Ben Kweller

Ben Kweller has done a lot of growing up in public-but this doesn’t mean that he didn’t start out with a strikingly mature sense for what pop music can be and what it can do to people. His group Radish, comprised of Kweller and some other Texan teenagers, found itself at the center of a bidding war as major labels smelled money and went after the group. If the Radish years didn’t break Kweller as an international pop star, they certainly woke the world up to a talent that was bound to stick around, so long as he could survive his close contact with such confusing, distorting phenomena as bidding wars.

With three records out on ATO and a handful of EPs released prior to that, Kweller has shown himself to be capable of creating a beautiful hybrid of power pop, rock and roll, and plainspoken balladry. If it’s easy to point to Beach Boys and, say, Raspberries elements in his music, you can’t stop there in analyzing Kweller’s sound. I find that the voice, which is irrevocably youthful, brings me back to the Modern Lovers recordings produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. That version of the Modern Lovers managed to pair pop beauty with a lyrical depth that captured the strangeness of adolescent longing just as that longing transformed into an adult condition. Kweller shares in this capacity. It’s not that his youthful looks simply force him into an association with youth’s territory, it’s that his music reminds us of the manner in which the experience of being young is follows us always, often figuring into the choices we make as listeners and in life itself.