When I was fifteen I was spending my time masturbating like a man possessed with a thousand devils and falling in love with lasses sat beside me in science and listening to far too much Joy Division on account of how said lasses were never at all keen on the notion of maybe pressing their faces ‘gainst mine for a second or thirty- two.
When Ben Kweller was fifteen, he was touring the world as front-man for pop-grunge three-piece Radish, producing a couple rather splendid and altogether very charming records for Mercury, hanging out with Weird Al and singing to millions about the same sortsa things I was busy batterin’ out the filth of a weekday evening and twice on a Saturday.
This is the difference ‘twixt Ben Kweller and I.
Also, he has better cardigans.
Since then, since he was fifteen, Ben Kweller has ran. He tells you as much on the first track off of his new self-titled record (the third album proper of his post-Radish solo career), the track in question being called Run, fittingly enough. He has run, Ben Kweller. “Since fifteen”.
And ran where?
“Everywhere you can run” says he.
Ben Kweller has run. He’s run from his old band, he’s run from his old record label (or they ran from him, who can tell from this distance?), he’s run from his hometown for to tour left and right both solo and with The Bens (the band comprising Bens Kweller, Folds and Lee), and he’s run from the ghost of grunge, the phantom hung over most every note his teenaged self let fly from the fret or the throat.
He’s run from those things and where he’s stood at present is in the shadows of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen and Evan Dando and, to a lesser extent, the shadows of the aforementioned Mr Folds and even Daniel Johnston of occasion. He’s stood there in those shadows and at times he casts a shadow of his own fit to equal any o’ theirs.
With the Brian Jones hair and the Brain Wilson harmonies and the Brain De Palma thirst for a grand narrative, young Ben Kweller, he's been busying himself these past four years putting together some of the most beautifully honest and endearing and memorable records e’er set light my ear-hole bindings.
Those three albums (four if you count the self-released demo number Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller), 2002’s Sha Sha, 2004’s On My Way and the brand new Ben Kweller, they are immaculate things, no two ways about it.
But lo, t’is the new one I’ve stood top this digital hilltop for to holler in praise of, or in critique of, which, it turns out, is pretty much the same thing insofar as this particular record is concerned.
Ben Kweller opens with Run, which you’ll remember from a couple paragraphs ago, and what Run does is it makes a couple things clear with regards what a fella can expect over the duration of the album, thematically and musically. With regards the former, themes of running. That’s what we’re talking about. Running.
Ben Kweller, if this record is anything at all for to go by, he’s not a fella can ever find himself content wiping his arse with one roll o’ paper when there’s another brand waiting to be discovered couple bathrooms along. Like the wonderful Willy Mason and Mr Zimmerman and Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson and any amount o’ lads and ladies in-between, Ben Kweller is never happier than when wandering about the place. At the end of that first track he tells us “I’m not done with my travelling”, and there’s not a damn thing anywhere between then and the close of the album that contradicts him.
“I gotta move” he sings in I Gotta Move, “While the streets ahead are sunny.”
“I just can’t stay here in this small town… so in the morning I’ll hit the highway”
In Penny On The Train Track he’s imploring someone or other to “Get behind the driving wheel and go, just go!”
Ben Kweller, he’s all a-jangle in his own skin, and he’s strolling back and forth o’er America and further still, maybe in search of contentment or fulfilment, or maybe just for the love of the dander. Whatever the reason, those footfalls o’ his, they echo through every track herein.
Echoes alone, mind you, can hardly be expected for to hold a listener’s attention for a terrible while, and so in addition to those, Ben Kweller’s also gone ahead and constructed a series of impeccable, Tom Petty-meets-late-seventies-Springsteen sonic tapestries for to drape o’er every restless line.
Run, as one might expect, opens like a slightly less bombastic Born To Run, and lays down a musicological template rarely wavers throughout the following ten tracks. Crystalline piano lines, shimmering chords, tingling glockenspiels and triangles, soaring choruses, dear Lord oh, says I, and the lot played by Kweller and none other.
T’is a record stands in awe of 1979 denim-elbowed craggy-faced FM radio, t’is a record of longing and loving; longing for yonder pastures and loving the land and the woman holding a fellas hand throughout. In this case, a specific woman, woman called Lizzie, being our hero’s wife.
Lizzie, she forms the second Big Theme of the work, y’unnerstann, (Ben calls to her in Run; “Together is much better, so let’s run!”) a theme reaches its apex in the piano-and-vocal-only Thirteen, a twilight-coloured ode to this woman done wove spectacular, ineffable splendours o’er Sir Kweller’s shaking soul.
It’s a beautiful, fragile moment has the effect the title track of Ryan Adams’ Rock And Roll might have on the listener; a somewhat disarming, aching, reflective, naked moment midst a series of glorious, fists-aloft anthems all sonically lapping at reflections of The Greats (In Adams’ case, your Morrissey / Marrs, your Cobains, your Gallaghers – in Kweller’s case the aforementioned Petty, Springsteen, Dando et al).
