Ben Folds Five Set 2027 Tour
The 2027 tour, which kicks off in Tennessee in April, marks the band’s first live dates in more than 15 years.
Ben Folds Five have set their first tour dates together in more than 15 years. The band will hit the road next spring in support of the 30th-anniversary reissue of their self-titled debut.
The group’s April run will kick off in Knoxville, Tennessee, making stops in Chattanooga, Jacksonville, Clearwater, Austin, Houston, and more before concluding at Birmingham’s Avondale Brewing Company on April 22. Ben Folds Five hasn’t embarked on a proper full-band tour since their 2013 run behind the 2012 reunion album The Sound of the Life of the Mind. In 2023, they also came together for a one-off show at legendary Chapel Hill venue Cat’s Cradle.
Before the full band tour kicks off, Ben Folds has a series of solo dates in the UK, Europe, and Australia. A number of those shows are part of his Paper Airplane Request series, a unique format which allows guests to write song requests on paper airplanes and toss them towards the stage, with nothing in Folds’ catalog off limits. On October 24, he’ll also play a show with the Minnesota Orchestra at Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall.
The 30th-anniversary edition of Ben Folds Five came out on September 4, and essentially functioned as a double album, placing the 1995 original next to a previously-unreleased shelved version. According to Folds, he recently rediscovered the sessions on a cassette in his personal archives. They included seven early alternate takes from the finished LP, and three outtakes that didn’t make the cut on the original tracklist: “Emaline,” “Dick Holster,” and “Eddie Walker.”
“It’s NOT the kind of record you’d hear produced these days,” Folds said in a statement. “It’s pretty rough and tumble, mostly in a good way. And it’s emphatically unique. It’s from an era when you could still identify a band by the instrumentalists, before you’d even hear the vocalist. I don’t think that’s been a thing since computers allowed us to get things just right.”
