the show was an epiphany. They struck every responsive chord in my body. And then the chase began, because every major label in the business wanted to sign them, and at the time, [550 Music] was this embryonic little record company. I’ve never felt so insecure yet so passionate during a chase for a band in my life.”

Among the many things that impressed Anthony about Ben Folds Five is that its members were all “obsessive about their craft.”

On the other hand, she points out, “they have their zany, crazy side.” Indeed, for all the acclaim they’ve received for their clever artistry, these three young men resist the notion that they’re calculated perfectionists.

“The stereotype about pop musicians,” says the band’s Jessee, 32, “is that they’re all really anal . . . really concerned about producing these perfect-sounding records. That’s not us.”

Folds started fiddling with chords, pretty or not, at a tender age. The North Carolina native, son of a carpenter and an artist, began taking piano lessons when he was 9 and soon found that he preferred making up new songs to learning old ones.

Later, he studied music at the University of Miami, before playing on the New York theater circuit and in Nashville.

In the early ‘90s, Folds returned to his home state and enrolled at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he tapped into the town’s burgeoning college rock scene and teamed up with Jessee and Sledge.

With their support, Folds overcame his aforementioned stage fright, and audiences responded favorably. So did the independent label Caroline Records, which scooped up Ben Folds Five just as Folds was preparing to graduate. (The singer is one semester short of a bachelor’s degree.)

Caroline released Ben Folds Five’s self-titled debut album in 1995. The music industry buzz it generated led to the bidding war that was won by 550 Music.

Under the terms of its deal with 550, the band still owed Caroline one album. That obligation was recently fulfilled with the release of a collection of early demos and live performances recorded from 1995 to early 1997, called “Naked Baby Photos.”

“The idea is that, if you’re showing someone a picture of yourself naked, you want it to be a picture of you when you were a baby and didn’t know any better,” Folds explains, grinning. “It’s OK that the stuff on this album is raw and naive, because when it was [recorded], we were still raw and naive.”

Errol Kolosine, national director of marketing and promotions at Caroline, agrees that “Naked Baby Photos” provides “a snapshot of a period when the band was just starting out. The good thing is that the band had complete creative control of the record. They selected the tracks, Ben wrote the liner notes. . . . We’ll be promoting it as you would expect, with full servicing to radio and retail and press, but we’re being vigilant not to interfere with the fantastic success they’re having with ‘Brick.’ If anything, we want to augment what’s happening for them now.”

The Caroline release crowds the Ben Folds Five marketplace, but Ben Goldman, the artists and repertoire director who signed Ben Folds Five to 550 Music, has no problem with the situation.

“Would I have wanted them to wait until after we’d had our run with [“Whatever and Ever Amen”] to release [“Naked Baby Photos”]? Yeah, maybe. But ‘Naked Baby Photos’ is a really cool piece of work, and in the end, I think it can help us. If people see it before they see our record, maybe they’ll buy both albums.”

Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that none of the members of Ben Folds Five could conceive of having a single hit album. As they finish lunch, the musicians ponder how far they’ve come in a relatively short period of time.

“None of us had ever been able to go places or move people to the extent we’ve done in this band,” says Sledge, 30. “Being successful does create this weird gap, because when you’re just playing at a club level, you’re almost expected to fail.”

When Folds and his cohorts reenter the studio to start work on a new album later this year, they plan to exploit the creative rapport they’ve continued to develop on the road.

“I’m generally not great at that traditional, Lennon-and-McCartney-like approach of sitting down and shooting ideas across the table,” says Folds, who has done most of the group’s songwriting so far.

“But everyone in the band has really cool ideas. Like, Darren [Jessee] came up with the chorus for ‘Brick.’ . . . We’re gonna take more time writing songs for our next album, so that we can write stuff that reflects the way we play together now.”

In the meantime, Ben Folds Five will continue touring the United States and Europe, where the group has already built a sizable fan base.

“I’ve always been one of those stupid, Fanny Brice-type characters who just loves being on stage,” Sledge says. “When I’m up there, I don’t wanna leave. They can’t make me.”

Even Folds himself, a reluctant leader at first, is learning to enjoy life in the spotlight.

“I think this band always felt like we were growing faster than we could,” Folds muses. “After our first few gigs, the overriding comment wasn’t so much ‘That was a great show’ as ‘You guys are gonna be big!’ . . . Joining this band was a stretch for me, and I needed a lot of encouragement. But I think I can do this now.”

* Ben Folds Five plays tonight at the Palace, 1735 N. Vine St. 8:30 p.m. Sold out. (213) 462-3000.

Hear Ben Folds Five

* Excerpts from “Whatever and Ever Amen” and other recent releases are available on The Times’ World Wide Web site. Point your browser to:

https://www.latimes.com/soundclips