Review: People & paper everywhere as Ben Folds entertains arts festival crowd

PITTSBURGH ― A crowd estimated at more than 7,000 packed Fort Duquesne Boulevard on Sunday night to watch Ben Folds close out the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival with wit, substance and piano-powered alternative-rock style.

"Let's hear Pittsburgh's largest chorus," Folds said before "Not The Same," one of several instances where fans seated in personal folding chairs or atop concrete barriers, or simply standing on the street, sang along loudly. At one point, Folds expertly orchestrated them in a three-part harmony singalong.

Acknowledging a mild and brief rainfall that weather experts had failed to predict, Folds tacked "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" onto the end of "Sentimental Guy."

Alone on stage playing piano the whole show, Folds' first batch of songs were sometimes too soft to properly hear if you weren't among the throng wedged closely to the stage. The location of his Steinway piano, set back 15 feet or so from the front edge of the stage, also made sight lines tricky for fans hoping to get at least a side-stage view. Some spectators audibly longed for the festival's 2010s location in wider Point State Park.

Folds kicked up the volume and hit full stride about seven songs in when he began the "Paper Airplane Request" portion of his show, where fans write the title of a song they want to hear on a piece of paper then fling it on stage paper airplane mode. Since the arts fest stage wasn't a cozy theater setting, like the rest of his tour, Folds relaxed the rules and allowed any form of paper ? even crushed-up paper balls, as long as there was a song title.

Fans quickly flooded the stage with paper, with some requesters shrewd enough to include their name for Folds to say out loud. For unsigned requests, Folds opted for "Billy," after learning that was the name of a front-row spectator.

The upshot of fan requests: Obvious choices, like Folds' crossover hit "Brick" and his rollicking alt-rock ditty "Army," both appeared earlier than normal in the set. "Brick" demonstrated how Folds' high-reaching voice remains in fine form. His piano playing ? both pretty and flashy depending on the need ? got more percussive as the show progressed.

He showed his dry, quirky humor is intact, too, as when he introduced "Phone in a Pool" by relaying the story of how he once chucked his phone into a hotel swimming pool out of frustration at the precise random moment when paparazzi-fleeing pop star Kesha happened by. She gave Folds the helpful advice to put his phone in a jar of uncooked rice to help it dry.

Folds tenderly sang the sweet love song "The Luckiest" then moments later went back to digging through sheets of paper strewn on stage, pulling from the pile a request for "Rock This B----," a song snippet from a 2005 live album he likes to tailor fit for whatever city he's playing. Folds brought on stage singer Lindsay Craft, the support act on his tour, to have her help improvise a Pittsburgh song. She off-the-cuff suggested singing about Pittsburgh's three rivers, admitting she didn't readily know all three names. Fans heeded Craft's suggestion to shout out the names of each river in alphabetical order, which she and Folds then loosely crafted into a lively, unpolished song that mainly name-dropped the Ohio.

Folds encored robustly with "Rockin' The Suburbs," the title track from his 2001 album, prefaced with his comments on how thrilled he was to see all the smiling faces in the crowd. He wondered aloud why musicians like him were so sullen in the 1990s.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: People & paper everywhere as Ben Folds entertains arts festival crowd