We know you have a lot of choices these days when it comes to the “Bored musicians broadcasting for free” department, from Liam Gallagher streaming profane Oasis parodies about washing your hands, to John Darnielle letting the latest Mountain Goats track loose on Twitter earlier this afternoon. But how many of those musical shut-ins are offering that most precious of commodities in these lawless and troubled times, i.e., control? No, if you want to take the pure, fate-dictating power of creation out of the hands of a musician and instead invest it in your own, you’re going to need to turn to Ben Folds.
The “Rockin’ The Suburbs” artist is currently holed up in Sydney, Australia, where he was touring with an orchestra when the whole, well, everything shut down. Now he’s announced—via both Facebook and his Patreon—that he’s going to begin hosting live apartment concerts on Saturday evenings (Sunday mornings in Australia) in which he’ll be happy to take requests from his audience in the live chat. No formal procedure or anything, so if you’ve ever wanted to find a new way to scream “FREEBIRD!” at a performing musician and have it actually have a snowball’s chance of getting played, now’s presumably your chance. Just maybe no “The Luckiest” right now, huh? Nobody is the luckiest at present.