Ben Folds Premieres Two Tracks From Holiday Album, ‘Sleigher’: Writing Original Songs, ‘I Just Realized How Christmas Frames Everyone’s Year’ (EXCLUSIVE)
by Chris Willman · VarietyHoliday records tend to be more of a late-career refuge for artists who see an easy shot to knock off some covers than something most top-flank singer-songwriters view as a chance to creatively mine for a whole set of fresh material. So fans of the Christmas genre — which, evidence suggests, would be most of America — have something more compelling to look forward to this year, in the form of Ben Folds‘ first holiday collection, “Sleigher,” for which the celebrated artist wrote seven original numbers themed to the season, along with recording three covers.
It’ll be out via New West Records on Oct. 25, but with a month to go till the full set, Variety is premiering two tracks from the album for anyone who wants to get a musical jump on the season. Click below for Folds’ take on the most familiar of all mid-century carols, “The Christmas Song,” and also the first original to be unveiled, his duet with actress and touring partner Lindsey Kraft on a romantic reverie they co-wrote, “We Could Have This.”
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Folds spoke with Variety about how “Sleigher” came together and admitted that his original intent was, in fact, to be just a little lazier, if we can call it that, by indulging more in doing covers, before the bug to write a sleighful of original material really bit him.
“It’s fun to write something almost to an assignment, and that’s kind of what this was,” Folds says. “I always kind of like something that’ll just make me write,” he notes, and so he proposed to the label that he get a combined budget for 2023’s “What Matters Most” and a separate Christmas album. When it came time to really follow through on the latter, Folds says, “I had felt like I might be a really good curator of just really neat Christmas songs somehow, but that was a little ignorant: I was surprised not to be able to find as many covers as I thought.”
That original concept wasn’t completely in vain. “I did find a couple — like the album ends with the Mills Brothers’ ‘You Don’t Have to Be a Santa Claus,’ which is basically a Depression-era sentiment of ‘Why don’t you just help people all year long? Open your heart all the rest of the year and help a fellow out,’ and I really liked that. And I found a Burt Bacharach/Herb Alpert cover for the record, ‘The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle,’ which I hadn’t heard before. Burt Bacharach could just shit stuff out like that that was just superior every time. And then the chestnuts roasting on the open fire — I felt like I need to do the most popular one of all time, and just do it in a way that is a complete challenge, live, with no bass on it or anything.”
But “Sleigher” ended up being very much a Ben Folds record in the most classic, reflective sense.
“It ended up being more of an original album than I expected,” he says. “As I began to write, I realized how Christmas just frames everyone’s year. It doesn’t matter if you are into Christmas or not. It definitely comes down to: Where am I? Christmas really frames the year, so that you’re back in it and you can really know where you are, because all the other variables have been eliminated. It’s the same songs on the radio, the same ads on TV, familiar weather, colors — but it’s also like, ‘Oh, so-and-so’s not here anymore. So-and-so is divorced. My nephew, he was just riding his bicycle around; now he’s got a job and he’s lost his hair.’ You really frame life that way. So I found it actually suddenly super easy for me to start writing songs for it. I would write one, and then another and another, as I was unable to find covers that I liked.
“From a songwriting perspective,” he continues, “I think it would be unlimited if you wanted to be a songwriter who only wrote Christmas songs, just simply because there is no more important sentiment in writing a song, I think, than ‘Where am I now?’ Even if you’re talking about the past, you’re viewing it sort of through an ethnographic lens of going, “OK, I’m studying who I was, but I can’t take my current state of mind out of it.’ It’s transparent in songwriting, so I think you just do that the same way as you just write about breakups. Because breakups are always the end at the beginning. It’s always both things. It’s always looking forward, too, if you write a good breakup song.”
The album starts off with some of its more downbeat or reflective material and then gets jauntier as it goes along. Folds talks about how he came up with some of the more melancholy tunes heard early in the record.
