Ben Folds
speaker
250 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 31 May
Ben Folds’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The MeidasTouch Podcast · Ben Folds Responds to Performers Leaving Kennedy Center · 11 Jan 2026
podcast
No, no, I think when the National Symphony Orchestra has opportunities to play like at Wolf Trap and they're playing other venues, I really would love to see people in the DC area support that.
The National Symphony Orchestra is not the Kennedy Center and they're some of the finest musicians in the country and they're just basically held hostage inside a building with someone spray painted their name on the outside.
No one shows up to their shows anymore.
And that's what I would tell people.
Thanks, Ben.
Well and you could help me with this too, because you know, I'm I'm a musician that's not used to messaging this sort of thing, but I've spent a lot of time, um, in the last, you know, ten or fifteen years being involved in uh, you know, advocating for uh arts funding.
I I actually did a um
Um I actually went to uh uh did a a test uh testimony uh before the uh
uh house uh subcommittee uh on on arts.
I I played and did panels at the Republican National Convention in 2016, uh as well as the uh Democratic.
And I just I I feel like I 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 a 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.
Uh people might not realize how the arts work uh uh 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.
Showing 101–120 of 250 · page 6 of 13
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