Choose your weapon. Artists are closely defined in the public imagination by their instrument of choice. Though the most untamed and transgressive progenitors of rock’n’roll – Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – were piano pounders, and despite the later efforts of Elton John, over time the instrument has come to be associated with restraint and politesse; the straight second cousin to rock’s clichéd wild child, the electric guitar.

He strolled on stage like a stranger and left 100 minutes later as an old friend I hadn’t realised I’d missed

American singer-songwriter Ben Folds has been playing with these expectations for the best part of 30 years, first in Ben Folds Five, then as a solo artist. His music pledges allegiance – sometimes, you feel, a little self-consciously – to the ornate piano-pop composers of the 1960s, 70s and 80s: Randy Newman, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Harry Nilsson, Billy Joel; Neil Sedaka and Barry Manilow, even.

Melody bursts out of Folds’s songs in great colourful ribbons. His lyrics evoke the arch, literate sass of Steely Dan – short stories boiled down to a handful of verses about odd people making poor choices – yet they can also wrong-foot with moments of great emotional acuity. Tim Minchin has listened closely, that much is certain. 

It’s easy to lose track of an artist like Folds, who unstarrily just gets on and does his thing. His latest record, What Matters Most, is his first for eight years. In Edinburgh, he strolled on stage like a stranger and left 100 minutes later as an old friend I hadn’t realised I’d missed.

It helps he’s a good talker. Having the ability to engage with an audience without sounding like a children’s TV presenter or the winner of a beauty contest is a fading art. Folds’s spoken prelude to the funny-sad ‘Kristine from the 7th Grade’ was twice as long as the song and just as entertaining. He prefaced ‘What Matters Most’ with a breezy tale about clearing out his lock-up, before casually mentioning the song is about a close friend who died suddenly a few months ago. Building riffs and themes with deceptive ease, he understood that a concert is a conversation that doesn’t stop each time a song ends.

With Folds seated behind a grand piano, his five-piece band – electric bass, drums and acoustic guitar augmented by cello, harmonica and various small wind instruments – had one foot in rock’n’roll and one foot outside it. It made for a rich, woody sound in a set focused mostly on songs from What Matters Most and his first solo album, Rockin’ the Suburbs. 

Folds still looked and sounded like the quintessential American nerd, but what he offered was more complicated. Sometimes he was the nerd who gets the girl, not altogether happily on opener ‘Exhausting Lover’, which might be the archetypical Folds song: shifting time signatures, near-the-knuckle lyrics which shade from laughter into desperation, power-pop thrust and melodic elegance. 

At other times, he was the geek with a heart. Time has tempered his smart-ass tendencies; now there is tenderness and even sentimentality in songs such as ‘Fragile’ and ‘Moments’, the latter simple as a sunset. There was wholesome audience participation on ‘You Don’t Know Me’ and ‘Not the Same’. His voice – slightly nasal and reedy, as the tenor of the songs demands – slid into beautiful falsetto on ‘Still Fighting It’. 

Between jaunty tempi, glistening solos and arpeggios, he battered the piano like his rock’n’roll forefathers when the mood took him. Yet in the end, he graciously allowed room for another instrument to steal the show. Folds used the fact that Glaswegian bassist Mandy Clarke was a (relative) local as an excuse to make her the star turn. A litany of regular name-checks and cheers culminated in an impromptu song in her honour. It was rather sweet. 

The bass was the centre of attention in Edinburgh a couple of nights earlier too. Jah Wobble has been a purveyor of deep, bone-shaking dub grooves since the punk era. His Metal Box – Rebuilt in Dub show revisited the great Public Image Ltd album, released in 1979, a record shaped by Wobble’s bass lines, drumming and co-writing. 

Though he and his band performed most of the Metal Box album, this was a winningly loose reinterpretation. The emphasis on spatial reggae rhythms, punctuated by Wobble’s geezerish chat (he’s another good talker), made it a largely sensory experience, but one underpinned by songs with depth and heart. As with Folds, to shackle Wobble to a single instrument is to clip his wings.