Ben Folds What Matters Most Tour

What Matters Most, Ben Folds’ first new album in eight years, isn’t so much a statement as it is an offering, an open hand reaching out to all those wounded and bewildered by a world that seems to make less and less sense every day. Recorded in East Nashville with co-producer Joe Pisapia, the collection is a bold, timely work, one that examines the tragic and the absurd in equal measure as it reckons with hope and despair, gratitude and loss, identity and perspective. The songs are bittersweet here, hilarious at times, though often laced with a quiet sense of longing and dread, and the result is a record that refuses to succumb to the weight of the world, an ecstatic reminder of all the beauty and promise hiding in plain sight for anyone willing (and present enough) to recognize their moments as they arrive.