The Texas Return of Prodigal Son Ben Kweller
BEN KWELLER walks up to a picnic table behind Flipnotics looking, for the most part, just like any South Austin hipster. He’s wearing a Levi’s corduroy jacket — you know, the kind with the sherpa fur collar — and a trucker hat, his wavy mane of hair flowing out from beneath.
He looks like a kid, your average slacker. Carrying a straw tote bag, he pulls out a Thermos, a tiny silver cup filled with herbs and a metal straw that also serves as a filter. “This is maté [pronounced mah-tay], by the way, from Argentina,” he says as he pours hot water over the concoction. “It’s an herb, basically a tea — totally legal!”
That’s something your average guy doesn’t do, bring his own tea setup to a coffee shop. And don’t be deceived by his youthful appearance. Kweller is a family man, a seasoned industry veteran and a shrewd career manager. This former child prodigy isn’t afraid to challenge himself, take risks and try new things, without really seeming to reinvent himself at all.
Signifying a return to his Texas roots, both physically and metaphorically, the indie-pop rocker has just released his first country album, Changing Horses. Kweller, his wife Liz and 2-year-old son, Dorian, moved to Austin from New York City last year. Since then Kweller’s been spending more time exploring the great outdoors with his son than trying to establish himself in any sort of scene.
“I’m a Texan,” he says. “It’s really nice to be back where I’m from. All summer we swam. We went to Hamilton Pool, and to Reimers Ranch and Blue Hole out in Wimberley and San Marcos, all the rivers and the natural springs, and fishing in the lakes.”
Perhaps it’s the fact that Kweller’s been a working musician for nearly 15 years that makes him less enamored with the spotlight than some of his peers. In 1993, when Kweller was just 12, he started the band Radish with John Kent and Ryan Green in his hometown of Greenville. With critical attention and a dose of hype around a band of teenage Texans, Radish eventually signed with Mercury Records, releasing the album Restraining Bolt, and had some notable television appearances on Conan O’Brien and David Letterman.
But by 2000, Kweller had decided the time was right to make a change, and moved to be with Liz, first to Connecticut and ultimately, New York City. “I was done living in Texas. And John was starting a recording studio in Texas. He was also writing his own music and wanting to start a new band. So we really never broke up, but it was just that we knew we wanted to try different things.”
The years with Radish provided valuable perspective, though. “By the time I was 18 and ready to start my solo career, I had already seen the good and bad of the music business,” Kweller says. “So I knew all the things I wanted to keep close to me and all the things I wanted to push away. I just knew how slimy and sharky it could be. I learned a lot when it comes to the business side.”
In New York, Kweller was on his own, honing his slightly quirky, indie-pop sound and solo performance chops. “I guess when I was in that apartment on Smith Street in Brooklyn, and I wrote all these songs, and they were a lot more autobiographical and personal, I looked around the room and realized I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have a band, so I guess I was Ben Kweller at that point.” His first solo LP, Sha Sha, contained the radio-friendly hit “Wasted and Ready,” and Kweller has been recording and touring steadily ever since.
The move to Austin was a quality-of-life decision, made with his family in mind and a desire to give Dorian the kind of childhood that he himself had. “We moved here because it’s our favorite town in the world. We love New York City, but we didn’t see ourselves there forever. ”
Dorian is already playing music with his dad, accompanying him by banging on the drums or piano. Kweller himself comes from a musical family. His father was a doctor, and it was his medical career that brought the family to Texas in the ’70s. But he’s also a drummer.
“When I was 7 or 8, he got the drums out of the attic and taught me how to play two and four,” Kweller says. “He taught me guitar when I was about 10, because my fingers weren’t big enough until then. He taught me an E chord and an A chord, and so I wrote a song with those two chords. I was just a little sponge.”
Kweller caught the songwriting bug early, placing in a Billboard songwriting competition by age 9. “I remember the exact moment that I wanted to try writing a song. I was in the living room. My dad and mom had one of those big old console turntables. I was listening to Magical Mystery Tour, ‘All You Need Is Love’ was the song, and it just made me cry. I didn’t understand why I was crying but the melody was just so beautiful. I would just move the needle back and listen to that song over and over again. And that’s when I said, ‘I want to do this. I want to make other people cry through sound.’
