Band Bios
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Ben Kweller
Ben Kweller’s seventh studio album, Cover the Mirrors, isn’t just about the loss of his teenage son, Dorian. It’s about…everything. It’s time folding in on itself. It’s a journal only he can really read. It’s an amalgamation of the decades preceding — a storied career that started in Kweller’s teenage years, continued during his days as an early 2000’s indie rock stalwart, and evolved as he grew up into the father of a son on the precipice of his own rock & roll story. Loss and love are woven through it all, yes, but, in the end, it’s about living on.
“It’s a full circle type of album,” Kweller says, of this one, which drops (via his Noise Company label) May 30th, on what would’ve been Dorian’s 19th birthday. “There's a lot of reflecting — not only reflecting on the loss of Dorian. I'm also taking an inventory of everything else. My whole time on Earth. Everything I've created as an artist.”
Kweller has embodied myriad genres over the years — from the post-grunge Texas ‘90s band Radish to the anti-folk/indie pocket of his solo years, breaking out in 2002 with his radio-ready premiere Sha Sha. All the while, he’s toggled between the dark and the light — the playful and morose. “My iconography is often the skull and the strawberry — I like it all,” he says. “There are some beautiful ballads in my catalog, and then there's some really raw punk bullshit. That’s the Ben Kweller aesthetic.”
But after years of touring with the likes of Jeff Tweedy and, most recently, Ed Sheeran (and earning his rightful place as an elder statesman of indie rock), a simple domestic moment spurred Kweller’s next metamorphosis. He overheard his son, Dorian — artist name ZEV — in his bedroom, laboriously, lovingly working on a new song. “That was a big parallel for me, of me,” he says. “The beauty of just being an artist — of finding the gift that you have inside and a passion. It's the only thing you want to do — and it’s beautiful.” He saw himself in the boy.
When Dorian died in a car accident in February of 2023, Kweller’s desire to kindle that gift — to keep it alive — flared brighter. Dorian was on the precipice of his dreams when he passed: a photo on the cover of a skateboard magazine, a tour with his father, a gig at SXSW. Kweller’s musical mini-me since age two, Dorian was about to, in a sense, relive his father’s youth — and Kweller didn’t want to let his son down. Ten years back, Kweller shut down his career briefly after his entire family almost died of a carbon monoxide leak. “This time, I made the decision to not lock myself away in the closet and just use the music as this tool to carry on,” he says. “For Dorian.”
“It wasn't like I set out to say, ‘OK, I'm gonna make this album about going through grief and loss.’ But there was no way around it,” he adds. “This is just another chapter of me trying to heal and just get through what I've been going through. My music is always very autobiographical.”
After going out on tour with Sheeran in April of 2023 as a kind of balm against the grief —
“I felt like Dorian was with me onstage, singing with me,” he says — Kweller got to work on Cover the Mirrors. (Kweller’s family is Jewish, the title of the album a reference to that religion’s funeral practices.) Recorded entirely at his home studio/barn in Texas, the record came to life not far from where Dorian is now buried on a family plot on the Kweller homestead.
Kweller wrote “Going Insane” first, kicking off with spare piano and lush imagery of purple skies and tambourine guys. It’s a quietly gorgeous track that aches. “From a personal standpoint, it’s just literally what happened to us — and how you start feeling crazy. ‘Is this real? Is this a dream? How is this person that I've raised his whole life dead?’” he says of the track. But it’s not all doom and gloom; Kweller also reflects on his early days on the road in the song, dreaming of being in a van “with an ax in your hand,” the fate Dorian never quite got to experience. Bitter and sweet through and through — a Kweller classic.
“Dollar Store” saunters in next, keeping up the theme of those early road dog days. Written with Modern Love Child and featuring vocals by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, the song is a ‘90s nostalgia gut punch that feels like something you heard on the late-night radio as a teen alone in your bedroom. “I have a vision sometimes: Sunday afternoon in a shitty motel, the blinds are cracked, the sun's coming through, and there’s the smell of an old air conditioner,” Kweller says. “It's super depressing, but also comforting — you’re lost and complacent at the same time.
