Ben Kweller looks back with Changing Horses

By Aiden Landman
Published: January 30th, 2009 | 12:00am

One of the coolest things ever to happen to Ben Kweller? Beating Kenny Chesney at his own game. “I just found out that Country Weekly Magazine just gave Changing Horses four stars,” Kweller says from his home in Austin. “It’s like People Magazine for country music. Kenny Chesney got a three-and-a-half star review. I’m thinking — fuck — I got a better review than Kenny Chesney.”

For all of the excitement that this rating inspires, Kweller’s recent success wasn’t without its initial anxieties. He warns, “Don’t ever tell your label you’re making a country record if you’re known as an alternative artist. It puts preconceived ideas in their heads.” Kweller’s three previous outings have framed him as the kingpin of cigarette-smoking slacker rock: brazen guitar work, sing-shout vocal interplay, and the ability to turn whimsical on a moment's notice — because even slackers have a soft side.

With Changing Horses, Kweller is not so much abandoning the style of his youth as he is expanding on a theme. For all of the KISS-influenced guitar bravado, nonchalance, and stoned-out, big-city ethos of his earlier recordings, at their core, Kweller’s songs were always a product of his upbringing. Kweller provides the old adage, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” as the impetus for — at least momentarily — trading his Converse All-Stars for a pair of cowboy boots. A native of Greenville, Texas, a community of nearly 30,000 people deep in the heart of the northeast quadrant of the state, Kweller’s embrace of country music not so surprisingly came at a young age.

He began writing the songs that would later make up Changing Horses after tragedy struck his high school, taking classmate Wendy Baker. “The Ballad of Wendy Baker” closes side one of the LP. “She died in a car crash when we were freshmen. It was the first time most of us had ever dealt with death. It slapped us in the face with reality,” Kweller says. “Me and some friends were at the local Chinese restaurant a few days after her death. My fortune cookie said ‘no one loves ’til it’s gone.’ It was the first time I ever had that feeling of wishing I could ... say things differently to someone or cherishing a moment and knowing you’ll never get to do that again.”

The crystallization of a moment or of a feeling is something that characterizes the songs on Changing Horses. The upbeat melancholia that haunts it are childhood echoes, Kweller says, everything from his recollection of “standing in front of my dad’s turntable listening to ‘All You Need is Love.’ I was just crying because the melody was so beautiful” to his current experiences with childhood as his son Dorian Zev Kweller nears 3 years old. “Ever since he was born, I’ve been writing children’s songs. It is so funny,” Kweller laughs. “When he listens to songs, he picks one lyric or one line and calls the song that. Instead of calling it ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ he calls it ‘How Much I Love You.’ what a good title, ‘How Much I Love You.’”

Lately, the youngest Kweller’s tastes have started to run more adult. “His latest craze is Guns N' Roses,” Kweller remarks. “He loves ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ He’s always running around the house singing ‘Welcome to the Jungle, We’ve got fun and games, We’ve got everything you want.’ I got him Appetite [For Destruction] and both of the Use Your Illusions [I & II]. Use Your Illusion is a little too advanced for him.”

Ben, wife Liz, and Dorian moved to Austin shortly after recording wrapped on Changing Horses. “We were still living in New York. The tour from my last album [2006’s Ben Kweller] ended at [Austin City Limits]. We thought, ‘let’s just rent a house and all live in Austin.’ My friend Jim [Eno] has a studio [Public Hi-Fi] here in town. So we made the album here. Then we went back to New York. About a month later Liz said, ‘Let’s move to Austin.’ It is such an easy place to live.”

One of the other exciting experiences when making a record for Kweller is seeing the finished product. “Just got a FedEx today from ATO Records of the new album. It looks so fucking awesome,” Kweller describes. “Black and white, but the white is embossed. So on the digi-pack and even on the LP — which is huge — all that white is puffed out so it feels really good.”

With the newly pressed album in his hands, talk inevitably turns to what it’s like to have one’s work leaked, something that Kweller and ATO had to deal with when an unfinished copy of Changing Horses hit the Web in November 2008. “It’s more of a bummer for the fans,” Kweller says. “I’m holding this new digi-pack of the album with the artwork, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Whoever downloaded it digitally from a lame MP3, that experience has been tarnished for them.” As frustrating as this thought may be, Kweller isn’t focusing on this aspect right now. Always looking forward, Kweller is eager to get to work on his next album, “I already have material for the next one done. I haven’t demoed it all yet.”

The reason? He can beat Kenny Chesney in a southern man's war on wax, but there is one battle he tries not to fight, “I try not to demo too much. The worst thing is to get to the studio and try to beat a demo.”

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For more information on Ben Kweller, check out his Web site or his MySpace.