Singer-songwriter Ben Kweller is in Phoenix for a show on Saturday at Crescent Ballroom.
Kweller has been touring and recording since he was 16 years old. Now 44, he recently released his seventh studio album, “Cover the Mirrors.”
Kweller spoke with The Show about his career.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: I have to start off by telling you that I am a huge fan, so I have some bias.
BEN KWELLER: Thank you.
DINGMAN: Your music has meant a tremendous amount to me and If I could, I wanted to go back a little bit before we get to “Cover the Mirrors” and ask you about what is very much my favorite song of yours, which is “Penny on the Train Track.”
KWELLER: Oh, nice one.
DINGMAN: The line that has always really just kind of made me vibrate whenever …
KWELLER: Yes, yes, yes, yes,
DINGMAN: Whenever I hear it is, “I see all these things that I should be.”
KWELLER: I should be, yeah.
DINGMAN: And I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about where you were at when you wrote that line.
KWELLER: I grew up in Greenville, Texas, small town. My family had an old upright piano with broken keys, and that's what I started tinkering around on when I was like 4 or 5 years old, and fast forward, you know, I started bands and playing guitar and eventually my band Radish signed a record deal to Mercury Records when I was 16. I went on tour, dropped out of high school, never looked back, and I've been doing it ever since.
And meanwhile, my parents. have this lake house in Texas on this little lake, and we always would go there for the Fourth of July, and we'd set up instruments on the deck. We called it Lake Fest, and it was basically just us jamming all day.
DINGMAN: Oh, that’s cool.
KWELLER: And one summer, the lake house was, you know, kind of a shabby shack. We noticed that there were like mouse droppings upstairs where I was sleeping, which was kind of lame cause you're like, oh God, this is gross.
And so I had to go to, to Walmart to get some mouse traps. And so I'm like down on my knees in like aisle 14 or wherever the mouse traps are, and then I hear a voice, this dude says, “yo, is that Ben Kweller?”
So I turn around and it's my friend Mike from high school, full police uniform.
DINGMAN: “Ran into a friend just the other day, got a badge. He's a local cop.”
KWELLER: He’s a local cop, you got it, bro. And so I sit down at that piano and I just start playing the opening riff in the key of D.
[SONG CLIP]
KWELLER: I just started singing those words and they just came out of me.
[SONG CLIP]
DINGMAN: Not to be too pedantic, but can I probe you a little bit on the word “should” in the song, because, you know, you, you see this friend who has turned out to be a cop, which, you know, some would say is the opposite of rock and roll.
KWELLER: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
DINGMAN: And then there's another lyric where you see a friend who's living this, you know, very tranquil suburban life. “He's making lemonade in a KitchenAid,” as the, as the song goes, and you say “it's grim when you wish that you were just like him.”
KWELLER: And I say that because especially now, like when we fast forward to the life I've had the past 2.5 years after losing my son, Dorian, and I say it's grim when you wish that you were him because it's not a good way to be if you're always looking over your shoulder wanting to be something different.
DINGMAN: Oh, that's fascinating. So that's directed at, at yourself, not at him necessarily.
KWELLER: Totally. When you can find acceptance from within, I mean, that's really all that matters. In that lyric, that's like a momentary feeling of like, gosh, yeah, that guy hasn't made, wouldn't it be nice to be him, but actually, no, I wouldn't want to be anybody else, you know.
A lot of it comes back to humility because, you know, you obviously, you crave control as a human, we want to control what's happening to us.
On that night, February 27, 2023, when Dorian was in the car crash, I had no control of anything. I was in complete chaos, and so I'm losing my train of thought here.
DINGMAN: No, that’s OK.
KWELLER: You're going deep, bro. This is good. This is good.
DINGMAN: Thank you for sharing all this. I appreciate it.
KWELLER: I, I'm happy to because I'm just trying to learn what it is that I'm going through.
DINGMAN: Can I ask you, I mean, there is a song called “Oh Dorian” that closes out the record. And on that song you say of Dorian, “my best friend, I can't wait to hang with you again.” Is the idea that you'll be reunited with Dorian?
KWELLER: Makes me cry to hearing you say it back to me. But yeah, I do believe that. I believe I'm gonna see him and whether I'm right or wrong, that doesn't even matter. It's just the belief I'm going with and it helps me get through each day without him.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, if I'm not mistaken, you, you play one of Dorian's songs on the record, right?
KWELLER: I do, I do.
DINGMAN: Does that feel like a way of, of kind of hanging out with him?
KWELLER: 100%, and when we perform it live every night, I feel him there with me. And that was really special, that song, it's called “Trapped,” and it's a song he was working on. He started writing it, and he was working on it for a few weeks leading up to his death, and I remember going into his bedroom and saying, “dude, what is that? That's so cool.”
And he said, “I know it's just coming out of me. I don't know.” And we sat down on the bed together with two guitars and messed around with it for a little bit, but he never quite finished it.
And then fast forward a few months when I realized that I was making my new album, and I just couldn't stop thinking about that song “Trapped” and, and how no one would ever get to hear it.
And so I thought, OK, well, I'm gonna try to finish it, and so. I have a photo of him here in the studio above the door, and I just look up at him and say, “all right, Dorian, bring me some lyrics. We're gonna finish 'Trapped' today.”
And we just started working on it. And it's a wild thing, you know, to write a song with a dead person, like what? That's just a different, but it can be done, I found out.
[SONG CLIP]
DINGMAN: On another one of your songs, the line you have in there that really resonates for me is “my love's extreme.”
KWELLER: My wife, she calls me Ben “All or Nothing” Kweller because I'm either like all in on something or all out. I've never been able to play it cool.
DINGMAN: Yeah, to go back to “Penny on the Train Track,” I think that was the other thing I remember really, really appreciating about it when I heard it for the first time is, there's this sense in it of like knowing that your life is meant for something, but you don't know what it is, but you do know that if you stay stagnant, you won't experience whatever that is.
So you might as well just run as hard as you can towards that thing and in particular the line that always struck me was, “if you can't get behind your own life, get behind the driving wheel and just go.”
KWELLER: Exactly.
DINGMAN: I think that's the lyric, “just go.”
KWELLER: That's it, just go.
[SONG CLIP]
KWELLER: You could just waste away on the couch forever, for sure, but in my mind, much better to go seek adventure. Because at least the result, even if it ends up being a failure, it's the same as the couch method.
So, so he might as well just go look for the adventure. That was, you know, that's always been my philosophy.
