Ben Folds Five, revisited

Witty piano-popsmith Ben Folds -- who'll be seen Sept. 17 in the august company of the Minnesota Orchestra -- gets back to basics for a best-of box due Oct. 11.

"The Best Imitation of Myself," a three-disc set, includes three new tracks by his old group Ben Folds Five. You can hear one of them, "House," at NBC.com (Folds is a celebrity judge on the network's show "The Sing-Off").

It's a breakup song -- kind of like George Jones' "Grand Tour," but more embittered than rueful, and with a hint of dynamite or some other explosive coming into play.

The new songs, cut earlier this year, are the first studio recordings of original material by the Ben Folds Five since 1999's "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Meissner."

Earlier this year, during an interview with Star Tribune critic Chris Riemenschneider, Folds recalled a January 1996 gig with the BFF at 7th Street Entry -- a far cry from Orchestra Hall:

"The temperature was minus 40," he said. He and the band faced the already-daunting task of unloading his baby grand piano into the club without proper winter gear.

"It was so cold, we twice had to go inside to save ourselves and just left the piano out there in the middle of the street, with cars driving around it,"he remembered with an incredulous laugh. They finally got the thing indoors, but it took so long, the hammers inside the piano froze.

"For about the first hour of the gig, they were frozen solid, which was pretty bad," he said. "But then it got worse when the hammers started to unfreeze, and then they sounded all soggy. There was even steam rising up out of the piano."