Ben Folds Don Arnold/WireImage Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Ben Folds is "Rockin' the Suburbs" for your kids these days as Charlie Brown's main songwriter (all due respect here to composer Jeff Morrow). On Friday, Aug. 15, Apple TV+ released the first new Peanuts musical in 35 years, Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical. This time around, the gang has to save their beloved summer camp from being closed - bring in the guy who wrote that abortion song. (Kidding, of course: both "Brick" and Folds' Peanuts work are terrific in their own right.) This year marks the 75th anniversary of Peanuts. Apple TV+ became the home of Peanuts in 2019 (the deal was first announced in 2018). Related Stories News Lucian Grainge Fires Back at Drake's "Farcical" and "Nonsensical" Claims That Universal Wanted to Devalue the Rapper's Brand Movies Watch Out 'Mean Girls,' It Seems Oct. 3 Is Now Taylor Swift's Day Produced for Apple TV+ by Peanuts and WildBrain, Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical is directed by Erik Wiese and is written by Craig Schulz, Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano. Executive producers are the Schulzes, Uliano, Paige Braddock, Josh Scherba, Stephanie Betts and Logan McPherson. Read The Hollywood Reporter's wide-ranging (from Charlie Brown to Bill Burr to Billy Joel) Q&A with Folds below; we previously published an excerpt from the same Zoom interview in which the former Ben Folds Five frontman discusses his exit earlier this year as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra, a program overseen by the Kennedy Center. *** Classic rock-and-roller move here - I'm trying to understand how you got involved with Snoopy and the gang. You and I wonder the same thing. I don't really know. I did another TV special with them, I guess two years ago and got an Emmy nomination for ["It's the Small Things, Charlie Brown"], and everything. We all worked together really well. And I don't know, I feel like I understand that world Charlie Brown's mentality is very familiar to me. It feels comfortable, you know? But, the Schulz's are great, and I think we might have done some stuff with them years ago for other projects. They've got Schroeder. [Laughs] Yeah. You'll probably get nomination(s) off the new musical, and as we speak, a kids movie called KPop Demon Hunters is dominating Netflix, in large part because it has great original songs. Why are so many of the best pop songs coming (first) from movie soundtracks today? That's interesting. Well, I think some of it is because pop music, in and of itself, is not really all that relevant. Comedy probably took the place of rock and roll at some point. It did the same things. It was rebellious in that way, and it defined lots of things about culture. And now it's like everything is sort of eaten up into content. I don't really know the landscape enough; I've never been a real student of any of that, but that's the feeling that I get. I think that one thing I could do for [Apple TV+] with this show was just to bring a real, old-fashioned craft of songwriting, which is dying out. That doesn't mean that there's not good songs these days, but there are different kinds of songs, far less about the craft, which is a good thing. But it makes me think of something specific: David Bowie and Bing Crosby sang that famous duet ("Peace on Earth"/"Little Drummer Boy"). Well, the story, roughly, behind that was that Bowie walked into this whole thing and was like, "I'm not singing ba rum pum-pum-pums." And they were like, "Well, what if we made it something- a little bit expanded?" So a staff writer just wrote the half of the song. They call it a mashup, but the song didn't exist. So the other one, where it says "Peace on Earth," or whatever, the other they've mashed up, the staff writer pulled that out of his ass And that's the kind of craft that existed in that era, where people who were just writing on staff were writing better than stuff that people make now. Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical Courtesy of Apple TV+ So how do you apply that to Charlie Brown? He's an established, iconic personality. We know he's not the dude that elbows his way to the front of a choir. He's not, like, effusive, big, loud. So then, him breaking into song has its own sort of constraints, and the way he expresses himself has to be real solitary. And since he's been with us forever, he's an old soul. "When We Were Light"...he's singing like a middle-aged dude singing back about something [that] he shouldn't actually know about. I think those things require a little thoughtfulness, a little craft that you just kind of got to know, [or] even have a bag of tricks as far as writing songs goes. The first two (songs), I didn't write. I know one of the guys that was part of the team that wrote the first two songs, and they're great. They set th