Since Dorian Died
Ten minutes after I meet up with Ben Kweller for our first interview, he asks me if we can go to my apartment to meet my wife and son. It’s Easter Sunday and we’re in Carroll Gardens, the Brooklyn neighborhood where my family lives and where Kweller lived with his wife, Liz Smith, in the early 2000s. We are standing in the center of Carroll Park, surrounded by screaming and running kids, the day after his April 19 Bowery Ballroom show, the fourth stop on a tour in support of his first new record in four years, Cover the Mirrors. “Is that off-limits?” he asks me after making his request.
For two decades, Kweller has been a reliable purveyor of warm, winsome rock songs, located somewhere at the cross-section of Weezer and Wilco. He’s never quite had a Zeitgeist moment — the closest he came might have been his 2002 album Sha Sha, which hit around the same time that anti-folk groups like the Moldy Peaches were enjoying college-radio play, or maybe when he teamed up with Ben Lee and Ben Folds for the jokingly named side project the Bens one year later. But over the years, he’s managed to amass the kind of devoted following that a jam band like Phish would admire. His live shows feel like a family reunion; during the Bowery set, Kweller honored shouted requests from the audience, no matter how random or obscure. His wife, Liz, was backstage, and his 15-year-old son, Judah, manned the merch table.
In Carroll Park, Kweller is dressed in an oversize striped shirt that makes him resemble a Peanuts character. He’s 43, but his round face and sandy, reddish-brown hair are still boyish, as are his plaintive blue eyes, through which everything he feels seems to pass through unfiltered. He wants to stop at Frankie’s, the venerable Italian restaurant on Court Street he used to frequent, and also, it turns out, say hello to my family. I text my wife: “Ben Kweller might be coming over?” Her response: “Like now?”
Kweller’s family and mine have both endured unspeakable tragedy. On February 27, 2023, Ben’s 16-year-old son, Dorian, left the family’s Texas ranch on a Tuesday evening to go skateboarding at his friend’s house. Around 9 p.m., on his drive back, Dorian swerved off the shoulder to avoid an oncoming truck. A branch pierced through the windshield of the Toyota Highlander that his parents had given to him and struck him in the head, killing him instantly. He was less than two miles from home.
The circumstances of our children’s deaths are different, but something in the violence, the freakishness, and the chilling randomness of the accidents unite us. My 2-year-old daughter, Greta, was killed in 2015 when a piece of falling masonry from an eighth-story Upper West Side windowsill struck her head. In the first two years after her death, my wife and I sought the company of other bereaved parents with the urgency of starved animals. We needed to see others who had endured what we had. I tell Kweller we’d love to have him but suggest we walk around the neighborhood first. “Oh, of course, dude!” he says. His enthusiasm radiates in circles around him and seems to touch everyone within a block radius.
We walk to Frankie’s and settle down at a bench in their backyard patio. “The car was fine,” Kweller says, recalling Dorian’s accident. “It’s like, What the fuck, man? It’s fluke shit. It’s just a fucking branch. The hole was this big.” He makes a hole with his fist roughly the size of a tangerine. “When I’m talking to other parents about it, I almost want to tell them, ‘Don’t worry,’ you know? ‘I was able to take it off the table. It’s not going to happen to you.’” He stops and laughs. “That’s weird. Is that weird?”
I have a few more years on my grief timecard than Kweller, and I know how long it took me to reach a place where I could feel philosophical about my child’s death. But Kweller is only two years out, and he’s already back in the public eye in a big way, flying around the country and talking with strangers about Dorian’s death. Less than a month after the accident, he was onstage at South by Southwest, calmly introducing a song to the crowd that Dorian wrote; talking to me here in Brooklyn two years later, he is composed, open, sunny — almost disconcertingly so. I ask him, carefully, where he finds the space to allow himself the visceral emotions that come with a loss this primal. He smiles. He seems to want to help me. “I seem okay — is that what you’re thinking?”
