Ben Folds on Kennedy Center Resignation and Surprise Album Release

Summary

The MeidasTouch Podcast: Ben Folds on Kennedy Center Resignation and Surprise Album Release

Release Date: July 6, 2025

In this compelling episode of The MeidasTouch Podcast, hosts Ben, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas engage in a profound discussion with legendary musician Ben Folds. The conversation delves into Ben's recent resignation from the Kennedy Center amidst political turmoil and his unexpected album release coinciding with Independence Day. This summary captures the essence of their dialogue, highlighting key points, insightful discussions, and impactful quotes with precise timestamps.

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1. The Threat of Project 2025 and Its Impact on Democracy

Political Commentator kicks off the conversation by addressing the alarming effects of Project 2025 on various governmental sectors. He emphasizes the systemic failures emerging from these political maneuvers:

"We're seeing the Trump regime dismantling museums, cutting back on the arts. And you have Donald Trump, like literally doing a coup of the Kennedy Center and people just really aren't going there anymore. Just all aspects of it are dystopian and it's resulting in systemic failure in our country."
[02:54]

He further elaborates on how Project 2025 is undermining critical areas such as cancer research and emergency weather forecasting, painting a grim picture of the nation's future.

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2. The Erosion of the Arts and Institutional Integrity

Transitioning to the core issue of arts control, the Political Commentator draws parallels between the current administration's actions and authoritarian regimes:

"He brings a group of construction workers to sit next to him and says, look, you see, they like me... He brings Kid Rock over and over and over again, he wants... He wants a Ben Folds to say, look, here's an artist with kind of deep intellectual roots who supports me."
[10:02]

This strategy, he argues, seeks to manipulate public perception by associating respected artists with the regime, thereby legitimizing its agenda.

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3. Ben Folds' Resignation from the Kennedy Center

Ben Folds, referred to in the transcript as the Daddication Representative, shares his rationale behind resigning from the Kennedy Center. He articulates his disillusionment with the administration's blatant abuse of power:

"What I saw was an abuse of power, a very extreme one. The firewall was breached in the biggest way... Guess who. Trump to be the chairman, the head of the Kennedy Center."
[07:36]

Ben underscores the importance of maintaining a clear separation between government and the arts to preserve artistic integrity and freedom of expression.

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4. Historical Context and the Importance of Artistic Freedom

Drawing historical parallels, Ben Folds references Slava Rostropovich, a renowned cellist from the USSR, to highlight the dangers of governmental control over the arts:

"Slava Rostropovich defected from the USSR and he found himself directing the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. What he enjoyed about that was a complete sacred firewall that existed protecting him from that kind of intimidation."
[13:15]

He laments the current breach of this protective barrier, expressing concerns over the potential suppression of artistic voices under the new administration.

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5. The Significance of the Surprise Album Release

Ben Folds introduces his newly released album, "Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra," emphasizing its timely release on Independence Day as a statement of resilience and artistic defiance:

"It stands to me for sort of a golden period where we were getting the orchestra to the point again of being an original, an orchestra that does original music... It's a memorial to that and I love that."
[16:00]

He reflects on the album as a culmination of eight years of collaboration, aiming to support the symphony orchestra amidst declining subscriptions and morale.

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6. The Role of the Arts in Upholding Democracy

In his concluding remarks, Ben Folds passionately advocates for the arts as the bedrock of self-expression and democratic values:

"It's extremely important. It's the bedrock of self-expression. That's what I would tell people... Don't be afraid of losing half our audience anymore. The country is sliding quickly from the democracy we knew and freedom of expression is more important than anything."
[19:46]

He urges fellow artists and listeners to take a stand, emphasizing that neutrality is untenable in the face of escalating threats to democracy and freedom.

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7. Encouraging Action and Support for the Arts

As the conversation wraps up, Ben Folds calls upon his peers and the audience to actively support the arts, ensuring that institutions like the Kennedy Center can continue to thrive independently of political interference:

"If we've been told for our whole life that we can't spend money on the arts because it's not important, why would that be the first thing if it's not important? It's extremely important. It's the bedrock of self-expression."
[19:14]

He stresses the urgency of preserving artistic freedom and maintaining spaces where creativity can flourish unfettered by political agendas.

---

Conclusion

This episode of The MeidasTouch Podcast provides an insightful exploration of the intersection between politics and the arts, anchored by Ben Folds' personal experiences and outspoken stance against governmental overreach. The discussion not only sheds light on the specific challenges posed by Project 2025 but also underscores the indispensable role of the arts in sustaining a vibrant and democratic society. Ben Folds' release of his live album serves as both a tribute to his collaboration with the National Symphony Orchestra and a testament to the enduring power of artistic expression in tumultuous times.

