Ben Folds is an Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter who has created an enormous body of genre-bending music, which includes pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, a holiday album, and numerous collaborative records.
He currently tours as a pop artist, while also performing for over two decades with some of the world’s great symphony orchestras.
Folds, who served for eight years as the first-ever Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) at the Kennedy Center, stepped down from his post when President Trump announced his takeover of the Center. Just days before the US presidential election, Folds recorded two sold-out performances with the NSO, which he released as a live album in 2025 that debuted at the top of the Billboard classical and classical crossover charts.
A New York Times best-selling author, Folds has also created new music for film, television, and theatre, including original songs for an ongoing series of animated Peanuts specials on Apple TV.
In 2022 Folds launched a music education charitable initiative in his native state of North Carolina entitled “Keys for Kids,” which provides funds and keyboards to existing nonprofits that offer free or affordable piano lessons to school-age children from economically disadvantaged households. For the past fifteen years, he has been an outspoken advocate for arts funding, music education, and music therapy in the United States as a member of Americans for the Arts and the Arts Action Fund.