It is. “It’s really weird,” he says. “Dorian dying should have been the moment that disconnected me the most. It shattered me, but it’s also somehow the thing that’s helping me with all the other stuff.” He’s referring to a period of his life between 2013 and 2020, when he lost all connection to his music. His retreat was triggered by a traumatic and well-publicized carbon-monoxide poisoning incident that almost took out his whole family. After that, he did what he calls “the bare minimum to pay my mortgage and support my family,” a period Liz later refers to as “the time when Ben decided he was going to retire from music.”
Since Dorian died, Kweller has thrown himself back into music with a vengeance. Cover the Mirrors is a moodier work than his usual, but beneath the sadness, there is an unmistakable joy at making music again. While he considers the album “very dark,” he also acknowledges that many fans have expressed surprise at how upbeat it is. “I don’t know if that just comes back to my natural personality,” he says with a shrug. “But is there an expectation that I make a certain kind of album after a tragedy like this?”
He wonders how this is going to sound; he doesn’t want to come across as cavalier. He’s just trying to make sense of it all. He acknowledges that there have been times he and his wife have sat up in bed and wondered, Have we been moving too fast since Dorian died?
As a teenager, Dorian Kweller spent hours in his room working out chord progressions and melodies. “I would always tell Liz, ‘God, he reminds me of me back when I was 15, 16 and didn’t have anything else to worry about in life but making music,’” Kweller remembers. “When he started making music seriously and recording it, I’d send it to my friends, like, ‘Dude, you gotta check this out. This is not just a proud-dad moment. This is just cool.’” Dorian recorded an astounding eight full-length albums with his best friend under the name B.H.22., all in the span of a year when they were both 15. Kweller pulls up Spotify and scrolls through their discography. “Dorian would always tell me, ‘Dad, don’t tell anyone about B.H.22, because the second people know about it, I might not be able to make the music I want to make anymore,’” he says. “Because it’s all over the fucking place, man. Some of it is, like, N.E.R.D. meets Wings, right?”
I feel a strange pang of secondhand loss hearing Dorian’s music. B.H.22 sounds like a couple of 15-year-olds dicking around for each other’s amusement, for sure, but the chorus to “Your car” evokes the legendary 1980s indie-pop group Beat Happening. More arresting are the songs that Dorian recorded as Zev, the name he settled on a year before he died, when he knew he wanted to take music seriously. His song “How I Am,” which Kweller performed at South by Southwest right after Dorian died, has touches of his father’s style: It is rooted in power pop, with singsong melodies and cleanly mapped verse-chorus-verse dynamics. But there is something wry and resigned lurking behind those chord changes, an insouciance to Dorian’s vocals, that suggests something deeper and bigger brewing — the sound of a fairly labyrinthine songwriting mind just starting to awaken to its potential.
When Kweller and I arrive at the third-floor landing of my apartment, it’s chaotic. My mini goldendoodle, Obie, is freaked out and barking as Kweller hugs my wife and fist-bumps my 8-year-old son. As the commotion fades, Kweller and my wife fall into familiar conversational rhythms over the randomness of death and the confusion and void it leaves. Within five minutes, Kweller has settled onto our living-room floor. Obie licks his hand compulsively. Behind Kweller, my son is seated on the couch, maybe listening and maybe not, as the musician begins to recount to us the story of his son’s death.
The Kwellers were eating dinner the night of February 27, 2023, when Dorian got up and announced his plans to visit his friend’s brand-new half-pipe. It was a school night, and Liz pointed out that he had a test to study for that week. “He was like, ‘I hear you, but I’m still going to go skate with Dylan tonight.’ He always had to be home by 9:30, and he was always really good about it,” Kweller remembers. “He was like, ‘All right guys, love you,’ and he left.”
The family was watching television — “some lame show on Netflix I can’t remember and that we never watched again” — when 9 p.m. rolled around. “Liz said, ‘Hey Ben, call Dorian. Make sure he’s on his way home.’” Not wanting to be a nag, Kweller pulled up the Find My app on his iPhone. Dorian’s blue dot was on McGregor Lane, the 8.5-mile country road that leads directly to their ranch in Dripping Springs, a small town 30 miles outside of Austin. He’d be home in ten minutes.
