Launching his solo career in 2001, Ben Folds is widely regarded as one of the major music influencers of our generation. Folds first rose to fame in the mid-’90s with Ben Folds Five, whose genre-bending take on piano pop helped define an entire era of alternative rock.

Folds’ masterful new album, What Matters Most, marks Folds’ first new studio release in eight years, and it’s a bold, timely, cinematic 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.

Folds tours as a pop artist, while also performing with some of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras and currently serving as the first-ever Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. A New York Times best-selling author and podcast host,

Folds has several music projects currently in development, frequently guest-stars in film and TV, and is working on two new albums.

He also recently launched a music education initiative in his home state of North Carolina, and continually advocates for improving public policies for the arts and arts education on the national level.