The paper airplanes flew and so did the songs as Ben Folds held forth during a two-hour show at Little Rock’s Robinson Center on Tuesday night.
Performing solo, Folds sat at his piano and worked his way through a career-spanning evening that was divided into two sets during this stop on his Paper Airplane Request Tour. For the first set, he hit on barbed, bittersweet, breakup tunes like “Landed” and “So There.”
Dressed in jeans, a vest, a white button-down and Puma sneakers, Folds was like the world’s coolest choir teacher as he guided the appreciative, near capacity audience in a four-part harmony on “Bastard.” He later left the piano to knock out a nice little drum solo before ending the first set.
The 10-song second set began with a stagehand holding a pair of lights like an airport worker guiding a plane onto the tarmac. Using pens that said “I Stole This From Ben Folds,” the audience wrote down requests on pieces of paper and folded them into paper aircraft.
After a countdown from 10, and like a scene from the rowdiest study hall ever, hundreds of paper planes went flying onto the stage as a bemused Folds looked on. He then picked through the piles of planes, one at a time, opened them up and played the requests, spreading the sheets of paper out on his piano as the evening progressed.
As one would suspect, many of the requests were some of Folds’ more popular tracks from his solo career and with the Ben Folds Five — “Zak and Sara,” “Song for the Dumped,” during which he again had the audience handle the harmonies, and the haunting “Brick.” One plane, though, was just a blank sheet of paper, so Folds made up a song about Arkansas and the things he saw during his day in Little Rock.
“Army” was his one-song encore before closing the thoroughly enjoyable evening.
Opening the show was Tall Heights, an electronic folk outfit from Boston, whose gorgeous harmonies and humorous stage patter were quickly embraced by the Robinson crowd. The three piece — acoustic guitar, cello and drums augmented by keyboards and other gizmos — performed songs from its latest album, Neptune.