Ben Folds Explains How Charlie Brown Goes From ‘Dude Who Hates Camp’ to Singing Its Praises in ‘Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical’

In Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, the Peanuts gang is heading to summer camp — and for the first time in almost four decades, they’re on a musical adventure.

The new special — arriving Friday (Aug. 15) on Apple TV+ — marks the first Peanuts musical in 37 years, and singer/songwriter Ben Folds is returning to the Charles Schulz-created world to contribute three original songs, after composing music for Snoopy Presents: It’s The Small Things, Charlie Brown back in 2022.

Ahead of the premiere, Billboard is premiering the Folds-written song “Leave It Better,” which finds Charlie Brown ending on a positive note after trying to convince his skeptical little sister Lucy that summer camp is the best.

Billboard also caught up with Folds — who created music for the special alongside composer Jeff Morrow and Broadway composing duo Alan Zachary & Michael Weiner — to talk about why he wanted to return to Peanuts, how to make the “melancholic” Charlie Brown break into song for a musical, and why the idea of “summer camp” isn’t just for kids.

Why Ben Folds wanted to return to the Peanuts world.

It’s real fertile ground. Unlike most programming for kids — and much that’s for adults — it’s a nuanced world. The Peanuts world is not black and white. There’s a lot of gray in it. Charlie Brown’s personality is fascinating. It’s an institution. So that’s all super attractive.

And there’s lots of challenges too in writing “break into song” [scenes] involving the character of Charlie Brown. I mean, he’s a melancholic, kind of quiet kid. You think he’s going to be the one standing up in chorus, belting out? I don’t think so. So that’s in itself a challenge.

It’s iconic, an institution, ubiquitous. I can’t imagine growing up in a world that I didn’t know about Charlie Brown as a reference point. Really, there’s no reason for me to say no to a project like this, unless the people that were working on it were clueless. But they’re so great. It’s the Schulz family who oversee these things. The guy I worked with the most, Eric Weiss, one of the animators, had revelatory things that he was doing. We were passing things back and forth and basically both of us getting goosebumps at the other’s work. That’s a really great way to work. So there’s really no reason for me to have said no to this one.

This time around, Charlie Brown is the one excited about summer camp and convincing his sister Lucy to get onboard.

Charlie Brown famously hated camp. For anyone that followed the original Charlie Brown, decades of his brand was “dude who hates camp.” [Laughs] So what they were doing, I believe, was allowing him to grow up just enough to then pass the mantle of that on to his little sister. Now she’s the one that hates camp. He learned that it’s OK. Lots of camp imagery we can use there even to think about it — dipping your toes in the water. Some people do that. Some people jump straight into cold water. Not me. I’m like, one toe at a time, knees, and I gotta get back out again. Squeal like a little kid. But see, [Charlie Brown’s] gotten to where he’s dipped his toes in. You know, the dude’s been growing up for 50 years. So let’s give him a couple of changes, but then that gives him a further distance to fall, which is where I come in. So I’m really lucky, because I got to pick up the story. A good team of songwriters began the thing and did the first two songs, and they have experience in this kind of thing, and they set up this really great, optimistic “camp is going to be great” kind of world. So then when it comes crashing down, now we get to really flex Charlie Brown as his most melancholic, because he’s taken the fall. That’s why it works for me.

Channeling Charlie Brown’s nostalgia for summer camp into “When We Were Light.”

Charlie Brown has this part of himself that he’s kind of an old man, right? Some little boys and some little girls are like that. They’re just kind of born old in the best sort of way. And I wanted him to take on the perspective of a 60-year-old Charlie Brown, to go back and say, [old-man voice] “Back when we were lighter than the clouds,” you know? But when you think about it, they’re not. … We all had the weight of the world on our shoulders when we were kids too, and we forget that because we’re so selfish. We’ve got so many problems. And you look at your kids and you go, “What kind of problems do you got? I gotta pay bills kid!,” you know? I thought, “Let’s get together … look at some pictures back from five weeks ago.” Because for kids, [five weeks is] five decades or five years.

Summer camp isn’t just for kids.

Summer camp stuck with me as an adult in that, when you work on a project, or you’re in the cast of something … and you’re together for a whole month or week or something like that, everyone’s best friends, people have relationships and affairs and all kinds of stuff. And then you’re like, “I will love you forever!” And then next year, like, “Did we work together?” [Laughs] You know, I was trying to summon the irony of all that too.