As a friend recently told me, “You can’t ride two horses with one tokhes.” For a musician like Ben Kweller, who wriggled his Levi’s into a cozy ass-groove of alt-rock at a young age, that sort of stretch is a bit more difficult.
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He’s gone country! Ben Kweller saddles up a new sound on Changing Horses. |
Yet Changing Horses, the title of the Austin, Texas-based songwriter’s fourth proper solo album, suggests that rock’s littlest M-80 has seamlessly jumped from one bronco to the next. And maybe he has: Kweller, a nationally touring musician since his early ’teens, writes on the back of his album that Horses’ 10 songs “have been collecting themselves for 13 years.” Long enough to suggest that the amblin’ man who rewrote a Vanilla Ice tune and christened it “BK Baby” has always been a little more country than his back catalogue might make him seem.
But it’s only a little more country, like spurs on sneakers. Horses resembles a Jack Daniels bottle, sports tumbleweedy titles like “Old Hat” and “Sawdust Man,” and opens with the tin can crackle of Kitt Kittredge’s dobro on “Gypsy Rose.” Yet “Rose” doesn’t get far along the dusty trails before Kweller turns the song’s country blues into a cozy, familiar slacker’s waltz—better suited to dancing with a Pabst than a partner.
For a record billed as a horse of a different color, the majority of Kweller’s Horses roams pretty close to home, which makes it all the more welcome a listen. The pedal steel in “Old Hat” doesn’t replace Kweller’s artless piano fills; it adds a gossamer that might fare well on those older Kweller tracks that didn’t keep a lead foot over a distortion pedal. And “Sawdust Man”—easily the best cut here, a Paul McCartney piano-pounder with a cracked vocal chorus that owes another debt to Macca—eases through a pair of rhymes that would run the risk of being trivially cute if they didn’t come wrapped in Kweller’s greatest gift, that combination of hammy swagger and Pop Rocks energy.
Which brings us to “Fight,” a song BK Baby is already tossing into the latter half of setlists to rally his crowds. “Fight” throws me a bit; the first two verses lack the forehead-slap simplicity of many of Kweller’s best lyrics, usually thick with idiom twists and metaphor mash, and the chorus—“You’ve gotta fight, fight, fight all the way!”—is typical of Kweller’s optimism, but lacks his usual charm and chutzpah. This is, after all, the fellow who proclaimed himself “Wasted and Ready” on an earlier record and, although “Wasted” isn’t his finest song, it’s bound to a certain characteristic spirit that audiences associate with BK. To borrow from Superbad, people don’t forget.
But a few more listens to the song did a lot to sway my opinion, thanks mainly to Kweller’s final verse: “Some days are aces and some days are faces,” he offers, then follows with “some days are twos and threes.” A few tracks here may prove his words true, but the delivery is all for Kweller, and Changing Horses delivers like Pony Express: The important stuff gets across.
