DecoyMusic.com

The

year is 1990. It’s Friday night in the small east Texas town of

Greenville. Boys are cruising Wesley Street in their S10 pickup trucks,

searching for action. They pull into Sonic, and as they roll down the

window to order cheese tater-tots the voice of a DJ escapes, “That was

the latest hit from Travis Tritt and you’re listening to 93.5 KIKT FM!”

The Sonic swarms with kids in cowboy hats. The cool kids are wearing

Justin Lace-R’s,  competing to see who can lace them the fastest.

Over

at the roller rink a mile away, skaters float to the pattering

“November Rain” and sway to “The Dance”, by Garth Brooks. Up front,

youngsters chomp rectangular pizzas and swill Crystal Pepsi. There’s a

middle-school girl with hair-sprayed bangs and tight red Wrangler jeans

on, tucked in the corner making out with a boy named Ben Kweller.

Tomorrow Ben will walk down the Sabine River with his pal Wade, fishing

for bass and smoking Camel Wides near the dilapidated moonshine still.

In town, country music is inescapable and follows Ben wherever he goes,

but when he comes home, he hears The Hollies’ harmonies from his dad’s

turntable. And in six months, Ben will be skating that same rink as the

chords of a new sound are played through the PA, a song called “Smells

Like Teen Spirit”.

The

schizophrenia of music that hit his ears at that early age created the

rainbow that critics have written about since his New York arrival in

‘99. He’s been called everything from balladeer to punk rocker,

anti-folker to indie-popper. His ability to weave together opposites

that coexist happily on the same album is something few can do.

On February 3rd, 2009, the whole deal comes full circle with the release of a captivating album called Changing Horses (ATO). With Horses, Kweller returns to his small-town roots as he takes one

of his own back-roads, country music, and makes it the main road. It’s

a collection of stories with a hymnal quality. The genre seems so

natural that you think he’s finally settled down, at least for one

album. Rootsy songs from his past, like “Family Tree”, “Lizzy”, “In

Other Words” or “Living Life”, make Changing Horses

a natural progression in this gifted songwriter’s career. His inviting

vocals still guide the songs, creating the compelling intimacy fans are

familiar with. “People are asking me, ‘why did you wake up and decide

to make a country album?’ To them I say, ‘I didn’t. It’s been in me the

whole time, I just never put it on tape.’ Friends heard me talkin’

about Changing Horses for years. They

know how much country music means to me - when Alan Jackson comes on

the radio, somethin’ happens inside. Brings me back to the trees, back

to pushin’ cars out of the mud. Reminds me of my hometown.”

The

album opens with “Gypsy Rose”, a haunting blues about a man with

nothing in life except the prostitute he sees every week, and closes to

the gospel of “Homeward Bound”, about a good-souled junkie living under

a bridge in Colorado. “’Homeward Bound’ is one of my faves,” says

Kweller. “It was written in the ’60s by Willy Mason’s mom and dad but

no one ever recorded it. Willy played it for me one day and I fell in

love, knew I had to cut it.” Other songs of loss and loneliness poke

their heads out like “Old Hat” and “Ballad of Wendy Baker”. “I must’ve

written ’Wendy’ when I was 16. It’s about my friend who was killed in a

car crash back in high school. We were all devastated. I was eating

Chinese food a few days later and my fortune cookie said, “No one loves

‘til it’s gone”. It hit me, so I went right home and wrote her that

song.”

Changing Horses’

dark beauty may begin with a prostitute and end with a junky, but there

are several up-beat, down-home tunes that balance out the mood. In

particular, the rambunctious road anthems “Fight,” about a trucker

burning up the highway, and “Sawdust Man,” which ends with CB radio

chatter. “I love trucker culture,” Kweller says. “I guess it goes

hand-in-hand with spending most of your life on the road. Come in... ”

Unlike his previous albums, Kweller produced Changing Horses himself. “I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked with some of the greatest producers and learned from them all. For Horses

it was time to take the wheel.” Clearly, a lot of time was spent on the

arrangements, which come alive thanks to his stellar rhythm section,

Chris Morrissey (bass) and Mark Stepro (drums). The jaw-dropping

talents of Kitt Kitterman, (Pedal Steel and Dobro) are debuted here and

play off Ben like a vocal duet. The 11-day recording session took place

in Austin, TX at Public Hi-Fi, an all-analogue studio founded by Spoon

drummer Jim Eno. Public Hi-Fi’s gear list wasn’t the only reason he

recorded in Austin. “I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the past few

years. Re-prioritized, found the important things in life. After our

son Dorian was born, [my wife] Lizzy and I started to crave open

spaces. Wanted to simplify. We needed nature. I was growing tired of

writing songs in my apartment. I used to write outside all the time. I

missed that. As a new father I started thinking about my parents and my

roots, which were in Texas.      

In

April of 2008, after nearly nine years in New York, the Kwellers packed

up and headed south to their new home in Austin. “I’ll always love New

York and the albums I made there. They have an urgency to ‘em that I

really like, but of all the albums I’ve made, this

was the easiest. It was so nice to sit around and make music with those

guys. We’re brothers.” Those brothers include Ben’s long-time engineer

Steve Mazur who turned the knobs at the old Neve desk.  

“I’ve

always been at ease in recording studios,” Kweller says. “They’re magic

places I can escape to, where everyday confines don’t exist. That’s why

art is so important, there are no rules.” With his art, Kweller views

the world with fresh eyes and empathizes with all walks of life. “This

album’s about the people in the background, in the alleyways of

society. I relate with them because we take life as it comes. We roll

with the punches, twists and turns.” In the third verse of “Fight”, he

sums it up, “Some days are aces and some days are faces, some days are

twos and threes.” Changing Horses is a whole deck.