"brought it out of retirement." Folds explained that at Wakarusa, in Kansas—the first time they "retired it"—"I just felt like we had played it enough." But at Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, "I just looked out on the faces of all the children, and I just thought it wasn't fair that they didn't get to sing that." Folds recalled himself "choked up when we retired 'Bitches Ain't Shit' at Bonnaroo." But then, "when we played Glastonbury, I didn't want to give the children of America something that I didn't offer to the British kids, too." There, "to bring it out of retirement like that was somehow even more moving for me." "Then it went back into retirement." Folds sums up, "then it's just one thing leads to another and now we're in Germany and I felt like I need to bring it out, too, because I didn't want to offend the Germans." "So," Folds capped, "it's been an emotional roller coaster." "So," the interviewer quipped, "it's now the Michael Jordan of your live set." Folds reportedly still had "Bitches Ain't Shit" in his live sets in 2015. He played it as recently as April 2017. Yet by 2019, Folds ceased to perform the song—which had "never got easier for me to sing," and "always felt so very wrong", although "that was also part of what made it interesting"—and while it was "regularly requested," had chosen to ignore these requests. Folds partly explains that one time, when playing the cover, "I saw a black couple pretty near me, and I'm like, 'How would I feel with the whole audience singing the N word?' Yes, 10 years ago it wasn't a big deal, but now it is a big deal, because they're being especially targeted." Folds altogether reasons, about the word niggas in 2019, "just because I'm an old man, and I can remember when you could say this, doesn't mean I need to make five people in the audience feel threatened, or terrible, or somehow less than. Anytime you're doing that, you're doing the wrong thing." His memoir, released in July 2019, imparts, "Music should work to ease social tensions, not throw gasoline on the fire, even inadvertently." In August, he elaborated, "I had to stop playing it because—and I've had a lot of African Americans tell me this—they don't like to go out to big events with lots of white people." In