Ben Kweller: Mid-stream

By • Dec 1st, 2008 • Category: Features
Photo courtesy of Sasha Haagensen / Soundcheck Magazine

Photo courtesy of Sasha Haagensen / Soundcheck Magazine

It’s two hours before Ben Kweller’s Chicago gig in mid-October, but the singer still has quite a bit to do.

With sound check having just wrapped up, he has a pair of interviews to squeeze in between dinner and a meeting with the band to determine the evening’s play list. The January release of his fourth solo LP, Changing Horses, is a few months away, and the media blitz is scheduled to intensify during upcoming East Coast stops. It makes this Chicago date the perfect juncture to shore up any questions that the hired musicians still might have about the songs and work out any quirks in the set’s flow.

But first, the 27-year-old father has an on-stage appointment for a nightly jam session. Positioning himself behind a piano, he launches into a Las Vegas-lounge version of the Steve Miller Band’s song “The Joker.” Almost immediately, Dorian Kweller – Ben’s 2-year-old son who has sneaked into place behind the drum kit, which he can barely see over – begins to pound away, keeping a beat all his own.

“We jam all the time. [Dorian] loves it,” Kweller said. “He’s been on a tour bus since he was 4 months old. Ever since then, he’s been fascinated by the drums. [My wife] Liz says he needs his one hour of drumming to recalibrate, to redo his brain after his nap.”

Given that he’s been up since 7 a.m., a nap also might have been ideal for the night’s headliner, not just his son. But raising a toddler has made the singer accustomed to sleepless days. And a son with a passion for music – particularly the drums – is something Kweller is even more familiar with, having learned to play from his own father at about the same age.

Not much is different throughout the Kweller family tree. As a child, Ben used to pal around with his dad’s friend, then-Bruce Springsteen band mate Nils Lofgren. Today, Dorian Kweller has found himself standing knee-high backstage with the likes of Brendan Benson and Local H’s Scott Lucas. It’s an upbringing consistent with his father’s, surprisingly orchestrated by an artist with such affinity for change. The theme often has been explored in Kweller’s music. In songs such as “Run”, “I Gotta Move”, “Penny on the Track”, “On My Way”, “Living Life”, and “My Apartment”, the singer romanticizes the idea of flux, singing of its necessity and praising its cathartic capabilities. This constant restlessness inspired How You Lookin’ Southbound? Come In … , a 2008 EP dedicated to truck drivers and intended to be a cross-country soundtrack.

“Change is always happening,” Kweller explained. “On the road [you can] connect with people you don’t know, people who you thought you’d never meet. On the road, it’s like, everybody has their own mission, but you can reach out and talk to people who all understand why you’re on the road, too.”

The hyperactive yet laid-back performer has had an increased share of change of late. After two solo albums on ATO, Changing Horses came realistically close to not being released on his long-time label, had it not been saved by late negotiations. The album, produced by Our Lady Peace guitarist Steve Mazur, also marks Kweller’s first solo output not recorded primarily in New York City. Having spent almost a decade there after leaving the guitar-pop ensemble Radish, he recently relocated his family back to his Texas roots.

“Me and Liz really have created a world of our own. … We kinda feel like we’re this gypsy family. If I had to stay in the same place constantly, I’d get a little stir crazy,” said Kweller of his life’s many moving pieces. “For an outsider, [the album’s title] will seem like a reference to the genre shift to country and western. And it is about that, too, because I know that I’m mixing it up on people.”

If conventional wisdom warns against making any drastic changes mid-stream – or in this case, mid-career – Changing Horses is a defiant recording, tempting age-old clichés. With some tracks dating to his high school days, it’s the album that Kweller claims he has been waiting to make for more than 13 years. Less autobiographical than his other records, the 10 songs are a collection of eccentric characters and heavy subjects. Opener “Gypsy Rose”, which is based loosely on Kweller’s father-in-law, tells of a man whose only relationship is with a local prostitute. “Sawdust Man” is the story of a lonely carpenter waiting for his lover to return home. The record’s closing number, “Homeward Bound”, continues this fascination with travel and examines the solitary life of a drug addict. The song “On Her Own” is about a fictitious female lead, while “The Ballad of Wendy Baker” – written by a then-teenage Kweller – is the true story his friend’s death in a car crash.

Musically, the record marks a shift, too. Gone are the jumpy piano tracks and fuzzy guitar licks that once had drawn comparisons to Ben Folds and Weezer, respectively. Instead, Changing Horses finds the songs steeped in steel guitar, honky-tonk piano, and thigh-slapping acoustic guitars. Kweller’s deceptively casual drawl now sounds a little thicker, and the cowboy boots that always looked like an ironic fashion nod to his upbringing are all too fitting.

“I’m getting tired of some of my older solo stuff,” Kweller said. “I feel I outgrew a lot of that stuff years ago – lyrically, certainly. I don’t really like playing a lot of the stuff off [2002’s] Sha Sha or even [2004’s] On My Way, so I don’t anymore. Some songs like ‘Falling’ I still love, but a lot of my older music just doesn’t really represent who I am or what I feel anymore.”

Who he is today is a performer at a turning point. If 2006’s self-titled LP was the proverbial quarter-life crisis, then this is the Ben Kweller who emerged. Having grown tired of the same New York flaws that had inspired him for so long, he’s an artist less interested in finding himself and more focused on discovering everyone else. He’s a man willing to put his family on a bus and leave their home behind for months at a time. But he’s also the same person who just moved 1,700 miles so that his son could be closer to his grandparents. If anything, he’s the stereotypical Gemini – a talkative entertainer with little more than a moment’s attention span, with a personality equally split between transient and stationary.

“I believe in astrology, and us Geminis can’t make up our minds about anything,” Kweller said. “It’s good because we see both sides of every situation and we’re always looking to find new things, but it’s bad because sometimes we want stuff to keep changing for us no matter what.”

Some things, however, will stay the same regardless of how much time passes – such as the lonesome appeal of a boozy country song, or a father taking time out each day to help his son learn to play the drums.

Soundcheck Magazine, December 2008

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