“I was already into banging on the piano,” Kweller continues. “What happened was someone taught me how to play ‘Heart and Soul,’ and I said, ‘Well, what if I skipped the second chord and go to the third one, and then back to the second one?’ So then it sounded just like ‘Let It Be.’ So my first song was the four chords from ‘Heart and Soul,’ which just happen to be the same four chords from ‘Let it Be,’ just inverted.”
Kweller credits a large amount of his early success to his family. “They were very supportive of my music career. They’d drive me to Dallas to gigs when I was 14 or 15. Sometimes it would be on a school night. Some of my teachers complained. I got lucky, because I had parents that allowed me to pursue my talents.”
Some of his earliest tunes were influenced by his Texas surroundings, the origin of his country roots. But they also demonstrate a level of maturity and sensitivity that was way beyond his years. “One of the songs I wrote was called ‘One Teardrop.’ It was about being at the train station, and she gets on the train, and I don’t. And as it is pulling away, I see one teardrop falling from her eye.”
His first audiences were comprised of his mother and her friends. And even as a child, Kweller moved seamlessly between roles. “I’d be out playing G.I. Joes in the gutter, and my mother would say ‘Ben, come in and play us some of your love songs.’ And I’d sit at the piano, and she and her friends would be there with their Bloody Marys, and I would play three songs, and they’d just be crying. And then I’d just go run around outside again, and climb a tree.” Kweller’s songs are full of these down-home stories, real slices of life with broad appeal.
Kweller had some early breaks on the New York scene, but it was his youthful enthusiasm — and a dose of naiveté — that created some of his biggest opportunities. He contacted Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy’s management to see if he could fill an open spot on a bill for an Irving Plaza show. Tweedy loved Kweller’s music so much that he invited him to open the whole Northeast leg of his tour. Shows with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads at the Village Underground in NYC in 2001 got him signed with ATO Records, a relationship that persists to this day.
He’s obviously learned a lot from these early collaborations and grew to appreciate the community of musicians with which he has worked, particularly Dando. “You learn so much from unspoken things,” Kweller says. “And just being around Evan, that guy loves music so much and always wants to play music. I’m just like that, too. Guys now, like these young bands today, they’re all about everything but the music. It’s really weird. There’s not this old tradition. I hope it doesn’t get lost. These bands now are more concerned about their skinny jeans and their little model girlfriends.”
The idea of a country album and Changing Horses had been jelling for a while, something Kweller had been toying with in the lists and sketchbooks he meticulously keeps. He wrote the first song for the album back in 2004, which was the springboard for the concept. But he insists he never sets out to write either a country song or a rock song; it’s just the way the song comes out. The country element just demonstrates a different and somewhat opposite side of his personality that can emerge quite organically. “I’m always writing songs,” he says. “I wrote ‘Hurtin’ You’ the same week I wrote ‘The Rules’ (a rockin’ tune from his 2004 release On My Way). So, they’re really different, but they were written in the same fit of writing.”
Kweller’s projects are known for experimentation. He played all the instruments on his 2006 release Ben Kweller, and for 2004’s On My Way, the tracks were all recorded live. Changing Horses represents Kweller’s first time at the producer helm for one of his own albums. “I felt like I had a real handle on this batch of music and knew what I wanted to achieve with it. I’ve been really lucky to work with some of the best producers ever, at least of my generation, and so I’ve taken a lot from these different people I’ve worked with. But for this album, also because of its country leanings, I felt like the producers that I know are definitely more in the rock world and maybe they wouldn’t have a grasp on what I was trying to achieve. And I didn’t want to go to Nashville and get some real country guy.”
The one constant across Kweller’s projects is studio engineer Steve Mazur. “I have to have him in the studio with me,” he says. “He’s the guy that turns the knobs. An engineer is really the most important thing, unless you’re not a songwriter or an arranger naturally. Then you really need a producer because that’s where a producer can really help.”
