Ben Kweller

Raised on his parents' record collection, Ben Kweller has lived life as the next big thing since he was fifteen. At that tender age, his band Radish signed a major-label deal with former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, with a subsequent glowing profile in The New Yorker. Now, seven years later, Kweller is an industry veteran -- at age 22.

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More About

• Ben Kweller
• Ryan Adams
• Alex Chilton
• Todd Rundgren
• Ethan Johns

Like his less-celebrated counterpart Denver Dalley and the better-known Ryan Adams (Adams knob-turner Ethan Johns also produces here), Kweller demonstrates a well-nigh flawless ear for recycling classic pop hooks on On My Way-- certainly enough to fill, say, an early-'70s Todd Rundgren album. And while the coltish Texas native occasionally evinces a clever turn of phrase (such as "New York's the place/Where the sidewalks know my face" on the otherwise insular "My Apartment"), it's clear Kweller has learned more about writing lyrics with his headphones on than from life in the outside world.

The album's opener, "I Want You Back," comes with a broad chorus of overstatement ("I need you back/I need you here/To take away all of my pain/And then my fear") and a musical nod toward Alex Chilton's "Hey Little Child," while "The Rules" is so dead-on Violent Femmes it operates as much as clone as commendation. But "Living Life" and "Believer" ("You speak to me without speaking/You touch so I can feel/With your strength I know I'm stronger/At last I know I'm real") are risk-taking sentimental love songs circa-Late for the Sky Jackson Browne that would border on the agonizingly tender, if not delivered with such heartfelt earnestness. Here Kweller stretches his legs, and though the lack of distance from his own adolescence leaves him lyrically short of similarly subject-mattered masterpieces by Chilton and the Femmes' Gordon Gano, one day this horse will run.