It’s pretty normal to get a little nervous before interviews, but I was legitimately worried before my conversation with Ben Kweller. His new album, Cover The Mirrors, is inspired by the death of his teenage son Dorian in 2023. It’s an impossible thing to imagine for those of us who haven’t been through it. Although I’d been assured Kweller was a super cool dude and was very open to whatever questions I might have, everyone has good and bad days, and I was imagining a few different scenarios the morning before we talked.
So you can imagine my relief when Kweller was ten minutes late to our appointment, and his explanation was the sort of thing that only happens to musicians on tour.
“Bro, I’m sorry,” said Kweller. “We were in a hotel and they didn't like our tour bus and said we couldn't park there. So they had to move, like under a bridge somewhere and then this homeless guy tried to get into our bus, and then we were like, ‘OK, we gotta leave.’ So we left that until we're moving to another hotel. And that's why I'm late.”
We were immediately laughing and having fun, and it made it much easier to ask Kweller to tell me about Dorian, which he was happy to do.
“God, Dorian was the coolest, man,” said Kweller. “He was so open-minded, he loved people and he could make friends with anyone. He didn't judge others and just had this way about him that was really free. It's easy to kind of see now, looking back because he's gone, but it was almost like he didn't have to worry about mundane everyday life, things like the normal stuff that kind of bring people down. He didn't worry about politics or current affairs. When he was with you, he was with you, and all that mattered was the here and now. And that was ... that was the most important thing to him. So I learned a lot from him.”
I spoke to Kweller during the first leg of his “Cover The Mirrors” tour, which covered half of April and the early part of May. Kweller and his band will be heading out again at the end of July, playing songs from the new album. Despite the challenging nature of the songs, Kweller said they’ve been well-received by audiences.
“We're playing the songs that have already been released, and we're doing like two that are unreleased,” said Kweller. “The ones that are unreleased, I think they're going down well. I will say on “Optimystic,” there's something special that happens on stage during that song. I mean that is like, such a vibe on stage, it's really impressive.”
“Optimystic” was the first single released from Cover The Mirrors. At first, it sounds like it fits squarely into the genre of “happy-sounding songs that are actually super sad,” but you don’t need to listen very carefully to hear the sadness. Kweller calls it a “complicated song,” “like a middle middle finger with a smirk.”
“‘Optimystic’ is a lashing out,” said Kweller. “It's just the feeling of being at the lowest of the low at the very bottom ... You know, you really don't have any hope, and it's a little sarcastic, but that's what it is.”
Kweller also sees “Optimystic” as a subversion of everything he’s done up until now. “Among all of my friends, and I would say, even my fans and people who know about Ben Kweller’s music, I'm known as an optimistic person. And so it's kind of an ironic song because I'm just straight up saying I'm not optimistic now, which is sort of like, in a way, like crushing the Ben Kweller dream. You know, at all costs, the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how bad today is. And so that song is me saying, ‘Nope, it's over. No more optimism. Life sucks.’”
Kweller assured me the feeling is “fleeting,” and then got heavy and reassuring at the same time.
“I hate to say the word suicide, but you know, every normal person, I think it's a normal thing to think — like ‘I just wanna kill myself,’ you know?” said Kweller. “But like, I never have really thought that, you know? When Dorian died, it's like, ‘Oh, well, what's the point of living, you know?’ But really, I have so much to live for. I gotta live for Judah — my other son — Dorian's younger brother ... I gotta live for my wife Liz. I gotta live for my parents.”
“And even beyond family, I really do feel like I have a lot more music to make, you know?” said Kweller. “So I have to live for the music. And there's so much in my life to be grateful for and that I have to live for. But it doesn't mean I can't write a song like ‘Optimystic,’ and in the moment just be really mad at everything. You know, that's the whole thing. I mean, that's punk rock. That's the outlet that we chose.”
Much like my conversation with Kweller, listening to Cover The Mirrors was nowhere near the painful, gut-wrenching experience I expected. It’s definitely sad, but it’s also a very comforting album to listen to, like a warm blanket and cup of coffee on a frigid morning. Perhaps in keeping with this, Cover The Mirrors includes guest appearances by some of Kweller’s good friends, who also happen to be among our favorite musicians at Studio One: The Flaming Lips, MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee to name a few. Kweller said it was “very intentional.”
“When I was making this album and thinking about Dorian and thinking about this experience of grief and loss, there was music that was there for me and lifted me up, and there was a community that lifted me and Liz and Judah up throughout those first few months. It really was what we needed,” said Kweller. “And so having friends come and sing on the album and appear on the album was just another way to sort of ‘mirror’ what this album means.”
“And I could have, like, gone and turned on the microphones and just sat on a stool with an acoustic guitar and made this really mopey, depressing, bad thing all by myself. Just Ben Kweller’s experience of grief. But instead, I really wanted to highlight the community aspect of what it is to get through something like this. And so that's why I brought my friends in. So it is one of the most communal albums I've ever made. That's another little irony to the whole thing.”
The song Lenderman appears on was the final song Kweller wrote, and it closes out the album: “Oh Dorian.”
“That's an example of when you sit down to write a song, you have an idea of what you want to do, but then it just turns out completely different than what you expect, and sometimes you just have to go with that flow,” said Kweller. “You have to just let the muse take you away, and just like so many things in life, we realize we have very little control of a lot of things.”
“I sat down to write a song specifically about Dorian, and it turned out to be this really sort of upbeat, almost like John Fogerty acoustic guitar thing, or like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I don't know. It's like, definitely like this retro thing, but it was fitting” said Kweller.
As for the lyrics, they put a huge smile on my face, and Kweller’s too. “Instead of just saying Dorian in the past tense and like he was this guy, and now he's gone, I just talk about him in the present,” said Kweller. “Like, he's a crystal child, double Gemini. He's got long hair. I just can't wait to see him again ... It's almost like, oh, he was a friend of mine who like, moved away. And God, I really hope if I ever get back to California I'm gonna track him down.”
Cover The Mirrors is available now, and you can read my colleague Anthony Scanga’s review of the album here. Ben Kweller and his band will play a couple of shows in New Jersey at the end of June before heading west in July.