And then there’s “Trapped,” that song Kweller heard his son toiling away at behind his bedroom door — the track that was supposed to be on ZEV’s debut album that never was. “It was initially about a girl that he was dating in high school, and how he felt like they started dating before they really got to know each other,” Kweller says. The sweet, sad song let Kweller commune with his son even after death; Dorian wrote about falling out of love with a girl in baggy clothes, a line his father could have written 30 years earlier. “I love that I'll be able to sing that on stage every night thinking of him,” Kweller says. “It makes me smile.”
“Park Harvey Fire Drill” is for the early Kweller heads — harking back to his anti-folk days in New York City, jamming on new tracks in his bedroom like Dorian. Replete with fan Easter eggs — he stayed at the Park Harvey while filming William H. Macy’s 2014 film Rudderless — the track’s bridge also calls back to Kweller’s anthemic live staple “Falling.” “It’s a tradition in rock & roll to reference your early days — like the Beatles — and since this is my seventh album, it seemed right. It’ll be fun to sing that shit live,” he says.
“Depression” eddies in next, a synthy, slinky collaboration with Coconut Records (Jason Schwartzman) that was, perhaps incongruously, inspired by a keytar Kweller got for Hanukkah when he was eight. The song was born from one of the pre-set sounds on the instrument, which Kweller bought on eBay after his family admitted that the OG model had been trashed.
“I'm definitely not hiding the ball here,” he says of the lyrics. “I mean, it's called ‘Depression.’ This is all right on the nose, which is very Ben Kweller, just to be straight the fuck up about it.” Still, Kweller doesn’t let it all languish, leaving room for hope in the final act. “I like the song because it goes to this other place at the end and doesn't ever return to the beginning,” he says. “It goes off into the sunset.”
The arena-ready “Don’t Cave” follows, written with Jimmy Robbins and Natalie Hemby in Nashville. Originally, the track was written for a country artist, but when Kweller was assembling songs for the album, he reworked it to be more personal — about his struggle with loss. “I sat down and really just kind of channeled where I was feeling in my life, and pretty much rewrote all the verses,” he says. “I got real — right down to the guts. It’s a hopeful song in the end; I’m going to keep the flame burning.”
Kweller’s outlook gets bleaker, ironically enough, on “Optimystic,” a thrashing banger that he wrote before Dorian passed. “It's a dark one,” he says. “It sounds upbeat, power pop, but it's extremely dark.” In some ways, Kweller says, the track foretold his future heartache — the pain, the violence, the loss. “Sometimes these songs, they hold the future,” he says.
Then “Brakes” slows the tempo down, a meditative track about missing and loving and letting go. “When you think about being away from your one true love, you convince yourself it'll be OK, but it's not enough,” Kweller sings. “People say that distance makes the heart grow fonder but I don’t buy into that — yeah, there are times you need to pump the brakes in life, but when it comes to love, I’m full on.” The Flaming Lips-featuring “Killer Bee” keeps us in this introspective space, a woozy 70’s offering about “being a misunderstood outsider,” Kweller says.
And then there’s “Letter to Agony,” what Kweller calls his “emo track” — “emo” as in Elliott Smith, not eyeliner. A faceoff with mortality, the song sees Kweller grappling with the realities of death and dying. “It starts off like: I've never been scared to die but now I am scared to die,” he says. “But by the end, I’m no longer scared.” Hope surges back in on what will surely be a liveshow standout, “Save Yourself,” a kind of aural bid for those in need. “It’s about moving forward,” Kweller says. “Just reach your hand out — I'm gonna help you get across this river.”
Album closer “Oh Dorian” handily subverts any expectations of a mourning tune. Wreathed in an airy Sixties vibe, the MJ Lenderman-featuring track is more about memory than loss.
“I took the approach of: I'm actually talking to a really great friend I haven’t seen in a while — and I can’t wait to hang out again,” Kweller says, adding that he wrote the song, in part, for Dorian’s high school friends who still come and visit his grave. “He’s not really gone. I’ll see him again.”