“We danced in the moonlight at midnight” coos Ben to Liz, “We pressed against back doors and wood floors, And you never faked it”
Sundry memories and anecdotes mined for this intensely private ode to this one particular lass, and yet every other line brings with it a cavalcade o’ memories clogging up a fella’s own mind-wax as he listens to this however many thousands o’ miles removed from the troubadour and his muse. Much like how Mike Skinner manages to dot his verses with references to names and places mean nothing to no- one but him, and yet the whole affair seems as universal as I Wanna Hold Your Hand, much like that, says I, Thirteen could be about anyone anywhere, and yet no, it couldn’t.
“We met on the front porch, fell in love on the phone…”
“We questioned religions, gave bread to the pigeons, We learned how to pray”
“Was in the back of a taxi that you told me you loved me, And that I wasn’t alone”
Says Kweller himself by way o’ the Press Release doohickey;
“Thirteen was a breakthrough for me. As a songwriter with pop sensibilities, you can feel pressured to always write big, sing- along choruses. Lately I find myself placing the importance on emotional content and not on standard pop technique. With Thirteen I just kept writing verse after verse and never felt the need for the chorus… I was thinking of Liz and all that we’ve been through in eight years… All these emotions were pouring out of me while I was writing it.”
Pouring out of himself there, and pouring fresh out the speakers, out the headphones, down the sides o’ the face and all danglin’ off the jowls.
My lady-friend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, she’s meeting me by the floral displays outside the theatre other side of the river. She kisses me and then, oh, says she, what’s that, now, upside your cheek?
Touching a finger to the spot in question, and finding, to my surprise, a puddle o’ gorgeous harmonies must’ve stuck to the skin when I was listening to Ben Kweller earlier.
Same thing happened with On My Way. Stood kissin’ a lass in the shadow o’ the cathedral, and she’s jabbing her tongue round the back o’ her teeth shortly afterwards. I’m doing the same, y'unnerstann, feared out my brains that maybe a rogue chard o’ steak might’ve been hiding in the cracks atween the molars.
But no. What happened was I had the chorus of My Apartment clinging to the gums, and there it is now on her tongue.
“It tastes beautiful” she says.
“Aye” I’m nodding, “It does, an’ all.”
Sha-Sha, when that came out, y’dig, I was going through a right stinkin’ bugger o’ a break-up. It was left to me and my own good self to find traces of Wasted And Ready danglin’ here and there off of the thighs. Or the bum.
Because that’s the kinda thing a man can expect from the work of Ben Kweller, songs giddy with a lust for the roving, just like the fella done penned them. They’ll wander round the soundways a time but they get bored, y’unnerstann, and so they’ll take off for clamber o’er the taste-prangs instead. They’ll hover ‘neath the nostrils. They’ll sparkle in the sweat ‘neath the sheets of a summertime doze.
You turned the record off a fortnight past and still this or that middle eight hides in the gaps ‘tween the fingers.
Ben Kweller’s songs, you can find out if folks’ve heard them by taking a stool sample. They cluster and bunch and swell in every corner of a person’s being, y’unnerstann, traces of them skit about the gastrointestinal tract for months afterwards.
Special kindsa songs, y’unnerstann, they’ll do that. They glisten in the airways as well as the soundways, they elicit glorious synesthetic frenzies. The songs of Conor Oberst or Shane MacGowan or Pete Doherty or Billy Bragg or Ryan Adams or Ginger or Gram Parsons or Bjork or…
These kindsa people, these kindsa songs. These are the kindsa songs Ben Kweller writes. These songs, they have nothing in common with the muzak drifts past out every other storefront, with the songs serve no purpose other than to illustrate some technical marvel or other, songs that exist “so as there’s new ringtones”, as the Arctic Monkeys so brilliantly put it. These are not the kindsa songs to be found on Ben Kweller by Ben Kweller, and even if they were to be hijacked by some fiend intending to batter them into some such peg, even then the songs would resist it, for they are organisms living and breathing and shitting and pissing and reproducing and lined along staves all pulsing with life.
Beautiful Ms Gillian, she slaps me upside the head, she says come now, she says calm the fuck down, for the love o’ God, your heads gone tartan.
“Thank you” says I, and I kiss her. “I needed that, right enough.”
Still, a fella can scarcely be held accountable for such fits, surely to Jesus, when the topic of his scribbles is, for example, a song such as Sundress, with its chorus like a frozen sun slowly re- heating at the base o’ the spine.
Or what of I Don’t Know Why, song has me my own self gnashing with jealousy and yet also jiving and bopping and right afire with the gorgeousity of the whole damn thing, even when the lyrics feel like razor-lip kisses all slashin’ at the back o’ the neck.
“Everything I plan just slips right through my hands, And I don’t know why…”
“The world is feeling like it’s passing me by, I’m fixin’ to loose it And I don’t know why”
Or Magic, with those melodies like a gorgeous, red-lit, sun-kissed city appearing out the swell of the sparklin’ ocean, and its series o’ “oh oh oh oh”’s The Futureheads would surely be delighted for to borrow of an evening.
Every which way a man turns, Ben Kweller presents him with the sortsa life-affirming, bittersweet pop songs have him waking at half six of the morning with all o’ God’s holy glories sparking ‘lectric off of the window-glass, and with a chain-gang’s thirst for the road gnawing at his throat.
A beautiful record, it surely is.
And because we can do things like this nowadays, underneath this article, you'll find three minutes worth o’ proof, by way of the video for Sundress.
Take time with it. You’ll thank it for the privilege.
