[ATTENDED: July 14, 2016] Gracie Folds
The Levitt Pavilion Steelstacks in Bethlehem is one of my favorite venues. Last year I saw Modest Mouse there and this year it was Ben Folds. I raved to Sarah about the venue last time but I don’t think she realized just how great it would be until we walked onto the grass and walked up to the stage where there were only two people in front of us. And, if we were pushier, we could have easily gotten up to the fence.
So, yes, we were about three people from the stage. And just to make it better, the forecast predicted massive thunderstorms all night long, but by the time of the show, the clouds had parted and a cool breeze came in through the field.
As the show started a young girl walked out and sat at her keyboard and told us her name was Gracie. Anyone who is a fan of Ben Folds knows he has a daughter named Gracie. But those of us who have no concept of time passing still assume she is like 6 years old. Well, she is 17 and she opened for her dad. And that’s pretty awesome.
She told us that she went to school where you had to play either cello or violin. Once she saw that you sat down to play the cello, her decision was made. She liked the instrument but once she found she didn’t make first chair, she basically bailed on it. There’s another funny story about how she learned to play the piano (embarrassment at not being able to pick out an A on the piano to help to tune her cello) and now that has become her main instrument.
Gracie played six or seven songs “that you’ve never heard before.”
The first two were on the keyboard and I instantly loved her playing style. She uses a lot of syncopated notes (as opposed to chords) and some of them are quite unexpected–pretty, but atypical. She reminds me a bit of Regina Spektor and maybe early Tori Amos (playing style, not singing). Her singing voice is deeper and a little breathier which I also liked.
At first, I didn’t love how slowly she sang, but you have to be a pretty confident performer to get up on stage and sing songs with lengthy pauses between words and syllables. It may have just been unfamiliarity though because I just listened to the two songs on her bandcamp site and they are really great. Incidentally, she has the awesome if cumbersome bandcamp name: therealgraciefoldsasopposedtothefakegraciefolds.bandcamp.com. I also love that her Instagram profile name is Waffle House Hipster (shame we didn’t see her at the Waffle House after the show).
There’s some humor in her lyrics, although the songs aren’t funny per se. “Comic Sans” features the chorus “back when comic sans was cool / I’m pretty sure that caring was too / back when comic sans was cool / sleeping was easy and eating was too.” And I loved the way the complicated speed of the verses is offset by the slow cabaret style piano of the middle section. It’s a wonderfully constructed song.
I also love the piano melody of her second song “Ding.” It has another fun lyric “she comes from a fake butter family in Larchmont.” Here’s a clip from Ding.
After a couple of songs she switched to guitar and talked about the band that she is in in LA (but she never mentioned the band’s name). She played two songs on guitar. They were much shorter than the piano songs and perhaps a little less interesting without the complex piano melodies. Having said that the second song has some nice chord progressions. And she’s just as good at guitar ask piano.
Then she returned to the keyboard and played a few more songs including one that she wrote when she was a freshman in high school and another that she wrote the words to “that morning.”
Gracie was a charming performer. The crowd was really supportive and she responded perfectly. It was also pretty cool that her dad watched from the side of the stage for a bit.
I wish her much success and hope she gets a full album of those great piano melodies out.
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