By Robert Moran
It grabs you suddenly. There you are, half-watching Apple TV+’s new Peanuts special Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, having finally settled on some wholesome family viewing that isn’t just your 14th run-through of KPop Demon Hunters, when 31 minutes in Charlie Brown – depressed, bedraggled and caught in a sudden downpour – existentially mutters, “I just can’t”.
The sentiment is universal. But then a plaintive synth follows, and a beat like a broken heart. If you’re like me, you’ll be fighting back chest-heaving sobs while your kids wonder what the hell’s going on with dad.
Ben Folds wrote several songs for Apple TV+’s Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, the first new Peanuts musical in 37 years.Credit: Apple TV+
Is it weird that the most emotional song of the year might be a synth-ballad by Ben Folds, written and recorded for a Peanuts musical where Charlie Brown tries valiantly to save his childhood summer camp from closure? Perhaps, but here we are. I don’t know if the Emmys even give out awards for songs, but Look Up, Charlie Brown should win them all.
“I’m glad you like that one,” says Folds, who composed several original songs for what is the first new Peanuts musical in 37 years. “I always saw that as one that may not even make the cut, but that’s the one that everyone keeps saying they like, which is very interesting to me.”
The song was written specifically for the special’s emotional peak, Folds explains. In an excited bid to rescue their beloved summer camp from developers, the Peanuts gang decide to stage a “save the camp” concert. But the weather gods strike.
“It starts raining, which is beyond the control of the children,” says Folds. “But then the resolution in the script was that the sun comes out. So how do you write that song? How do you earn the sun coming out?”
Look Up, Charlie Brown: give it all the awards.Credit: Apple TV+
Feeling the spirit of Charles M. Schulz, Folds’ answer was to get philosophical (in a minor key). “As a kid, you need to understand that things happen that are beyond our control and that when these things happen, all you can do is your best,” he says. “So I said, ok, Charlie Brown is going to look down and just work. He’ll go, ‘I refuse to believe that this is not going to go my way, even though everything is saying that it’s not because it’s raining and I can’t stop the rain.’”
But just as Charlie Brown, in his Sisyphean tradition – he’s the chump who never stops kicking at the football, even if Lucy always pulls it – has vowed not to give up, the clouds part, the sun comes out, and the song builds to its glorious apex, a chanted “Look up! Look up!” that will rip your soul out.
“What I hoped to convey is that if you are in adversity and it looks like there’s no winning, there’s a lot of honour in just keeping your head down and going on,” says Folds. “The kids are looking at Charlie Brown like, ‘It’s raining! You understand that, right?’, and he’s like, ‘I don’t care, I can’t give up.’ When the sun comes out, he’s still looking down. And so I thought that was an opportunity for the other kids to say, ‘Look up! It’s all going to be okay!’ ”
It begs the question: why did Folds almost cut it? What did he not like about it? “It’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just one of those times where it goes to show you that you can’t sit and worry about what Vince Guaraldi would do,” he says, citing the late pianist whose jazzy compositions are synonymous with Peanuts cartoons. For a piano guy like Folds, Guaraldi is a revered figure.
“Vince Guaraldi’s moves on the piano, for a piano player, are the equivalent to a Pete Townsend power chord on guitar,” he says. “You can’t avoid the power chord if you’re playing rock on the guitar, and you can’t avoid the Guaraldi-isms on the piano if you’re playing jazz. It still sounds so sophisticated, and it’s brilliant stuff.”
Folds even had a version of Look Up, Charlie Brown that amped its ’80s British synth-pop feel that he decided he’d never get away with. “It already felt like blasphemy to bring in a drum machine and an electric piano. I was even putting delays on the vocal – I never do shit like that! It was all just very out of my comfort zone, which proves that it’s always good to take a risk.”
Folds will return to Australia on his Ben Folds and a Piano Tour in February.
Folds is Zooming in from his home in North Carolina, where he’s lived for the past two years. He’d previously lived in Adelaide intermittently between 1999 and 2006, with his Australian ex-wife Frally Hynes and their twin children Gracie and Louie, and then in Sydney during the pandemic. Australia remains significant for Folds; it’s also the place where his band Ben Folds Five first found success with their debut album, released 30 years ago this week.
“When we finished that album, I knew everything would change,” says Folds. “That sounds so cocky, but when we were in the studio I knew I was hearing something that I just hadn’t heard before.”
In Australia, Underground became an unlikely alternative hit for the band. “That was really affirming, because that song was so damn uncool when we were recording it,” says Folds. “It felt like everyone in the studio was rolling their eyes. It’s the height of grunge music and we’re there going ‘doot-doot-do, doot-doot-do!’ That’s so goofy, you know? So in America, it didn’t catch on.”
One morning in 1996, the landline by his head woke him at 4am. “It was Triple J doing a prank, a couple of comedians named Merrick & Rosso just being idiots on the phone,” says Folds. “But they were like, ‘Congratulations mate, you’re number three on the Hottest 100.’ I didn’t know what Triple J was, or the Hottest 100, but that was the beginning of success for us. That song took off from there – it became a top 10 hit in Europe and the UK – but it started in Australia, so I’ve always had a nice thing there.”
Folds will tour Australia in February, amid a moment of personal upheaval. In February, he resigned as an artistic advisor at the Kennedy Center, a role he’d held since 2019, after Donald Trump dismissed half the board of the Washington, DC arts institution and named himself its new chairman. In the months since, Folds has released an album with his old charges, the National Symphony Orchestra, in what feels like a pointed act of resistance.
“It is. Art itself, in times like this in America, is by definition an act of resistance, because an authoritarian regime wants people in line and art does not stay in line,” says Folds. “We’d recorded that before the election. It felt very ominous at the time, but I didn’t think he would win the election. I still don’t understand it, but it happened.”
The Kennedy Centre, opened in 1971, had a reputation as a beacon of freedom of expression in the US capital, says Folds. “Having it taken over in that kind of authoritarian way and becoming the Ministry of Art suddenly, it has a very North Korean feel and it’s pretty scary. I stepped down because I didn’t want to be a pawn in that. I didn’t want to represent it or support it in any way, and I could afford to leave. But it was sad because I worked there for nearly 10 years and I’ve still got friends that are kind of trapped in the building… We’re in dark, uncharted territory.”
Amid such mayhem, does Folds ever feel like returning to live in Australia? To paraphrase Charlie Brown, he just can’t. “It’s an amazing place, you don’t have to worry as much about your health care or your leadership saying they’re going to invade your neighbours,” Folds deadpans. “But I’m from [the US], and I would like to stick it out. But if I need to, I may come knocking on your door and asking for a referral so you can get me in.”
Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical is now streaming on Apple TV+. The Ben Folds & a Piano Tour includes gigs at Sydney’s State Theatre on February 20 and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on February 26.