Notable Quotes:

• "We don't need to go full, like, south park, you know, caricature of ourselves and go out and, you know, everything's green and."
  Ben Folds
  [19:46]

• "We're having this conversation. You can go out and tell the truth with your music and use your microphone."
  Ben Folds
  [21:30]

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For those interested in supporting Ben Folds and experiencing his live performances, his latest album, "Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra," is available for download and streaming. Embrace the fusion of classical and modern music that celebrates artistic resilience and democratic values.

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Stay Connected:

• Subscribe to The MeidasTouch Podcast for more insightful discussions and interviews.
• Follow the Meiselas brothers on their social media platforms to join the MeidasMighty community.
• Support the arts and democracy by engaging with content that champions freedom of expression.

Transcript

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[Father]

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[Daddication Representative]

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[Political Commentator]

Of Project 2025 in all aspects of our government right now, whether it's cancer research being cut, whether it's weather forecasting and the devastating impacts we're seeing when you cut emergency weather forecasting and when you say you want to eliminate fema, what happens? We're also seeing the Trump regime dismantling museums, cutting back on the arts. And you have Donald Trump, like literally doing a coup of the Kennedy center and people just really aren't going there anymore. Just all aspects of it are dystopian and it's resulting in systemic failure in our country. I'll give you just different data points as well. I mean, one data point. You talk about cancer research. How could that be partisan? But the Trump regime is cutting cancer research across the board. Pancreatic cancer research where major breakthroughs are taking place. Like watch. This is an individual who has, who has been able to recover with a promising new vaccine and is now in fear that that's going to be taken away. Here, play this clip.

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[Daddication Representative]

Bottom line, I'm cancer free five years now.

[Medical Expert]

The Callahans are concerned the cuts at NIH could interfere with or even stop Kevin's vaccine. TR they claim that they're not cutting back on any of the science, on any of the people who are really doing the research.

[Daddication Representative]

I don't believe that for a minute.

[Medical Expert]

But if I say to you, is it worth the money that the American public is investing, the tax money, what.

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[Political Commentator]

People were warning about this as well. Everybody was saying, here's what Project 2025 is going to do. And again, we're seeing what happens when you weather forecasting, when you cut emergency FEMA relief. And we're now in the heart of hurricane season. Here was a professor back on August 27, 2024, saying how Project 2025 is designed in one of its chapters to get rid of the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here, play this club.

[Environmental Advocate]

You know, the fact is the Republicans have put out a plan. It's called Project 2025. And people like Bill McKibben have written about this in the nation. And it is a very detailed plan for how to dismantle our federal infra things like getting rid of the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which literally just keeps track of data around what is happening to our earth. They want to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. We saw what a first Trump administration would do, rolling back almost 100 environmental rules, pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement. And what does a well organized second Trump administration look like? If you want to know what it looks like, look at that Project 2025 document. It's very scary. By contrast, what the Bide Biden folks want to do is they want to keep delivering.

[Political Commentator]

It was all out there. And Donald Trump's trying to prop this up with North Korea style propaganda, state regime media like Fox and also trying to control the arts. Control the arts. That's what fascist dictators do. I want to bring in legendary musician Ben Folds, because, Ben, you were the first artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra. It was a major part of your life for a long time. You resigned 2-12-12, like literally in a minute after the Trump regime announced it was taking over the Kennedy center and it was going to take over all aspect of the arts. They were going to dominate it. I want you to talk through that decision. But you were able to record something with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy center that has now been released on July 4 that the Trump regime is not happy about, which I want to talk about also. But I want, I want you to talk through first what you saw with this regime's grab and the propaganda that they were trying to the propaganda they're trying to spew by controlling the arts.

[Daddication Representative]

Well, and you could help me with this too, because, you know, I'm a musician that's not used to messaging, this sort of thing. But I've spent a lot of time in the last 10 or 15 years being involved in advocating for arts funding. I actually did a testimony before the House Subcommittee on Arts. I played and did panels at the Republican national convention in 2016 as well as The Democratic. And I just. I feel like I know a lot about this sort of the civics of this and the difference between the private sector and the public sector. What I find is when I'm trying to explain it to other people, not many people have the prerequisite knowledge for it. So maybe you could help me out with that a little bit. I mean, there was why I resigned, and then there's kind of another question that I think people want to answer, which is, why not stay? But let me say that what I saw was an abuse of power, a very extreme one. At the Kennedy center. People might not realize how the arts work in the government, but it's very separated from the art itself. The government, partisan politics is separated with a firewall from what we say, how we say it, who says it. That's up to the people. And the firewall was breached in the biggest way. I mean, he let go of the board, which was bipartisan. Once the board was gone, installed loyalists, the loyalist came in and voted in. Guess who. Trump to be the chairman, the head of the Kennedy Center. The reason that that is so alarming is because now he can put. Or they can put their fist on the scale of what is programmed, who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak at our greatest arts institution, the Kennedy Center. That's a real problem. The thing I have a hard time explaining to people is why not stay and sort of, you know, fight it out? And I think I can really use some Ben Mysalas coaching on this, because I know I did the right thing. Well.