Ten minutes passed, then five more. Kweller checked Dorian’s blue dot again; it hadn’t moved. He hopped in Liz’s car and drove down to meet him. Maybe he had a flat tire, Kweller remembers thinking, or got pulled over. “At night on McGregor, there’s usually deer everywhere. You have to be careful,” Kweller says. “I was driving really fast, and there were no deer.” He kept repeating “Everything’s okay” to himself. “I made one turn, then I made another, and then I saw all the lights.” There were three police cars, one fire truck, and an ambulance. The truck that caused Dorian to swerve never stopped, and the driver remains unknown. The driver’s-side door on the Highlander was removed. Dorian wasn’t there, but his iPhone was still fixed in its holder.
Kweller called Liz. He told her to come and that it didn’t look good. She started screaming — “a scream I’ve never heard before” — and she and Judah rushed to join Ben. Eventually, a detective arrived at the scene. “Finally, they let me go and see him, laid out in the middle of the road. And I saw him, and he was beautiful. He had a wound right here on his head.” Kweller’s left hand lifts absently to touch the side of his own head. “It was like the hand of God said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve got to come back to us now. We’ve got another plan for you.’”
By now, the sky outside my apartment windows is darkening, and Kweller stands up and says he should get going. Before he does, he grants my son’s shy, last-minute request: to come into his bedroom and hear him play his guitar. Kweller’s eyes light up. Moments later, I peek through the cracked-open door to see Kweller, crouched on the floor holding a child-size acoustic guitar, playing accompaniment to my son, who is on electric. They are harmonizing together on the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.”
Kweller started writing songs when he was 8. Going back and forth between his parents’ record collection and the piano as a child, he figured out how to play “Heart and Soul,” then he mixed up the chords to discover, to his delight, that he had morphed into playing “Let It Be” by the Beatles. He wanted to make music that made people cry in the way that the rising chord progression of “All You Need Is Love” made him cry. He started writing love songs. He didn’t yet understand romantic love, of course, but he understood songs about love. He’d mastered the vocabulary of pop songs right around the same time most kids his age were picking up their first instrument.
When Kweller was 15, his band, Radish, was at the center of a surreal bidding war. This was the era when major-label execs in search of “hot new talent” would still park their limo outside some kid’s house in Greenville and fling out a seven-figure advance. Kweller was brought in for meetings with Madonna and Tom Petty. In the end, he signed a multimillion-dollar record contract with Mercury, and that same year, he embarked on his first national tour. Restraining Bolt, the band’s major-label debut, landed with a resounding “thunk” when it was released in April 1997, moving only 13,000 copies and inspiring derision (“He’s just a kid”) and compassion (“He’s just a kid!”) in equal measure from the press. Despite this, Kweller soldiered forward with the same mix of optimism, aplomb, and steel-trap conviction that powers him to this day. His publicist would come to his shows and plead with him to stop dyeing his hair, arguing that no one would know what he looked like if he kept switching things up.
I ask him whether he ever felt powerless to push back on certain things earlier in his career, noting that even grown-up musicians talk about the pressure to do things they feel unable to object to. He just shrugs and says, “I never played the game, dude.” “Half the time, I couldn’t even tell if some of the suits were even listening to the Radish stuff,” he says. While he never finished high school, one of his earliest educations came from family friend Nils Lofgren, the legendary guitarist from the E Street Band and Crazy Horse. The young Kweller didn’t drink or do any drugs, but Lofgren urged Kweller’s parents to send him to local Greenville AA meetings to “just sit and listen” before heading out on his first tour. “I’m grateful for that. The obvious potential demise from the Radish era is that I would just go nuts, burn out, and be a washed-up kid rocker,” Kweller says.
