Folds Thinks He’s Come Out Ahead Subtracting 1 From Five

Piano-pounding pop singer Ben Folds was always the center of Ben Folds Five, so it wouldn’t seem a huge change when he decided to go off on his own as plain old Ben Folds.

Nevertheless, in his current tour with his new band, he hardly plays anything from his old band in the main set.

Which raises the question: How different is the current aggregation from the old trio anyway?

“In the big picture, I don’t know. I was accustomed to being part of a band, and the process was different,” Folds says.

“Some people hear the new album and say it pretty much feels like a natural extension of what I was doing. But there are other people who were really into the personality of the band, the chemistry of the band and the intricacies of the rhythm section. I’ve always been a song person. Not that I didn’t care about the rhythm section, but I’d be more likely to listen to an album because of songs. A lot of people miss the band, but others say it’s only mildly different.”

It’s not that he completely ignores songs from albums such as “Whatever and Ever Amen” and “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner,” which brought him to the limelight in the late ‘90s.

“At the end of the set, I come back to the old songs most of the time,” says Folds, 34. “If it’s a good gig, I’ll play a bunch of old songs on piano, just by myself. Then I started to incorporate a few old songs into the normal set. But a lot of time it doesn’t feel natural. I don’t know if I don’t do them out of respect to the band or because I’m tired of the songs.”

At any rate, he’s got a lot of other songs to play. There are the heavily character-driven songs on his new “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” as well as “other stuff people haven’t heard,” Folds says, “newer songs that haven’t been recorded, and B-sides recorded at the same time as the album. I’m not a big fan of playing an album like a recital, all in sequence.

“The whole idea on this particular album was to really concentrate on well-crafted songs,” he said. “I just thought it was the way to survive the transition without going nuts.

“A good song will get you through anything, even a [lousy] producer or a record that was not performed well. If the songs are good, it’ll all work.”

For the album, Folds played all the instruments, from the piano-- for which he is known--to bass, drums, guitar and practically everything else.

“Maybe my strongest suit is that I play a lot of instruments pretty good,” he says. “Piano is not my best instrument. I can go in and knock it out on there, but I wouldn’t call it my best.”

So what is? “I lean toward drums. Or bass. I don’t know what to do when I sit with a band and play piano. I know what to play on bass and drums.”

Not that he had to worry about playing with a band in this case. “This album was like me floating in space. It’s all me. There’s not much collaboration of any kind on this record,” he says. “It’s very much like me in a vacuum.”

From his first single, “Underground,” tweaking the clubbishness of indie rock, Folds stood out because he was one of the few rockers who did so behind a piano rather than a guitar.

In rock’s piano rock pantheon he puts “Elton John, Billy Joel, Little Richard, maybe even Bruce Hornsby. And certainly Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Burt Bacharach. There’s Jerry Lee Lewis, I guess, but I don’t think he did anything other people weren’t doing better. And now there’s Tori Amos.”

Folds has been getting less help from radio, where his hit “Brick” went to No. 17 in 1997.

“That was an anomaly,” he said. But even without radio, “We’ve found niches,” he says of himself and fellow artists out of favor with radio. “We’re all selling more records than we used to.”

And if he doesn’t play that particular hit from his past, it’s not that he’s trying to avoid it. “I wasn’t very good at playing it,” he said.

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Roger Catlin is rock music critic for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune Co. newspaper.