Ben Folds, surrounded by folded paper dreams.

On September 19, piano rocker Ben Folds brought his Paper Airplane Request Tour to the Epstein Family Amphitheater on the UCSD campus. The hook: write your request, sail it onto the stage, and if Folds picks it up and he knows how to play it, congratulations, you’re the luckiest. Not just his own stuff, either: someone said he’d done “Billie Jean” at another show.

John didn’t have an airplane, but he did have a piece of advice: “Don’t make the plane long. If you make a short plane with the weight in the middle, it will coast a lot further. You make a triangle, and then you fold the whole triangle down.” Someone commented, “It would be kind of awesome if all the people on the green threw their planes and they just, like, didn’t make it to the stage.” (Folds has a number of songs about failure in his oeuvre.)

“I’m not very good at folding paper airplanes,” said Ben, who was wearing a signed Ben Folds shirt. “I may just crumple it up and run up there close to the stage.” Ben chose “Regrets” off of The Unauthorized Autobiography of Reinhold Messner. “It’s kind of a jazzy song; his chords are jazzy. The ending is very grandiose. I like prog rock, I like jazz fusion, I like keyboards — Genesis in the ‘70s. I wouldn’t call Ben Folds’ music prog — he knows what it is — but I read in his biography that he wrote that album as a continuous piece of music, and you can hear it. I like that kind of music.”

Ben with “Regrets.”

Aaron was confident that he could reach the stage from his seat — “a couple of folds for more of a delta wing, very sleek — get it going fast.” He was there with Amber; she had chosen “Smoke” — “it’s a heart-melter.” But the plane needed some work. “It was my birthday present,” she explained. “It’s been on our fridge for a month and a half, and it was perfect, but then I shoved it in my pocket.” She turned to Aaron and pleaded, “You’re going to have to fix it.”

Monica and Chris were there with their kids Betsy and Murphy. “We practiced throwing in the backyard before we came,” said Chris. “The important part is the follow-through. You have to throw it straight. If you drop your hand down, the plane will go into the ground.” He had asked for “a solid piano song: ‘Rocket Man’ by Elton John.” Monica “took a leap: anything by John Prine or Harry Chapin. Those are my dad’s favorite singers, and I’m a huge John Prine fan. I don’t know if he’ll know anything by either of them, but ‘Souveniers’ by John Prine was one of my dad’s favorites, and it’s one of mine, too.” Betsy had chosen Taylor Swift’s “Lover,” while Murphy went with “TNT” by AC/DC. His practice had him feeling good. “My second throw was like, from here all the way to the stage.”

Diane made her plane from a piece of her own art. “I did a watercolor. I got here, and I was still holding it. I had had a particular Ben Folds song in my head all day, but I found I didn’t want to write it down on the paper. The paper was not suggesting that song. I think maybe the painting actually chose.” Its choice: “Selfless, Cold, and Composed.”

Terra was there with her daughters Grace and Mayson, who had given her tickets for her 50th birthday. “I’m a Ben Folds fan from way before his solo albums, but after I had Grace, one of them had a song by that name. So I’m asking for ‘Grace’ for my Gracie.”

Aaron and Amber and the birthday plane.

“She cries every time she hears that song,” said Grace, “and one time, it was my birthday and we were driving over this big bridge, and she’s afraid of bridges, and that song was playing and she was crying, and it was the scariest moment of my life.” Grace chose “Lost in the Supermarket” from the Over the Hedge soundtrack. “I chose it as a joke, but I also really like that song.” Mayson had a hard time picking, so she went with “The Luckiest.” “It’s sentimental, it’s classic.”

Shortly before Folds came out, a few people started sailing their airplanes toward the stage. Some fell short. Someone ran up close before throwing, and someone in the crowd yelled, “Cheater!” A plaine floated in from somewhere way back, and people cheered. Then the loudspeaker spoke up and said, “Following the first set, there will be a brief intermission. You will be instructed to have your airplanes ready then — not now. Before the start of the second set, we will have a countdown. Please hold your paper airplanes until then. Thank you.”

After the first set, paper and pencils were provided for anyone who wanted to make a plane, and a crowd descended to the stage’s edge for the countdown. When it hit zero, the planes fell like rain onto the stage. I hoped that Folds would pick up the ones that obviously had come from home: the ones made from watercolor artworks, from white pages ruled with blue lines from a little kids notebook, from wrinkled sheets that had traveled here in back pockets. But I left before I could be disappointed.