After Radish recorded another album that went unreleased, Kweller launched his solo career. When his first batch of songs from his 2000 self-released album Freak Out, It’s Ben Kweller reached Jeff Tweedy and Evan Dando, they each featured him on tour. His career was off and running again. Over the next 23 years, Kweller released six solo albums and founded his own label, the Noise Company. He’s been joined by his current touring band with him for four years — one that features Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. McLovin from the teen-comedy classic Superbad, on backup vocals and bass.
The period during which Kweller stepped away from music has cast a long shadow, and when he discusses it, it’s the only time he cries in my presence. After the 2013 carbon-monoxide poisoning incident, he spent 24 hours on oxygen. A specialist at the hospital had handed Kweller a thick folder full of potential side effects, many of which affected him for years. “There’s a major short-term memory-loss issue. I started having trouble with lyric retention, which had never been a problem before. I was basically diagnosed with brain damage,” he says. “I don’t talk about that much. I feel like I lost a bunch of years.”
When he talks about his rededication to music, I think of a story he told me about Dorian. A few weeks before he died, he told his parents he wanted to release new music every week. “Dorian was getting so antsy,” Kweller remembers. When he died, in a way, Kweller felt a similar sense of urgency. “I just knew that I wasn’t gonna fucking hide. I truly feel I have so much music still in me, and I have to get it out. That is my soul’s purpose. It’s the first time I’m aware of my mortality. I don’t want to go before getting it all out of me.”
“Welcome to the end of the world, dude!” This is how Kweller, wearing a sleeveless shirt that says “ZEV,” greets me a month after our Brooklyn meetup when I step out of my rented Buick at his 30-acre Texas ranch. I have driven 25 miles southwest from the Austin airport through the 11,000-person town of Dripping Springs (the town sign reads “The Gateway to Hill Country”) before turning onto McGregor Lane, winding past ash junipers and live oaks while trying not to wonder where, along this stretch of road, Dorian’s accident occurred.
We walk over to the barn to meet Liz, who is busy packaging and sending out the 500 or so preorders of Cover the Mirrors vinyl that arrived the previous afternoon. When I enter the cool, shaded barn, “Baby Love” by the Supremes is playing. There is a massive studio console to my right, handsome rugs covering the concrete floors, a drum set, and mics in the center of the room. Liz appears from the rafters, arms folded and smiling down at us. “This is my life for the moment,” she says, gesturing to the mailers.
The barn wasn’t intended as a studio. When Dorian died, they were in the midst of ongoing renovation, and the barn had been “just a place to park the tractor.” Suddenly, all their various projects seemed unmanageable. They had invited several bands to South by Southwest that year, and they were all scheduled to rehearse in a matter of weeks for Kweller’s label’s showcase at the festival. “They were so excited about their first South by Southwest,” Kweller remembers. “I wasn’t gonna cancel it for them, you know? I said, ‘Let’s just put some doors up so we can make music in here, at least.’”
For months after Dorian’s death, Liz tells me, the Kwellers slept together in one bed. “We were just so freaked out,” she remembers. “If I was lying awake and going into one of my spirals, I would wake everybody up: ‘All right, guys, sit up. I need you to know that I’m spinning out of control, so I’m going to tell you what’s going through my mind.” Liz’s mother had died when she was 8 years old, so it was crucial to her that Judah see his parents process the pain in real time. “When no one talks about it, you become this crazy OCD kid, like I did after my mom died: If I don’t this, and this, and this, and if I don’t do it exactly right, my dad’s gonna die.”
Catharsis rarely arrives predictably after traumatic loss — it’s messy, eruptive, and weird. The first time the family all belly laughed after Dorian’s death was also the first time they attempted to go to therapy together. “The therapist was just awful. She barely asked us about what happened. She barely asked us anything,” Liz says. “She kept reaching into her desk drawers to bring out all these … tools? To help us? That we could maybe purchase? Like this buzzer button that you could hold in your hand, apparently to soothe you — some EMDR kind of thing. And she was really pushing them on Judah.” The three drove home in silence until Judah finally said, “I do not want a buzzer.” They all cracked up, and then felt like, Oh God, should we even be cracking up? Will we ever crack up again?
