Ben Kweller
On My Way
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Brooklyn’s own Ben Kweller makes a remarkable return with his second ATO/RCA release, the exhilarating On My Way. The much- anticipated follow-up to 2002’s critically acclaimed Sha Sha, the 11-track collection is immediate and irresistible, capturing the ever-exciting sound of a prodigiously talented singer/songwriter captured live and direct, at the peak of his powers. While On My Way offers a more consistent sonic vision than its gleefully genre-hopping predecessor, Kweller’s inexorable knack for musical diversity continues unabated. Glamtastic rock ‘n’ roll (“I Want You Back”) and anti-folk balladry (“On My Way”) careen into elegiac anthems (“Living Life”) and melodic piano pop (“Hospital Bed”), while tracks like “Ann Disaster” and “The Rules” see Kweller and his crack combo kicking out a bracingly fuzzed-up clatter akin to “the sound of four guys standing around a drum kit, practicing in the garage.”

“I just wanted to bring it all back to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll recording,” says BK. “I wanted to do it the way Buddy Holly did it.”

With that in mind, Kweller enlisted producer Ethan Johns, whose services and sensibility had come highly recommended by his good friends, Kings Of Leon. In Johns – whose father, legendary producer/engineer Glyn Johns, was behind the board for landmark albums by the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones, among many others – BK found a kindred spirit who truly understood his goals for the record.

“Ethan really helped to clarify things,” Kweller says. “I knew the sound I had in my head but I didn’t know to make that come to fruition.”

In October 2003, Kweller and his band – bassist (and “right hand man”) Josh Lattanzi, guitarist Mike Stroud, and drummer Fred Eltringham – took up residence at Sear Sound, NYC’s oldest independent studio, famed for its old school vacuum tube technology and vintage microphone collection. Kweller and Johns stripped the recording process to its bare essentials, with the musicians playing together in a single room.

“I’d only ever done it one way – separate the guitars, separate the drums, get a really tight-sounding album,” he explains. “This time I wanted something different. I thought, let’s get rid of the headphones and let’s all listen to the one sound that’s happening. Let’s listen to each other, instead of focusing on what your guitar sounds like in your headphones.”

On My Way was recorded in just three quick weeks, with hardly any rehearsal or pre-production. Two years of near-constant international and domestic touring – both as headliner as well as alongside such bands as the Strokes, Kings Of Leon, Dave Matthews Band, Dashboard Confessional, Adam Green, and Brendan Benson – had given Kweller and his crew a musical telepathy that allowed them to hit the studio and bash out the tunes almost instantly.

“The band was so tight, we were able to just go in and learn a song and that’d be it,” Kweller says. “I had a lot of the parts in my head, so we’d talk about what to play then just do it. We’d go and play the song three times and whichever take felt the best, we kept.”

Inspired by artists like Sonic Youth, Pavement, and of course, the Beatles, Kweller opted to split the guitars in the mix, placing Stroud in the left stereo channel and himself in the right. The technique – known as hard-panning – serves to accentuate the two players’ unique styles, while also emphasizing the band’s intuitive interplay.

“It’s just like you were watching us from the audience,” he says. “Stroud’s on stage right, I’m on the left. Our styles are so different, but by showing the separation, it ended up melding together perfectly.”

Once the basic tracks were laid down, Kweller laid down his vocals with little or no overdubbing. For the most part, he simply stood at the mike and let loose, singing his songs in single continuous takes. As a result, his trademark winsome, winning voice is stripped bare, revealing a heretofore unrecorded urgency and all-new emotional colors.

“It’s wild,” he says. “I couldn’t hear myself singing, I was just screaming into the mike.”

In the midst of the sessions, Kweller’s longtime musical compadre John Kent was brought in to take over drum duties from Eltringham, who moved to California to start a family. After the recordings’ conclusion, Stroud also decided to leave the fold, choosing to start his own band, Ratatat.

“Both those guys are such great players,” Kweller says. “One of my favorite things about this record is that this band was documented really well.”

BK credits the ragged glory of On My Way to the minimalist approach taken to post-production. Kweller and Johns opted to mix the tracks as they went along, recording each track then mixing it down to half-inch tape at day’s end.

“Usually you finish a song and go, ‘Okay, let’s move on,’” he says. “Then a month later, when you go to mix, you’re trying to get it to sound as good as it did that day. But so much has changed, it’s impossible to get it where it was. That’s why the mixes on this record are so raw, they almost sound like rough mixes.”

Kweller brought the same mindset to his songwriting, keeping it as organic as his band’s performance. While Sha Sha featured songs largely written in his native Texas, this time out Kweller was inclined to pen a New York City classic in the tradition of Lou Reed or Bob Dylan. The Big Apple state of mind is expertly portrayed on the buoyant “My Apartment,” in which BK conjures up a spot-on sketch of life in his beloved adopted hometown of Brooklyn USA. Throughout the record, Kweller’s gift for memorable melodies and poignant lyrics are on parade, with songs like “Believer” and the album-closing “Different But The Same” expressing the tunesmith’s plaintive positivity, a big-hearted emotional palette that’s at once deeply personal and wholly universal.

“It’s all about a feeling,” he says. “I spit out lyrics and then months later I find out what they mean. Now that I’m looking back on the lyrics, I see that I’m honing in on what it is to do the right thing in life. There are a few key words, like ‘real’ and ‘power’ and ‘feel,’ that keep showing up. ‘Living Life’ really sums up the philosophy of the record – all the answers and the dreams will come to you in time, that’s the full-on Kweller optimism right there. The record’s all about making sure that you’re following your heart.”

Kweller certainly did just that, taking all the necessary steps to make sure his creative objectives were brought to bright, beautiful life. If Sha Sha was the sound of a young artist finding his feet, the remarkably accomplished On My Way finds Ben Kweller standing tall and ready to run.

“Every record I’m going to make is going to be more mature than the last,” BK says, “just because you’re always growing, as an artist and as a person. I’m feeling like I’m able to complete my thoughts and put them into my music more than I ever have before. On Sha Sha I’d say I got eight out of the 10 elements of being a complete artist together. This time I’m one step closer to getting all 10.”

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