The Wake

“I was just out in L.A. and The Strokes were in town,” Ben Kweller tells me. “We hung out all night.”

The twenty-three year old, retro-fried rocker sounds a lot like Buddy Holly. Soft-spoken with a southern rancher’s drawl, you’d think he was the underpaid star of some Hollywood B-list Western film – not a budding, Big Apple breakout artist. But for Kweller, now a ten-year veteran of the music biz, such conflicting imagery is nothing out of the ordinary; the Texas Troubadour has been a walking contradiction ever since he was old enough to reach the piano keys.

When Kweller’s first band – Radish, a Nirvana-inspired angst-rock outfit – released their debut album in 1996, he was heralded as the boy-genius of rock and roll. He was Brian Wilson, Daniel Johns and Doogie Howser all rolled into one: a seminal pre-teen savior, who would conquer the musical world with an electric guitar and a cracking voice. In what used to seem like an imponderable age-to-talent ratio, Kweller – then fifteen years old – was singled out as the last-ditch beacon of untapped musical genius. He was supposed to be the middle-school crowd’s magical answer to Mudhoney and The Meat Puppets.

Needless to say, the pint-sized revolution didn’t exactly take hold. Though Radish did gain mass media attention – shamelessly promoted to no end as burgeoning rock ‘n’ roll prophets – they were never able to break-through in America, scoring their only Top 40 hit overseas in Britain.

Radish’s fall from fantastic speculation, even in the most optimistic of recollections, isn’t all that hard to understand. When a group of kids too young to drive are supposed to possess the kind of punk prodigy that elevated Kurt Cobain to sainthood, well, it’s a lot to live up to. And trying to retain a legitimate stance on grunge-laden issues isn’t easy when you’re relatively at-ease with life and a good fifteen years shy of a bullet-hole in your brain.

That said, by the late nineties, it was obvious the members of Radish weren’t going to be the cherubic chairmen of rock and roll’s executive-board anytime soon; it was time for the band to move on. So, in 1999, the band parted ways to pursue individual musical interests.

For Kweller, the former front man and musical mastermind of that ill-fated, root-vegetable trio, this change meant moving to New York, getting an apartment on Smith Street and starting all over again.

“When I first moved to New York, so many kids my age were doing really cool shit. The Strokes were just starting out – and so were the Kings of Leon – and it really inspired me,” says Kweller, who soon thereafter began writing songs that encapsulated his transcontinental relocation. Playing solo gigs in the Big City, opening for The Eels, Jeff Tweedy and Moldy Peaches, Kweller slowly began assemebling the first pieces of what would become his debut solo album, Sha Sha (released in 2001 on ATO records). “Sha Sha was all about change and going from a small town to the big city,” he says. “When I moved to New York and I didn’t have a band, the songs were so personal and straight from me.”

Two years and one tour later, Kweller returns with his latest effort, On My Way, an album that takes a decidedly different approach from Sha Sha. Brimming with Kinks-esque crunch, On My Way highlights New York’s growing, raw-influence on Kweller as a songwriter. “It’s (On My Way) definitely a New York album. It’s a lot more garage-y than Sha Sha; we cut everything live,” says Kweller, who, for the first time since Radish, is collaborating in-depth with a band. “It’s similar to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Everyone plays their role.”

For the first time in his life, Kweller is now poised to ascend to his long-anticipated seat on the rock ’n’ roll throne. With On My Way, the twenty-something New Yorker shows that all the hype he received in Radish wasn’t purely that of youthful fetish – rather, it was merely a foreshadowing of his then untapped potential. Though it took him seven years and two states to do it, Ben Kweller has finally put the ghost-of-Radish-past to rest, creating his most truthful, heart-felt album to date. In burying the cutesy, contradictory faux-grunge of his latter life, the prodigious songwriter has been able to find what he never could in Radish: the truth. And in a musical world where the truth is all an artist has to hold onto, this is something to be acknowledged and appreciated.

As Kweller puts it, “It really doesn’t matter how big someone gets, as long as they stay true to themselves. The more honest you are, the longer you’ll stick around.”