Snoopy is the superstar of the “Peanuts” world, but Ben Folds is loyal to Charlie Brown. “I’m going to have to go with Chuck because he’s so emotionally compressed,” the singer-songwriter said when asked for a favorite.
Folds didn’t grow up poring over the Charles M. Schulz comics or memorizing the TV specials — “I can’t think of anything I really was a fan of outside of music” — but he loved Vince Guaraldi’s music for the animated specials.
He started studying Charlie Brown and the gang when he was hired to write the title song for “It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown,” sung by Charlie’s sister Sally in the 2022 Apple TV special. And he recently dove back into the world of these iconic characters when he returned to write the final three songs for “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical.”
“I think it’s good that I came to fully appreciate the world of ‘Peanuts’ as an adult,” says Folds, although he adds that he was still starstruck about writing for Charlie Brown. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” he says. “I was asking the Schulz family, ‘Can I say this?’ and they’d say, ‘Yes, it’s yours.’”
Folds’ best-known songs, such as “Brick,” “Song for the Dumped,” “Army,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and “Zak and Sara,” may seem too sardonic or dark for the sweet world of Snoopy and company. But he sees it differently.
“There’s a lot of deep stuff there. ‘Peanuts,’ like ‘Mister Rogers,’ presents an empathetic and nuanced, not dumbed-down view of the world, and that is rare for kids programming,” he says. “I was able to say stuff in my songs that kids will understand but that will go over the heads of many adults.”
He also knows how to approach the storytelling aspect of musical writing pragmatically.
Within the show’s parameters, Folds is grateful to the creators for giving him his artistic freedom. “They give me carte blanche and don’t push back” Folds says, adding that when he puts in poetic imagery — ”I’m not calling myself f—ing Keats or anything,” he adds as an aside — director Erik Wiese would weave those ideas into the animation. “That’s really cool to see.”
“My ambition is to have them tell me that my lyrics meant they could delete pages of script,” he adds. “That’s what these songs are for.”
Wiese says Folds was the ideal person to “take the mantle” from Guaraldi: “He brings a modern thing and his lyrics are so poetic; on his albums he always touches your heart.”
Writer and executive producer Craig Schulz, who is Charles’ son, was impressed by both Folds’ songwriting and the responsibility the musician felt to the “Peanuts” brand. “He has a unique ability to really get into what each of the gang is thinking and drive the audience in the direction we want to,” says Schulz, adding that there was one day where the writers got on the phone with Folds to explain the emotions they needed a scene to convey “and suddenly he says, ‘I got it, I’m super-excited’ and then he hangs up and runs to the piano and cranks it out.”
The first song Folds wrote for “A Summer Musical” was when Charlie Brown realizes that the camp he holds dear “is going to get mown over in the name of progress. I wanted him to have the wisdom of his 60-year-old self to go back to ‘when we were light as the clouds’ to let him understand the future,” he says. So it’s a poignant song even as he’s writing about Charlie Brown looking through “old pictures of people he met five days ago. That’s the way kids are — they’re taking in a whole world and learning a lot in five days.”
(He did not write the show’s first two songs, though you’ll hear plenty of Folds-esque piano and melody in them because, Wiese says, “We wanted it to sound cohesive.”)
In the final song, Folds’ lyrics celebrate the saving of the camp (yeah, spoiler alert, but it’s “Peanuts,” so you know the ending will be happy), but he laces in the idea that these children are inheriting a lot of bad things from older generations, including climate change. But it’s not cynical, instead adding an understanding that their parents did the best they could (with a “Hello Mother, Hello Father” reference thrown in for the old-timers) and that this new generation will do the best they can and make their own mistakes.
Folds says it’s important for people in the arts and on the left to bring a realistic view but not to become doomsayers.
“I see how bad it could get, but there are two stories you can always tell that might be true — one way to talk about climate change will leave people saying, ‘We’re screwed anyway so I’ll just drink out of plastic bottles and toss them in the garbage,’ but the other way is to motivate people, to tell a story that shows an aspiration towards the future.”
That does not mean, of course, that Folds is blind to the perils of the moment. He stepped down as the National Symphony Orchestra’s artistic advisor at the Kennedy Center to protest Donald Trump’s power play there.
“I couldn’t be a pawn in that,” he says. “Was I supposed to call my homies like Sara Bareilles and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come play here?’” But he’s focusing on the positive, noting that he’s now working with other symphony orchestras with that free time.
Folds has recently also tried countering the turmoil of our current era: Last year he released his first Christmas album, “Sleigher,” and his 2023 album “What Matters Most” opens with “But Wait, There’s More,” which offers political commentary but then talks about believing in the good of humankind, and closes with the uplifting “Moments.”
And obviously, Folds knows that a show that stars a beagle and a small yellow bird that defies classification is not the right place to get bogged down in the issues of the day. Even when the lyrics dip into melancholy waters, they find a positive place to land.
“In this era I don’t want the art that passes through my world to not have some semblance of hope,” he says.
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