Ben Kweller works through grief with the help of friends on ‘Cover the Mirrors’

In the weeks after Ben Kweller’s son Dorian died in a car accident at age 16, the family’s home remained largely silent.

“The first two months after Dorian died, I didn’t even think about music,” the Texas-based Kweller said from the road in the midst of his current tour, which visits A&R Music Bar on Wednesday, Nov. 19. “There’s always music on in our home, and we’re all music lovers, but we couldn’t even listen to music we were just so sad.”

A few months into this grief, in the early spring of 2023, Kweller stepped into Dorian’s bedroom, which he said still looks much the same as it did the night the teenager left the house for the last time. Once inside, he picked up his son’s acoustic guitar and seated himself on the edge of the bed, cautiously strumming a handful of chords between his tears. “And I slowly started feeling that magic of music and songwriting coming back,” he said. “And then fast forward to now, and I’m on a tour bus, touring and playing all of these songs. And it’s all been such a blur. And it’s hard to believe all of this has even happened, because I remember being so frozen when he passed away. It’s such a weird thing to move on – I hate the phrase move on – but to go on, to move forward. 

“The hardest thing for me is the last time I saw him, when he left the house to go skateboarding with his friend, Dylan, every day the distance between that night and now grows farther and farther, and that’s so sad to me. There have been different things we’ve done, and different experiences both happy and sad, and they’ve all happened without Dorian. And that’s a weird thing to grasp, how life just moves on.”

On Cover the Mirrors (The Noise Company), released in May on what would have been Dorian’s 19th birthday, Kweller explores this space with rare vulnerability, excavating his deep well of sadness, yes, but also the thousands of ways in which loss changes a person and the need to preserve hope even in those times when it feels impossible to do so. “A new day’s coming for me,” Kweller sings toward the end of “Depression,” an otherwise downcast synth tune recorded in collaboration with labelmate Coconut Records that captures the feel of the weather finally breaking at the end of a long, dark storm.

There also exists within the album the idea that we don’t have to navigate these shattered paths alone, with Cover the Mirrors steadily emerging as Kweller’s most collaborative effort to date. Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield turns up for “Dollar Store,” a soft-loud, alt-rock wrecking ball with a shout-along chorus, while the Flaming Lips help to buoy Kweller amid “Killer Bee,” a pretty, downcast tune that shimmers like sunlight cutting through the gray of early dawn. Then there’s “Oh Dorian,” an upbeat, country-tinged number given an assist by MJ Lenderman and rooted in Kweller’s awareness that he’s not the only person who lost something with his son’s passing.

“I was totally thinking about his friends that day, and how crushed they were. You know, it’s one thing to lose your child, but also to lose your best friend when you’re 16 and in high school and having some of the best, most carefree times of your life. To have that taken away from you, I just couldn’t bear it,” said Kweller, who within the song pays tribute to his “crystal child, double Gemini,” striking the perfect balance between sad and sweet, heartbreaking and hopeful as he sings, “I can’t wait to hang with you again.”

In a way, this reality comes to pass in “Trapped,” which could rightly be described as a collaboration between Kweller and his late son, and which Kweller first heard through a closed door as Dorian worked alone in his bedroom on the then-unnamed tune. “I remember he started work on that song in his room, and I heard it through the door and walked in and said, ‘Bro, what is this?’” Kweller said. “And I sat down and we sort of worked on it a bit, and we tried to record it a few times, just as a little voice memo. So, I do have voice memos with him singing and with me singing, and there’s one where he’s on drums and I’m playing guitar. But he never finished it, and it was really sad thinking he’d never get to finish it and to put it out there. … And I just love it, because it’s truly a co-write with him.”

Kweller said his son died at a point in time when he was just starting to scratch the creative surface, seeing in his son’s development a reflection of the teenage years he himself spent ping-ponging between styles in an attempt to uncover his own voice and identity as a musician. “He morphed a bunch in the four years leading up to his death,” Kweller said of Dorian, who recorded and released music under the name ZEV (a posthumous album is likely to surface at some point). “If you go to the ZEV Spotify, I think there’s like five or six songs we were able to put out when he was here. And when you listen to those, they’re so different. … The first one he put out, it’s called ‘Parachute,’ and it’s so wild, because it sounds like a 13-year-old Ben Kweller, back when I was first starting Radish.”

In those earliest days, Kweller acknowledged that he sometimes carried the weight of expectation, particularly when he dropped out of high school at age 15 after his first band, Radish, signed a major label deal with Mercury Records. At the same time, he said he never felt as though he had to compromise his music in pursuit of commercial success, or to prove himself in any way to anyone other than himself – an idea that has been further reinforced by his loss.

“I’m not even sure how to explain it, but it’s just like, what’s the worst that could happen? Because the worst has already happened, you know what I mean?” Kweller said. “So many things matter so much in our lives, when we get in our little bubble. But when you have something like this that happens, it just puts everything in perspective. And it’s funny, because me and [my wife] Liz will say that a lot when we’re just trying to make some normal, regular life decision, where it’s like, ‘Fuck it, dude. How much does it really matter?’ Because, really, life is short. You gotta just try to enjoy what you have.“