Death, memories, love, and road dust, Cover the Mirrors is about grieving, sure, but it’s also about going on — both for Dorian and Kweller, who carries his son with him every step of every day. “My life is the catalog of songs that I write — my diary,” Kweller says. “When I listen back to old songs, I instantly remember where I was when I wrote them — what I was going through.” And in those pages, in those notes, Dorian lives on.
Les Savy Fav
Almost out of necessity, Les Savy Fav’s sixth LP was born in a pocket reality: singer Tim Harrington’s Brooklyn attic. “A freaky barn,” as he calls it, the room was built over the ruins of black mold and plywood, a de facto studio. Different from anywhere they’d ever recorded, the space allowed for a much-needed rebirth for the long-running post-hardcore band. In that in-between, they pieced together what would become their latest evolution, OUI, LSF, growing the album’s title and cover art out of a patch of grass. “The record grew organically — literally and figuratively,” Harrington notes wryly.
It’s impossible to talk about Les Savy Fav without acknowledging that it’s been more than 10 years since the guys released 2010’s Root for Ruin. But it’s not like they had a messy breakup or quit to become bankers. They just had a lot of living to do. “When we finished our last record, there was a sense that if we were going to do more, we wanted to do something more ambitious,” Harrington says. “I think it took us a while to even get in a space where that was possible.” Remember, these five men — Harrington, Seth Jabour, Syd Butler, Harrison Haynes, Andrew Reuland — have been friends and collaborators since 1995, when they attended Rhode Island School of Design. It takes a beat to shake old habits.
In the interim, the band has been busy building growing their families, taking and losing jobs, and living through the various ecstatic and hideous aspects of growing older. Harrington wrote and illustrated children’s books (like 2015’s Noes to Toes You are Yummy), ran out of money, built his attic studio, wrestled with mental health issues, and got a job-job as a creative director. Butler continued to run his label, Frenchkiss (which released the majority of the band’s albums, including this one), and, along with Jabour, honed his writing skills as a member of Seth Meyers’ 8G band. Harrison left his career teaching to focus on fine art, while Reuland built a reputation as a film/commercial editor and writer on Adult Swim’s cult show Ballmastrz: 9009. That onslaught of personal ambitions and adulting could spell death for many bands, but, as Harrington puts it: “The band was never a job, so we can’t get fired and don’t have to quit. We had the time to figure out how to bring the people we’ve become and the people we are as artists together authentically. There’s a chaotic, untethered ecstasy at the center of the band’s universe. Squaring that with the desire to create stability and the need to endure some grind isn’t easy.”
Over the years, the band has continued to perform, always on their own terms, but after a stint at Primavera in 2022, they caught the proverbial songwriting bug once more, sharing demos, jamming in Harrington’s attic, and recording through the heap of DIY and esoteric gear Harrington collected over the last decade. At first, there was no intention of recording an album; they were playing music, not writing it. “The last record was a lot about holding on. OUI, LSF is the sound of release — no map, no preconceptions, no self-righteous certainty,” Butler says. “There's nothing like hitting 50 to slap the cocksure vanity off your face.” That’s not to say it was easy. The challenge of learning a new way to write and work together took a lot of letting go. Among the artwork that plasters the attic studio is a piece by Harrington that reads, “Can’t do it how you want. Don’t want to do it how you can,” spiraling into a bloodshot eye. “I put it there as a warning about how easily that fixation can paralyze you,” he says.
The resulting album is a glorious mix of tragedy and comedy — studded with nods to the band’s eclectic musical taste — delightfully weird and utterly them. Album opener “Guzzle Blood” crashes us into the record like a runaway cop car, setting the tone for the rest of the 14-song suite. “It opens with just a total disillusion — a loss of faith, frustration, anguish,” Harrington says of the song, which speaks of demons haunting your sleep and the battle for salvation. “Limo Scene” whiplashes in next, a peppy, lean “sex-ghost song,” as Harrington calls it, channeling the Rivingtons’ “Para Oom Mow Mow.” And then there’s “Void Moon,” named after an astrological period where it’s apparently super dangerous to make decisions. Too bad the couple in this growling rocker decided to get married during this doomed time. Harrington says, “The song is like: What if Edgar Allen Poe was into astrology?”