[Political Commentator]

Here'S my thought, is that you don't want to be used as a puppet for the regime, and they're gonna use someone like you with your distinguished career, and they're gonna say, look, Ben Fold supports me. You know, take a look. And what Trump does, and you see this. He brings the Juventus soccer team, an Italian football club, to be behind him as he's talking about potential war with Iran. He brings a group of construction workers to sit next to him and says, look, you see, they like me. But what he loves the most is celebrity. And when he just has Kid Rock over and over and over again, he wants. He wants a Ben Folds to say, look, here's a. Here's an artist with kind of deep intellectual roots who supports me. And a Ben Folds support. You should, too. So I. That's my belief about why. Why you. You have to leave because you're just used as a prop.

[Daddication Representative]

Yeah, no, that's. That's a good. That's a really good point. And part of what I should use to explain that, I mean, where I've been before with it is to say, well, I mean, look, you know, we all grew up seeing, you know, there are abuses of power that I saw on television. You know, there was, you know, Watergate. So in Watergate, the, you know, the Saturday Night Massacre occurs and people are asked to do a task that they can't do. You know, like they can't do morally or ethically do the things that the president is pressuring them to do, but they don't want to be subordinate either. So the only thing they can do is publicly resign. But then there are like the generals that are like the adults in the room. Like, you know, if the, if you're talking about, like, you know, we're worried that he's going to have a, you know, a bad day and wake up and nuke somebody, then it's good to have. But that's not the, that's not the case with me. There's nothing I could do there. I was curatorial, so, you know, I couldn't curate within the bounds of whatever kind of white Christian thing that they wanted to do. There was another problem of it, but people's kind of, you know, earnest ignorance of the way that the arts work in the private and public sector is too, I find a little frustrating when I'm trying to explain it.

[Political Commentator]

Well, also, it's not fully funded by the federal government. I mean, the Kennedy Center, I mean, a lot of the money actually comes from private sources. And the Most was like 90%. And the market was speaking that this was a viable, thriving, successful model. Of course, it has wear and tear and always could be improved. But to me, it was a shining example relative to what we saw in the Soviet Union and how their arts were fully controlled by a central planning regime. In fact, and I know you've talked about this before, a lot of the origins of the Kennedy center and the celebration was that it was different from what existed in the Soviet Union. And now it has essentially followed the Soviet regime, central planning style, control of the arts, which the original leadership of the Kennedy center was kind of a reaction to. Can you speak to that?

[Daddication Representative]

Yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, legendary directors and conductors at the Kennedy center was, you know, they called him Slava. His name's too, too long to pronounce, but Slava Rostropovich, cellist from the USSR and also a conductor and the right hand man, essentially, to Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was like, he was, you know, it's classical music dust now, but he was a big celebrity. Stalin really cared what this guy, you know, thought. He was like Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift. And Stalin would go and intimidate Shostakovich at his performances. He would show up and he'd laugh at Shostakovich from the stage, point at him. His generals were there flanking him, and Shostakovich was like, oh, my God, my. My family's going to get imprisoned. I'm going to get in prison. Someone's going to get killed. And it's the same thing as tweeting out, I hate Shostakovich. Right. I hate Taylor Swift. It might seem funny. Yeah, he's just up there laughing. But the pressure and the intimidation put its thumb on the scale of the arts. So Rostropovich saw this, and he defected from the ussr and he found himself directing the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. And what he enjoyed about that was a complete sacred firewall that existed protecting him from that kind of intimidation, from that kind of pressure and that kind of influence. I thought about him when I resigned in that minute, because I could feel suddenly I sounded crazy before, and all of a sudden, it's real. All of a sudden, it's like, this is real. It's like, okay, there's not a firewall there anymore when I bring an artist as a curator, or are they safe? I don't know. I mean, can they say what they want to? I. Yeah, I guess they can, but what's the. What's the consequence going to be? They can't trust me anymore, and I can't trust them, and there's no trust. You know, before, there wasn't a law that said you couldn't do this, so Trump did it. But the reason the norms are there and the reason that America is America is because of the people that steward it, not the institutions. And so, yeah, that was a real thing, and I hate to step away from it, but we'll have to do our work outside of the Kennedy Center, I'm afraid, for a while.