“I had a few weeks where I was doing something I’ve always done actually through my whole career, which is mining the newspapers,” he says. “And so there was this piece about someone with a sleeping disorder at Christmas, and I just thought about sleepwalking through times in your life, so it may as well just be Christmas. We’re all in places where you’re not present, and feeling like, ‘I’m in another world. I’m not with these people. I’m with someone else. I’m not in my skin, I’m somewhere else.’ And kids come up and yank on your sleeve and you pull the roast or whatever beast it is out of the oven and you act like you’re there, but you’re not. I think most people have experienced that in life, and you just insert Christmas. So that one was written pretty early on.”
Another song on the somewhat sadder side is “Me and Maurice,” which describes the ritual of taking a dog for a walk during an ongoing white-out. Yes, his dog’s name really is Maurice, and yes, Nashville, where he now lives, did have a highly unusual winter.
“That was real. It felt like forever, but it was two weeks of the temperature just not going over seven degrees, and there was maybe 18 inches of snow on the ground that just wouldn’t go away. And in Nashville, they don’t know about stuff like salt, so we were utterly snowed in. Luckily I had enough dog food stuff to last, but it shut down everything. And we were just walking around, just me and him by ourselves, and just the weirdness of being in kind of the Edward Scissorhands kind of neighborhood that I live in with all the inflatable Santas. And we do live where the backyard goes to the highway, and I-40 goes all the way straight through, right into the ocean. So those are the things I was feeling. That was a song that was living in my brain for days and days on end, and the piano is scored very, very specifically. Nobody’s gonna notice, but it lifts — there’s a diatonic scale that lifts through the left hand through the right hand and is trying to lead it somewhere, ascending. I love shit like that. You know, it’s definitely not for the 2024 crowd. but it’s something that my music school mind loves.”
But his duet with Kraft, the actress-turned-songwriter who is currently his opening act out on tour, is nothing but sweetly romantic… which he admits is highly unusual in his catalog.
“I’ve only dived into that just a little bit, like with ‘The Luckiest,’ and I managed to do that with no hesitation. So it’s really good for me to work in that way. I mean, I’m probably a little more guarded, because in my writing, I probably filter things through… I’m not saying I’m smart, but through the intellect, you know? I wouldn’t say that Lindsey was guilty of that at all. It’s really refreshing. And this moment in music for us in general is people being very guarded, really guarded. It’s like they’ve learned the trick of false vulnerability. … If you look at my collaborative efforts now, it’s a weird group. It goes from ‘Weird Al’ to Amanda Palmer to William Shatner to Nick Hornby to Lindsey Kraft. It’s an oddball group, but what I like is when someone can bring something that I would have never thought, and it’s just real.”
Things reach a mirthful peak with “Xmas Aye Eye,” a beat-driven track which has an introduction which claims that the words were all written by AI — something Folds confirms is true “to the word.”
The singer swears he hadn’t thought much about the idea of a Christmas album being a perennial that will be pulled out year after year until the prospect was recently reinforced for him.
“Well, it is the gift that keeps giving, isn’t it? I didn’t even realize that. Like, the record label’s been educating me on what this means, like, ‘No, this is not just this year. You know, you just keep doing this.’ Really? Fuck! OK, we’ll see — but that’s kind of fun.
“And I kind of register a certain level of excitement about this record before people even hear it, which I wasn’t expecting. Like, ‘Oh shit, you made a Christmas record? Send that to me, I can’t wait to hear it.’ Well, you didn’t say that about my last album! But something about that, like, ‘Oh, Folds made a Christmas album’ — it’s a thing. It’s fun.
“A part of me felt like I was, like, in a good way, kind of overdoing it — like, really building it. My father used to build houses, and he built them like they could be bomb shelters. There was no reason for him to do that: Every floor had opposing, choiced angles and it was like Fort Knox. And I guess that’s in my blood. When I started making this record, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna do this record real fast.’ And I found myself really taking the songwriting seriously and writing real songs. And so hopefully that’s felt or noticed. But you never know, especially in this era, when you can just put out something and it just drops in the ocean; it just moves on. But I hope it catches. That would be nice.”
The “Sleigher” track listing:
- Little Drummer Bolero
- Sleepwalking Through Christmas
- Me and Maurice
- Christmas Time Rhyme
- Waiting for Snow
- We Could Have This (feat. Lindsey Kraft)
- The Christmas Song
- The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle
- Xmas Aye Eye
- You Don’t Have to Be a Santa Claus