“Mischief Night” is named after what people in Jabour and Harrington’s home state of New Jersey call the night before Halloween — when folks smash pumpkins and egg cars — inspired by an equally debauched night in Tijuana after a 2002 gig at iconic San Diego venue the Casbah. The spine of the song started as a slow dirge from Jabour — Harrington just doubled the speed until the guys found a bone-rattling Bonnie and Clyde crime banger inside. After this haunting introduction to OUI, LSF the band delivers a sharp bite of bratty candy with “What We Don’t Want” — a screed against “the algorithm” that dominates contemporary society. “It’s not not self-righteous, but the back half challenges glamorizing or romanticizing the old times before you got what you want, whenever you wanted it,” Harrington says.
“Legendary Tippers” swans in next on a wave of toe-tapping swarm. “It’s got a Laissez-faire swagger that probably would've caused us to outsmart ourselves in in the past,” Harrington says. “The guitars are literally a stack of scratch tracks we decided sounded great without edits. To me, it sounds like the solo from ‘Taxman’ wolfed down a bottle of Adderall,” he adds. “Dawn Patrol” is pure sepia-toned nostalgia, a chorus of crickets that long-time mixer Chris Zane says sounds like the Nineties in Connecticut. It’s the feeling of falling asleep in the backyard as a party rages inside. And then there’s the cheekily titled “Somebody Needs a Hug,” an airy song that belies the sadness at its core. “I wanted it to be a celebration of feeling good without being naive,” Harrington says. “When I sing, ‘I’m having fun right now,’ it’s about the visceral joy I have on stage performing, how fleeting it can be and how there’s something profound in embracing its simplicity.”
“Racing Bees,” recorded on an iPhone, is a bit of a palette cleanser, an onomatopoeia of a track that Harrington says was an experiment in simplicity. “A song doesn’t have to be labored over to qualify as a song,” he says. From there, the frontman gets raw on the unexpectedly intimate ballad “Don’t Mind Me,” trying out his piano bar croon as he sings about a world and a love lost. “I remember playing it for the guys almost as a curio and getting a strong response from everybody,” he says. “I'm a little embarrassed about it. It's a very vulnerable song. I'm not scared to pull all my clothes off and fall down from stage rigging; I'm much more scared of sharing that song.”
Harrington and the guys don’t let things languish, though, following up this sad, simple track with the goofily titled “Oi Divison,” complete with unlikely doo-wop vocals in the chorus, and an even less likely nod to the B-52’s “Roam.” The acerbic “Barbs” follows, an Eighties-esque banger that includes the oh-so memorable image: “Loving you is like getting fucked by a cat/at first it’s fun/then the hard part comes.” “Nihilists Cry Less,” zooms in next, answering the question: What would it sound like if a Beck song turned into a Spiritualized song midway through? When Harrington first gave the lyrics to Reuland, the guitarist wove in a distinctly Western sensibility — paired with “pots and pans” drum loops and some virtuosic bass playing by Butler — that builds to a swelling, swirling symphony. If you’ve ever heard the band’s obscure Accidental Deaths 7-inch, you’ll immediately recognize its place in the Extended Savy Universe — a counterpoint to “Legendary Tippers” and a dig at Harrington’s younger self. “When I was a kid, the nihilist posture was kind of cool,” he says. “Unfortunately, now nihilism has infected the entire world. The conservative movement in America is essentially a self-destructive fantasy nihilism disaster.”
And, finally, there’s “World Got Great,” a rocker that feels like it’s falling apart at the seams — in a good way. A bookend of faith to the disillusionment of album opener “Guzzle Blood,” it basically sums up where the band is today and where it hopes to go. “I’ve always felt like a late bloomer,” Harrington says before quoting the song, “What luck not to bloom sooner.”
A decade may have passed, but Les Savy Fav is still growing — like their musical range, like the seeds that grew into their album art, like the hope that someday they can say: “We were there when the world got great, we helped to make it that way!” Here’s to 10 more years.
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