Ben Folds caps off Three Rivers Arts Festival on a high note

On Sunday night, the final evening of the 2024 Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburghers streamed onto Fort Duquesne Boulevard downtown. Some carried camp chairs, some carried blankets, and some only carried the dream of hearing some great tunes.

And their dreams came true.

They were all there to see Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter-pianist who broke onto the scene with his group, Ben Folds Five, in the 1990s. Their biggest hit was 1998’s “Brick,” which reached No. 17 on the Billboard Top 40. Folds’ career has spanned genres and decades and has produced a parade of sometimes-witty, sometimes-sad and always-beautiful songs.

And Pittsburgh got to see him for free on Sunday.

This show was part of his “Paper Airplane Request Tour,” meaning that attendees got to submit requests via paper airplanes (or, in the case of this outdoor show with dicey weather, paper wads) to him onstage. While this format produced some impressive musical whiplash, it also got Folds to play some fan favorites — and some of his best songs.

As the audience amassed, droplets of rain began to fall, but this didn’t deter fans or the artist himself. It was just Folds and his piano onstage, and that was all he needed to rock the whole street.

He opened his set with “Capable of Anything,” from his 2015 album “So There,” a collaboration with chamber ensemble Music. After the next song, “Annie Waits,” he called out to the crowd, “Thank you very much, kind people. I tried to stand up so I could see you all, but this is a really slick floor. It’s made for moonwalking and I can’t do that.”

That quippiness was a thread throughout the whole performance, in both his songs and crowd interactions. Folds is a great songwriter and pianist, but he’s also a terrific showman.

As the drizzle quickened, he whipped up a charming version of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that sounded great on the piano.

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After the more frenetic “The Ascent of Stan,” he thanked the sign language interpreter who joined him for the show. “If there’s any dirty words in there I was asked to leave them out, there’s kids out there.”

(Spoiler: this commitment to not swearing did not last very long.)

He followed “Effington” up with the upbeat-but-melancholy “You Don’t Know Me,” which is typically a duet (recorded with Regina Spektor). He let the crowd fill in the female parts, which made for a fun back-and-forth.

Before “Phone in a Pool,” he told the story of the song: after one too many frustrating communications, he chucked his phone into a swimming pool and watched the camera light blink on as it sank to the bottom. Then, out of nowhere, recording artist Ke$ha came crashing out of the bushes nearby and, seeing what happened, dove in to rescue the waterlogged device.

After this, Folds had a problem with his piano, so he took a break to fix the instrument and allow people to get their requests together. Upon his return, there was a countdown, and then a shower of paper balls and airplanes sailed toward the stage.

“If it’s something that’s gonna suck, I’m not going to do it,” he promised. But he didn’t run into any such issues, as he started off this portion of the set with “Army,” a jaunty, witty crowd favorite that had him immediately swearing and culminated in a ragtime-y bridge.

Folds loved encouraging the crowd to sing with him, even holding back his own voice to allow everyone to hear each other better. This was a great tactic to use when, after a couple more requests — including “Zak and Sara” and “Narcolepsy” — he went into “Song for the Dumped.”

He promised that he wouldn’t say any of the swear words — and he mostly didn’t. Instead, he left them to the audience, who gleefully shouted back some lines that, well, can’t be printed here. He pounded on the piano, instructing the crowd to scream, and they complied with that, too.

“Brick” was next. It was a bit of a shock to the system — a serious song with a sad melody that he sounded genuinely melancholy singing. Changing the mood up again, he followed it with the zippier “Kate” and then the absolutely lovely ballad “The Luckiest,” which had couples all around swaying together.

After “Landed,” another sadder song but with a bit of peak Elton John flavor, the most entertaining — and difficult to write about — moment of the evening occurred.

At a show in 2002, Ben Folds improvised a song — based on a man’s shout from the audience — called “Rock This B****.” Now, he will do different improvisations of this “song” at live shows all over. When he opened the paper with that phrase written on them, he declared, “This one is for a song that doesn’t exist.”

But he didn’t disappoint. He brought out Lindsey Kraft, the performer who has been opening for him on this tour, and together they made up a song. She sang, “Three rivers, I have no idea what they are but maybe you guys do. In alphabetical order I’d like to hear them now.”

And so the mass of Western Pennsylvanians let the singers onstage know about the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio, and they sang about all three, interspersed with that magical three-word phrase that started the whole thing.

“Lindsey already is gonna beat me up after this because neither of us know our geography,” Folds sang.

After their improvisation, the crowd cheered Kraft as she left the stage. Folds didn’t let the energy die, teaching everyone a three-part harmony that he encouraged the audience to sing during the second-to-last song of the night, “Not the Same.”

Then, after a brief offstage break, he returned to play the night’s final song, “Rockin’ the Suburbs.” He prefaced the song with a short speech about how angry everyone on the radio was in the 1990s when he started out, then concluded with, “This is a joke with a beat.”

As the closer came to its climax, he sang, “Thank you kind people of Pittsburgh” and smashed out as much of a big rock ending as one can produce with a piano.

Sunday night’s crowd was truly “The Luckiest” as another year’s Arts Festival came to a close not with a whimper, but with a bang.