Five years into solo career, Ben Kweller gets personal|Most of the media surrounding Ben Kweller references the pop singer-songwriter’s youthful nature and his wiser-than-his-years songwriting. And while the two seem to contradict each other, they accurately nail the enigma that is Ben Kweller.
Sure, it’s hard to get past his clumsy, childlike tenor and his penchant for sunny, infectious melodies. And Kweller, who plays Boulder’s Club 156 tonight, is all about the love song. But while sometimes he goes the route of simplicity – girl meets boy, boy likes girl, good things happen – he’s also been known to delve into the land of the emotionally complex.
We caught up with Kweller during a tour stop in Missouri earlier this week to talk shop, which, in his case, is pop music. So how did we end up praising country music’s Travis Tritt? Read on.
Q: What’s been your favorite record of the year so far?
A: The Kings of Leon album is really great. They’re friends of mine for a long time. I remember when my A&R guy said he’d just signed this new band to RCA, the Kings of Leon, and he sent me a couple songs from their new EP, and they just blew me away. I told him, “Let’s get them out on the road and have them do some shows with us.”
This was six or seven years ago, and they showed up in a van in D.C. to play some shows with me on the “Sha Sha” tour, and it was their third gig ever, and we just became really good friends.
Jared (Followill) had just started playing bass five months earlier, and I’ve watched them grow so much. And now they’re just a huge success. This new album is really great. I love the song “The Runner.” It has a lot of depth to it. Oh, and I also loved (Bright Eyes’) “Cassadaga.” Conor (Oberst) – he’s so damn good. He’s the best lyricist of our time. His music is so special.
Q: Who was the last artist you OD’d on, listening to all of their records over and over again.
A: It’s funny, because it was on this tour, and it was modern country. I went the first half of this tour riding a lot in the opening act’s van, and when we’d get to truck stops I was always collecting cassettes.
A while ago I got this Travis Tritt greatest hits cassette, and I reconnected with the ’90s pop-country era I went through as a kid. And that Travis Tritt tape, on Side 2, I totally OD’d on it, driving everyone else in the van crazy. I’ve been in this real phase of listening to ’90s pop-country, Garth (Brooks) and Alan Jackson. The production quality is something I really get off on. When you do something for a long time, you’re always looking for something new and different, and one area I’m trying out now for myself is that Bryan Adams, Mutt Lange-produced sound, because it’s so different than anything I’ve ever been into. I’m into that sound of perfection. Everybody else in the van usually hates listening to it. But I can listen to that kind of stuff for a long time. Something about it doesn’t get old.
Q: You’re getting ready to play those three-nights, three-records shows in L.A., where you’ll play each album in its entirety in a single night. Are you looking forward to that kind of experiment?
A: I’ve only done this once before, and what I loved about it is that when you make an album, the order of songs that you choose is so different than the order of songs you’d choose in a concert. The flow is different. With a concert, you end with a big moment. But with an album, it doesn’t matter. You can do anything. So with “Sha Sha,” “Wasted and Ready” is Track 2, but if I’m gonna do that song in a concert, I’ll put it near the end, usually in the encore. “Sha Sha” ends with “Falling,” a nice ballad, and it’s so different than anything I’d do as a set-list closer.
Q: Now that you’re looking at your work in that album-by-album context, can you talk about what each of the albums means to you at this point in your career, five years after your solo debut, “Sha Sha”?
A: Sure. I guess “Sha Sha” has this innocence to it. It was the first thing I really did on as serious a level as a solo artist. It’s got a good mixture of what my music is all about – a little folk, a little punk, some country elements and some big piano ballads. It’s got a nice, youthful energy to it. It’s all about moving to New York and leaving a small town behind me and not knowing anybody. It’s got all of that in there.
“Sha Sha” is the feeling of being the new kid in school who just moved in from some weird, small town and having to get in front of the class and tell people who you are.
Q: And what about your second album, “On My Way?”
A: That was really a documentation of four guys who were on tour for a year and a half. We toured “Sha Sha” for a long time, and we went right in the studio afterward – and I didn’t teach the band any of the songs. We recorded everything immediately, and for all of them, they were hearing the songs for the first time. Everything unfolded while the tape was rolling. And I still hear things in those recordings that I don’t even remember, because we recorded it live and I was focused on what I was singing and playing.
Q: And the new record, “Ben Kweller?”
A: It’s really a personal record, and sometimes you can be personal and introspective and closed, but this record is the opposite of that. It’s got a real summery feeling, and it’s a good road-trip album. There are a lot of stories in there. It’s really autobiographical. There’s a lot of reflecting back on my early days, my high school days, life in general. There’s a lot of stories about life on the road, living while you can, trying to be free – and the whole musical element was really different, what with me playing all the instruments on it.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
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Ben Kweller
INDIE POP|Club 156, University Memorial
Center, University of Colorado at Boulder campus; 9 o’clock tonight |$15|larimerlounge.com