The morning after I arrive, Kweller takes me into town for breakfast. As we talk, I come to grips with an odd truth about him: He seems to feel no angst. Throughout our conversations, no matter how many times I ask him a dark question about his grief or prod about his musical process, I get an earnest, upbeat, uncomplicated answer. Feeling increasingly morbid, I go fishing in the depths. I ask him if there’s been a time in his life, prior to Dorian’s death, when he felt psychic torment. I ask him if making music has ever felt like wrenching the faucet back on or if it’s always been frictionless. But what I take away from his answers, again and again, is that Kweller is frictionless. He’s sad about his child’s death in an almost childlike way, without any of the adult contaminants of rage, bitterness, or self-recrimination. It seems to be the same way he makes music. At one point, I pose the theory that if Kweller the person and Kweller the artist were two parts of a Venn diagram, it would be a circle, and he laughs. “I love that,” he says. “It’s exactly right.”
The name of Kweller’s album references the Jewish practice of sitting shiva, and the songs touch lightly on the stages of grief in Kweller’s plainspoken, open-hearted language. The catchy chorus to “Park Harvey Fire Drill” (“I’m just glad I don’t have to talk to anyone”) revels in the misanthropy of early grief. On the stark acoustic ballad “Letter to Agony,” Kweller sings: “No I’m no longer scared to die / Just please bury me where you will be / Next to you for eternity.” The album’s final track, a loping country-rock tune called “Oh Dorian” featuring MJ Lenderman, strikes a hopeful note: “I can’t wait to hang with you again.” Dorian’s presence on the record is like that: palpable, familial, and seemingly just out of reach. “Trapped,” the third song, is a Dorian composition. He wrote the first verse and the chorus melody, but was unable to finish before he died. Shortly after the accident, Kweller revisited the song. “It nagged at me,” he says. “Just this sadness that it would never see the light of day, that he never got to finish such an incredible song.” Kweller wrote the second verse and helped smooth the chorus. He calls it a “major turning point” for the album. “When he sent me the demos, I just started crying,” Jason Schwartzman, a friend of Kweller’s since the early 2000s, later tells me. “The songs are, to me, the best ones he’s written.”
I get the sense, as we near the end of our time together, that Kweller needs to show me everything. Grief needs witnessing, after all, and I am one of the few bereaved parents he’s talked to since Dorian’s death. On our way home from breakfast, at a stoplight before we reach McGregor Lane, Kweller pulls out his phone to show me the last text he ever sent Dorian: “U ok?” It’s marked as “Delivered,” not “Read.” As the shoulder disappears and the road narrows, Kweller slows down the car and points out the spot of the accident to me. We return to his house, hop on the golf cart that he calls “the Mule,” and he drives us to the east end of the property, near an adjoining road. We walk toward a spot protected from the sun by a handful of arcing trees. This is the last place we will go together.
I stare at the gravestone of Dorian Zev Kweller. There are a few skateboards propped up against nearby trees, left as offerings by his friends. There’s a pair of checkered black-and-white Vans slip-ons. There’s a large flat stone nearby, perfect for sitting, and a bench with a laser-cut woodblock of Dorian’s face. Some birds I’ve never heard before call from someplace close by. Wind stirs some chimes that I can’t see. The green earth below the stone seems to vibrate with Dorian’s physical presence. I am overwhelmed. The two of us sink down onto the bench, and I begin to cry. Kweller puts his hand on my shoulder and murmurs something — comforting me, the journalist he has brought to sit before his son’s grave.
We might not speak to each other much after this weekend; that’s the impersonal nature of album cycles, of interviews, of dropping into someone’s life for a few days then parachuting back out. But inside the shade of the grove, we stare at the stone with his child’s name on it together. His breathing slows, as does mine.
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