In Profile: Ben Folds

Christmas is constant... Allowing you to take stock of what’s different, to understand who you are and all the ways you’ve grown and changed.

That notion lies at the heart of Ben Folds’ brilliantly titled new holiday collection, Sleigher, out now on New West Records. Built on an eclectic mix of originals and reimagined classics, the album examines the passage of time through the lens of Christmas, reflecting on memory, loss, and longing as it explores the variety of ways the yuletide season marks the chapters of our lives.

The songs are playful here, full of humor and cheer, but they’re also laced with an inescapable sense of melancholy, a looming darkness that always seems to hover around the periphery of those late December nights. Folds’ performances, meanwhile, flirt with the standards while stretching the boundaries of tradition, at times offering up flashes of Vince Guaraldi and Burt Bacharach while still remaining true to Folds’ singularly virtuosic brand of off-kilter indie pop.

The result is not so much a Ben Folds Christmas record as it is a Ben Folds record set at Christmas, a meditation on the inexorable turning of the calendar and our ever changing selves as observed at the most wonderful—and challenging—time of the year.

“There’s something about Christmas that really pushes you to ask, ‘Who am I now? How did I get here? You can look back on Christmases from your childhood and see the progression, or you can zoom out and look back at Christmas songs from the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s and see how we’ve evolved socially and culturally. Having that consistent framework is really illuminating."