[Political Commentator]

Let's talk about the album Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra. You were able to record this in the Kennedy Center. It kind of slipped through the cracks, if you will, and the Trump regime wasn't able to clamp down on it. Talk to us about the album, where people can download it and why it's such an important endeavor for you and the release on Independence Day.

[Daddication Representative]

Well, one. You know, for me personally, it commemorates eight years of working with that orchestra, and that's our nation's symphony orchestra. Incredibly proud of them. They're still our nation's symphony orchestra and they still need to be supported a little tougher because they're a bit demoralized because their subscriptions are so down. You know, I think Washington Post reported they were down 80% across the board. I don't know if that directly is a number that applies to the orchestration orchestra, but they're feeling it. And so to me, this memorializes that and I love that. Secondly, it stands to me for sort of a golden period where we were getting the orchestra to the point again of being an original, an orchestra that does original music. You know, that that is really difficult and expensive to do. When we did that concert and, and we recorded meant enough to me to have this just recorded to pay for it. Essentially myself, there was something that was funded otherwise, but it pretty much was me giving my fee and all this kind of stuff to make it work because it's really expensive to do. So it wasn't a capitalistic endeavor for me, though I dig some capitalism at the right time. So this, this is recorded one night, two nights, and it was before the election. Things were feeling a little bit eerie. I had chosen a selection of songs, like a song called But Wait, There's More, which I'd written a few years ago when the first part of Trump, which is like, it seemed like every day was like we were titillated at the next weird story and we were all paying attention. And like, that's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Like the press conference in the landscaping parking lot next to the dildo shop. Wow, that's pretty weird. That's crazy. What's next? Then it's old and then the next thing is even crazier. So that's what we started the concert on was like, look, we're still. It's getting crazier and crazier. Are we really out of this? There's a song on there about, about families and friends being torn apart by misinformation. It was all very much in the air. That was recorded and then, you know, put away. And when, when the Trump regime staged their Kennedy center couple, we completely expected this to be shelved. I thought, well, that's it. I'm never even going to hear the recordings. They're somewhere in a vault. But what you find about people that take things over like this is they're not really paying attention to the day to day. I mean, Deborah Rutter was running the center at a surplus some years like $6 million, I hear. Crazy. That's nuts. I mean, they're not supposed to run a surplus. It's not a private business. These guys have already got. The subscriptions are down, artists won't play there anymore, and people are, in general, in enduring a circus In. In times I never saw people boo one time at a concert. Now, now it's like, you know, some kind of wrestling show or something.

[Political Commentator]

It's one of the things, too. It's just not doing well.

[Daddication Representative]

Like.

[Political Commentator]

Like, you know, that there was a marketplace of ideas that was performing well.

[Daddication Representative]

We were selling out every single show we did in my series.

[Political Commentator]

Biggest audiences, the biggest crowds, the biggest everything. And then he puts his. This is. This is his history, though, right? He puts his finger on the scale. He tries to use artists as props, and he thinks that he's the most creative person and he wants to program. And then it fails. And then. And then. And then we pay the price. What's the last thing you just want to say to everybody else out there who. Seeing you take in, you know, public stances in these difficult times when a lot of artists are not.

[Daddication Representative]

Yeah. I mean, I'd like to say, first of all to people my age and my generation, we came through, you know, maybe hit it in the 90s. We're. We were all part of the shut up and sing generation. And I regret that, and I hope that you do, too. If you've at all withheld the things that. That. That you need to take a stand on. We don't need to go full, like, south park, you know, you know, caricature of ourselves and go out and, you know, everything's green and. But I think it is important to take a stand personally. Who are you? Where do you stand? Like they say, you know, you can't be neutral on a moving train. You don't have to go full, you know, advocate of everything. But let's not be afraid of losing half our audience anymore. The country is sliding quickly from the democracy we knew and. And freedom of expression is more important than anything. So that would be to my contemporaries, to kids, be yourself, be a freak. Take a stand on something. How you feel, who you are, what's going on around you. If we've been told for our whole life that we can't spend money on the arts because it's not important, it's not important, Then why did the first thing they do go in and take over the Kennedy center and our arts? Why would that be the first thing if it's not important? It's extremely important. It's the bedrock of self expression. That's what I would tell people and I would, you know, now say we need to, we need to do it while we can. It's feeling a little spookier by the day out there. But look around, we can still do what we're doing. We're having this conversation. You can go out and tell the truth with your music and use your microphone.

[Experian Advertiser]

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[Political Commentator]

Speaking of doing what you can do with your music, your microphone, your voice, everybody go and download Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra. You could stream it, purchase it, go and get it. Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra. Thanks Ben Folds. Thank you very much Ben, myself, everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. The truth is more important than ever. Check out our new Truth over lies [e-mail] touch.com all 100% USA union made.