Folds turns to fans for ‘Paper Airplane’ set list

Ben Folds appears in Honolulu this week.

He’s booked for The Republik, so we know it’s a rock show. Given the path Folds’ career has taken over the past dozen years, though, he could just as easily have appeared at a concert hall with the symphony, or in an art museum.

With accomplishments in classical music and photography, the pianist has become much more than a pop or rock star.

Friday’s show will be Folds and a piano — with a wrinkle in the programming that adds a dash of unpredictability. As suggested by the name for his latest set of dates, the “Paper Airplane Request Tour” gets the audience involved.

The first half of the show is a normal set. The songs change from show to show, but Folds picks about 10 songs to play just as any artist does for a concert.

For the rest of the show, each audience member writes down a request, folds it into a paper plane and, after a countdown, launches it toward Folds. He picks the rest of the night’s songs from those that reach the stage.

Word of advice: If you want to have a good shot at your song making the cut, stick to Folds’ songs or songs you know he’s played live. The point is to give the audience what they want, not to show off an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of song.

Opening up his whole catalog can be demanding, but Folds prepares to please everyone if possible.

“I’ll pick something up and go, “Oh, that song, whooo, OK, I think I can remember that,’” Folds said recently in a phone call from his Los Angeles home. “And I’ve brushed up on hundreds of ’em. So I’m pretty much gonna be able to play it all, but sometimes we’ll hit one and it’ll be, ‘I don’t even remember the words to this.’”

“It keeps me on my toes, and it’s scary. If you can go on tour being scared a little bit, that’s good.”

With the bold chances Folds has taken with his career, he doesn’t seem like an easy scare.

Folds and his trio Ben Folds Five (yes, a trio) rose to stardom in the late ’90s when they improbably fashioned a hit single out of a ballad about Folds taking his girlfriend to get an abortion. The earnest, reflective “Brick” made him a pop star and helped lift Folds’ second album, “Whatever and Ever Amen,” onto the Billboard 200 albums chart in 1997.

Many of the best tracks from “Whatever” exhibit Folds’ sense of humor and physical piano playing. He also included a solid dose of anger that appealed to indie-rockers of the time, with the epic breakup romp “Song for the Dumped” and how-do-you-like-me-now banger “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces.”

One thing that hit album didn’t have was guitars, which Folds has used sparingly throughout his career. He said the practice dates back to his youth, when he’d record four-track demos in his bedroom and there was no need for guitar with voice, piano, bass and drums.

He’s developed a style that’s not particularly guitar-friendly, said Folds, who last performed in Hawaii 21 years ago with the Five.

“It takes up too much space — the wrong kind of space,” he said. “It’s too pushy.”

The Ben Folds Five lasted through one more album and one more hit — the theatrical “Army” — before Folds broke off as a solo artist, most notably with “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” which went on to be featured in the 2006 animated hit film “Over the Hedge.”

Around that time, Folds’ career got really interesting — and more complicated.

That year saw the release of “Ben Folds and WASO Live in Perth,” a DVD of shows he recorded with the West Australia Symphony Orchestra in 2005.

It may have seemed like a departure to fans, but it was natural to him, he said. Folds played in a youth symphony growing up and attended the University of Miami’s prestigious music school on a scholarship.

“I was going to be a percussionist,” Folds said. “By the time I was playing in a rock band, even though I was writing rock songs and that’s what I did in my spare time, I’d identified myself as someone who would work in an orchestra one day.”

Folds has gone on to play with several orchestras in the U.S. and Australia, often in a pops format, performing his own hit songs as well as classical compositions.

His 2015 album “So There” is made up of collaborations with the New York City chamber music sextet yMusic along with a concerto penned by Folds and performed with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

And after featuring Folds as part of a pops series in 2015, the Washington, D.C.-based National Symphony Orchestra named Folds as its first artistic adviser in May.

“I’ve played with a lot of symphony orchestras as a part of what I do, and I think they just recognized … they knew I wasn’t part-timing this, and I have a valuable perspective on mixing pop and classical,” Folds said. “And so I’ve taken my job very seriously, and I’ve tried to create shows for them that musically appeal in the same way to a rock or pop audience. … It’s about turning the orchestra into a big rock band or turning a rock artist into an orchestra.”

Other interesting musical projects in Folds’ portfolio include producing a 2009 album of his songs as performed by university a cappella groups (followed by four seasons as a judge on the a cappella competition show “The Sing-Off”) and the 2010 album “Lonely Avenue,” a collaboration with author Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”).

Folds has also distinguished himself as a photographer, with membership in the elite Sony Artisans of Imagery and a recent stint as National Geographic’s photo editor.

Next up, Folds is already working on a book “on life and music” for a 2019 release and, having seen the success his former fellow “Sing-Off” judge Sara Bareilles enjoyed with her Broadway hit “Waitress,” sees himself completing a musical someday. It’s something he’s worked on, off and on, since the ’90s.

Those projects open up even more possibilities for where Folds will appear on his next visit to Hawaii.