On the latest album, don’t expect a stereotypical country sound. It’s just quintessential Kweller, drenched in pedal steel twang. The influences are broad. “‘Old Hat’ has a mid-’70s folk-drum feel, a Jackson Browne, Neil Young Harvest thing,” says Kweller. “But lyrically and melodically, I feel like that one is definitely my own.”
“Sawdust Man,” with an unexpected change of tempo in the chorus, evokes a Beatlesque wail, although Kweller says he didn’t hear it until others pointed it out. “When that song came out, a lot of people started saying, ‘Yeah it’s so White Album McCartney.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah? I never even thought about that.’ I just love that sound, that ’60s rock ’n’ roll.”
Few industries can be as fickle as the music business, and what’s perceived as a complete genre shift can be a tricky maneuver. So far, though, Kweller’s fans have been largely supportive of the new album. “Most have been really great,” he says. “It’s not too far of a stretch for most of my fans when you consider songs like ‘Lizzie,’ ‘On My Way,’ ‘Family Tree.’ But there have definitely been kids saying things like ‘What the hell is this? What happened to the Sha Sha Ben Kweller?’ He didn’t go anywhere; I just tell them that this is just one album of songs.”
One clear sign that his fans support him was the hundreds who lined up to squeeze into Waterloo Records for his in-store performance the day after Changing Horses’ release. During the show, Kweller tossed posters and T-shirts (the last few commemorating his now famous bloody-nose performance at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival) and exchanged charming banter with the crowd. He commented after he heard a dog yelp between songs, “I had another in-store that had a dog. I like it when dogs are at my shows.” Afterward, he lingered for a long time, signing autographs, snapping photos and giving hugs. There’s no pretension to this newest rock star resident of Austin.
Although Kweller is clearly and purely about the music and his craft, he is also very astute at understanding the importance of promotion. “First of all, the most important thing to me is independence,” he says. “So from day one, I’ve been all about my own domain and BenKweller.com.” Kweller goes on to talk about the importance of gathering data and using social media to distribute information to his fan base. “One thing we do is Kweller News. It comes out on Tuesdays. That’s my e-mail mailing list, and that’s about 80,000 people worldwide. I supplement with MySpace and Facebook.” The future holds more social media features for Kweller’s fans. “My whole thing is that I want my fans to go to my Web site, play games ... kids can even have their own profiles.”
Kweller uses a variety of current tools to engage his fans, including Twitter. “I hate blogging,” Kweller admits. “Twitter is so easy and works for a short attention span. It’s a fun way for people to know what I’m up to. And I enjoy seeing what Lance Armstrong is doing and what other people are up to that I find interesting.”
Kweller also has a Web video series called One Minute Pop Song, complete with its own catchy theme song. The first season chronicled him in the studio as he produced the Ben Kweller CD. The second season just started with videos of Kweller taking viewers on a tour of his childhood home in Greenville. Kweller also made a video announcing a Changing Horses promotion in which those who pre-ordered the album would get a chance to win dinner with him, regardless of where they lived. Another video on his site announced the winners. “It’s all about driving traffic and click-throughs,” he grins. “I’m way into it.”
The grassroots emphasis continues in his latest music video. He made the video for “Fight,” a rollicking trucker anthem, in Greenville, enlisting the help of friends and local officials. “We got the cop from my ‘Penny on the Train Track’ video. He found us a jail cell, a cop car. The speedboat is my parents’, the minivan is my old tour van, and the tour bus belongs to Mercy Me, a local band. We pulled off a $300,000 video for about $1,000.”
Kweller seems hesitant to offer advice to those just starting out. He’s smart enough to know that the D.I.Y. spirit that has worked so well for him may not be right for everyone. But some things are universal. “I would say keep it all about the music and don’t stop making music,” he says as he packs his tea paraphernalia back into the tote bag. “It’s all about writing songs. Just worry about the music, and make it your focus.”
