Ben Folds had his hands full Saturday night at the Vic. While his fingers busily ravaged the piano, he held the capacity audience in the palm of his hand.
Opening act Neil Hammond (formerly of The Divine Comedy) wooed the audience with his folky minor chord ballads, but North Carolina’s Folds induced a minor musical riot.
Folds’ 20-song set, heavy with selections from his new solo album “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” didn’t sate an audience that repeatedly interrupted the songwriter in between songs with a barrage of shouted requests and declarations of affection. Touring without a band since his break with his partners in Ben Folds Five last year, Folds carried the entire evening with his boyish voice and Baldwin piano.
Opening with a unfinished song titled “Chicago,” Folds’ loose and often profanely silly improv numbers peppered a night of songs that otherwise featured a full chorus from an audience who sang each and every word along with the piano man.
“Zak and Sara” and “Annie Waits” followed, the former stripped down to its bare essentials from another otherwise overproduced album track. The evening highlighted Folds’ often contentious but loving relationship with his instrument of choice, as he reminded himself of keys — “No, this one’s in C. No flats, no sharps” — and stumbled over them anyway. Not that anyone in the audience seemed to mind. Folds personal, unpolished presentation lent to the spontaneity of the live show.
Folds draws strength from the Lou Reed School of Songwriting (with perhaps, a few influential classes from Tom Waits), where each song exists as a three-minute novel. Every tune has a sense of geography, tone and the characters populating its bars and alleyways.
The spare “Carrying Cathy” winds around a spoiled child and her eternally doting family, who carry her right up until they lower her casket into the ground. Someone in the procession remarks, “Yeah, it’s always been this way/There was always someone to carry Cathy.”
The soulful performance of “Still Fighting It” followed a similar pop profundity with its meditation on growing older, and the manic classicalism of “The Ascent of Stan” drew attention away from Folds’ lyrics through his furious piano pounding.
A soft, conversational singing voice against muscular piano chords defines Folds signature sound. He capitalized on this technique with live performances of “Kate” and “Evaporated” (off 1997’s “Whatever and Ever Amen”), which gathered steam and substance under Fold’s fingers.
Folds’ self-deprecating sense of humor and slacker self-confidence were evident during his between-the-song banter. Example: After being dogged by metal band Korn in Spin magazine, Folds said he set out to write a beautiful song about brawling with the rockers, only to have the song turn into an homage to Bob Seger — until he finally turned it into the title track of “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” from which only a single line (unprintable here) from his original version survived.
Folds dropped MTV hit “Brick” from his set, only to offer up crowd-favorite “Song for the Dumped” — previously a raging scorcher of song — into a cradling encore ballad. This performance, paired with an earlier cover of Ray Charles’ “Them That’s Got,” provided proof that Folds remains one of the few artists one can describe by using the words “rock” and “piano” in the same sentence.
