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).

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.

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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 the whole thing up for me. But as soon as my three songs come in, you know, [Charlie Brown’s] been thrown in a hole. So it’s like, Chuck in a hole, now we’ve got to dig out. I didn’t really have scripts to explain how they get from a day where they’re supposed to save camp with a rock concert, and it’s raining, and then the sun comes out. But, this is one of the things about good songs and musicals, is they’re supposed to punt to the song and let the song dunk.

You didn’t have a full script to work from?

They didn’t really have anything in there. So it’s like, “Well, look, you know this it rains, and then they’re not going to have the concert. And then, the sun comes out, then yeah, they’re gonna have the concert.” The song that I wrote was there so it would obviate the need for script that would fill out.

So in some ways the screenwriters get more from you than you do from them.

Well, that’s the point of a musical, and actually good book writers, like them, know that. I’m not making up for a deficit. I’m actually stepping into the role of the column there that is required of the song. That’s another reason why I have to think that someone like me finds himself in an unlikely gig. That’s not for all songwriters.

Is there a challenge in music as in comedy where frankly so much has been done — written, sung, said — that there is also just less original stuff less to do? Like, literally fewer topics and word combinations available?

Well, I think (what) good music and good comedy have in common is that it’s about a unique view on what’s happening to us all. So, to the extent that history repeats itself, or rhymes, and to the extent that we have things you can and can’t say — they’re different now than they used to be. George Carlin used to go through the seven words you can’t say on television. Well, you almost have to say them now, right? What can’t you say (now)? Well, listen to a 70s a comedy album, just put the needle down, and you’ll hear something you can’t say now.

Especially in Peanuts.

[Laughs] Yeah.

In music more than comedy…if everyone just keeps on expressing roughly what they’re feeling, just technology alone is enough to move it into the next decade.

You were among those ‘90s bands and musicians that combined comedy within their otherwise good, solid, straightforward music. I’m not sure that happens these days — why is that?

What I’ve felt over my lifetime has been that it’s— I think it’s increasingly not encouraged to take a real solid stand of “Who are you?” I just imagine there’s no there’s no shape, gender, color, you can grow up in this moment, come purely from that place, and somehow not incite something hateful. I’m not going to try to imagine being in anyone else’s shoes, I’m just southern white guy — but I imagine right now that maybe one home for that music that you’d feel safe really being yourself, would be some kind of dreadful country music. And I think that if you joke, you’ve got to watch out what you’re joking about. I’m not being grumpy about some kind of “cancel culture” thing. I’m just actually talking about societally— it’s just much sexier to be mysterious.

If you’re mysterious, and we don’t know exactly who you are, then we can’t exactly attack you. Because everyone’s got faults…I think those differences should be celebrated. Let’s just say you’re growing up a white girl in the suburbs, upper-middle class, and you just kind of feel like, “I think I need to, you know, kind of affect a little bit more of a vocal fry, that’ll keep them off of me.” Just a certain kind of sexy, not any kind of jokes. They don’t have any real functions like eating or sleeping or having a bad day, it just has to come from the sky or something. I think that’s a lot of pressure on kids. If I were the the boss of them, I would make them come out from behind— like, even online, you just call yourself some stupid handle, and one has to see who you are. I just think, “Who are you?” That’s what I’m interested in.

When someone comes out and they’re just who they are— and think that’s true in comedy too. That’s why we love someone like Bill Burr. He’s obviously flawed. He’ll tell you that, he doesn’t try to hide it — he’s been through stuff. And I think that’s probably where humor went, because humor shows you that you have to take a little bit of stand on who you are, you have to have an ethnographic position.

Have you watched the Billy Joel documentary, (Billy Joel: And So It Goes)?

Beautiful, loved it. It’s just so moving. When I was coming up in the 90s, I was compared to him — but only in bad reviews. See, this is the way that they treated him, was so badly, that an up-and-comer like me, if I was going to get trashed, it would be by taking one of our great songwriting geniuses and comparing me to the guy. That’s how stupid they were.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.