Video: Ben Kweller – “Killer Bee”

Directed by Walter Bristol. Single out now on Noise Company.

Before you get any further go read this Texas Monthly feature by Dina Gachman: Ben Kweller Is Playing Through the Pain. It’s worth your time. See you in a minute.

. . .

Alright, welcome back. Pretty great, right? So yeah, Kweller has been through something absolutely devastating and seems to be doing as well as humanly possible. As the dad of my own sixteen year old boy, when I first heard the heartbreaking news about Kweller’s son my initial reaction was self-centered: Oh my god, what if that happened to my kid? I can’t even imagine how I would deal. Kweller is transforming his grief into something else, and it’s remarkable.

“Killer Bee” is just BK and his acoustic guitar. Simple, sad and pretty. He says, “This is song for anyone who’s ever felt alone in the world. We’re all outsiders until we find our people.”

Keep on keeping on.

Video: Ben Kweller – “Heart Attack Kid”

Directed by Robert Strange and Ben Kweller. From Circuit Boredom, due sometime soon on the Noise Company.

I dig Ben Kweller’s grungy Southern rocker look. It suits him.

If you’ve noticed that Kweller has been pretty quiet lately, there’s a very good explanation for that. He and his entire immediate family were all almost killed in a carbon monoxide accident.

“We were in this sweet little cabin and in the middle of the night, Lizzy woke up and said, ‘Ben, get up! Something’s wrong–I feel horrible,'” Kweller says. “I immediately jumped out of bed and collapsed to the ground. We instinctively crawled to the front door and opened it. Fresh air rushed in the cabin. I called 911. We grabbed the boys out of bed, trying to shake them awake, and managed to get everyone outside in the snow. The boys were crying and falling in and out of consciousness–it was like something out of a horror film. When the ambulances arrived, they tested our blood and said our CO levels were so high, we were 15 minutes away from not waking up. Fifteen minutes! We spent the next day in the hospital on pure oxygen and days after that feeling lethargic and mush-brained. When we got back home, I was an incapacitated zombie.”

Fortunately, everybody’s okay, but it took him a few years to be “start the machine back up again” and get back into the recording studio.

Glad he did. I’ve been following Kweller since I first heard “Family Tree” on college radio in 2002. He was just a kid then, but Sha Sha is still one of my favorite albums of that era. And he’s produced tons of great stuff since then as well.

“Heart Attack Kid” is a clear sign of good things to come.

And friends: make sure you have a working carbon monoxide detector in your home. It could save your life!

Ben Kweller: web, twitter, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.