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Ben Kweller’s seventh studio album, Cover the Mirrors, isn’t just about the loss of his teenage son, Dorian. It’s about…everything. It’s time folding in on itself. It’s a journal only he can really read. It’s an amalgamation of the decades preceding — a storied career that started in Kweller’s teenage years, continued during his days as an early 2000’s indie rock stalwart, and evolved as he grew up into the father of a son on the precipice of his own rock & roll story. Loss and love are woven through it all, yes, but, in the end, it’s about living on. 

“It’s a full circle type of album,” Kweller says, of this one, which drops (via his Noise Company label) May 30th, on what would’ve been Dorian’s 19th birthday. “There's a lot of reflecting — not only reflecting on the loss of Dorian. I'm also taking an inventory of everything else. My whole time on Earth. Everything I've created as an artist.”

Kweller has embodied myriad genres over the years — from the post-grunge Texas ‘90s band Radish to the anti-folk/indie pocket of his solo years, breaking out in 2002 with his radio-ready premiere Sha Sha.

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All the while, he’s toggled between the dark and the light — the playful and morose. “My iconography is often the skull and the strawberry — I like it all,” he says. “There are some beautiful ballads in my catalog, and then there's some really raw punk bullshit. That’s the Ben Kweller aesthetic.”

But after years of touring with the likes of Jeff Tweedy and, most recently, Ed Sheeran (and earning his rightful place as an elder statesman of indie rock), a simple domestic moment spurred Kweller’s next metamorphosis. He overheard his son, Dorian — artist name ZEV — in his bedroom, laboriously, lovingly working on a new song. “That was a big parallel for me, of me,” he says. “The beauty of just being an artist — of finding the gift that you have inside and a passion. It's the only thing you want to do — and it’s beautiful.” He saw himself in the boy.

When Dorian died in a car accident in February of 2023, Kweller’s desire to kindle that gift — to keep it alive — flared brighter. Dorian was on the precipice of his dreams when he passed: a photo on the cover of a skateboard magazine, a tour with his father, a gig at SXSW. Kweller’s musical mini-me since age two, Dorian was about to, in a sense, relive his father’s youth — and Kweller didn’t want to let his son down. Ten years back, Kweller shut down his career briefly after his entire family almost died of a carbon monoxide leak. “This time, I made the decision to not lock myself away in the closet and just use the music as this tool to carry on,” he says. “For Dorian.”

“It wasn't like I set out to say, ‘OK, I'm gonna make this album about going through grief and loss.’ But there was no way around it,” he adds. “This is just another chapter of me trying to heal and just get through what I've been going through. My music is always very autobiographical.”

After going out on tour with Sheeran in April of 2023 as a kind of balm against the grief —

“I felt like Dorian was with me onstage, singing with me,” he says — Kweller got to work on Cover the Mirrors. (Kweller’s family is Jewish, the title of the album a reference to that religion’s funeral practices.) Recorded entirely at his home studio/barn in Texas, the record came to life not far from where Dorian is now buried on a family plot on the Kweller homestead. 

Kweller wrote “Going Insane” first, kicking off with spare piano and lush imagery of purple skies and tambourine guys. It’s a quietly gorgeous track that aches. “From a personal standpoint, it’s just literally what happened to us — and how you start feeling crazy. ‘Is this real? Is this a dream? How is this person that I've raised his whole life dead?’” he says of the track. But it’s not all doom and gloom; Kweller also reflects on his early days on the road in the song, dreaming of being in a van “with an ax in your hand,” the fate Dorian never quite got to experience. Bitter and sweet through and through — a Kweller classic.

“Dollar Store” saunters in next, keeping up the theme of those early road dog days. Written with Modern Love Child and featuring vocals by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, the song is a ‘90s nostalgia gut punch that feels like something you heard on the late-night radio as a teen alone in your bedroom. “I have a vision sometimes: Sunday afternoon in a shitty motel, the blinds are cracked, the sun's coming through, and there’s the smell of an old air conditioner,” Kweller says. “It's super depressing, but also comforting — you’re lost and complacent at the same time.

And then there’s “Trapped,” that song Kweller heard his son toiling away at behind his bedroom door — the track that was supposed to be on ZEV’s debut album that never was. “It was initially about a girl that he was dating in high school, and how he felt like they started dating before they really got to know each other,” Kweller says. The sweet, sad song let Kweller commune with his son even after death; Dorian wrote about falling out of love with a girl in baggy clothes, a line his father could have written 30 years earlier. “I love that I'll be able to sing that on stage every night thinking of him,” Kweller says. “It makes me smile.”

“Park Harvey Fire Drill” is for the early Kweller heads — harking back to his anti-folk days in New York City, jamming on new tracks in his bedroom like Dorian. Replete with fan Easter eggs — he stayed at the Park Harvey while filming William H. Macy’s 2014 film Rudderless — the track’s bridge also calls back to Kweller’s anthemic live staple “Falling.” “It’s a tradition in rock & roll to reference your early days — like the Beatles — and since this is my seventh album, it seemed right. It’ll be fun to sing that shit live,” he says.

“Depression” eddies in next, a synthy, slinky collaboration with Coconut Records (Jason Schwartzman) that was, perhaps incongruously, inspired by a keytar Kweller got for Hanukkah when he was eight. The song was born from one of the pre-set sounds on the instrument, which Kweller bought on eBay after his family admitted that the OG model had been trashed.

“I'm definitely not hiding the ball here,” he says of the lyrics. “I mean, it's called ‘Depression.’ This is all right on the nose, which is very Ben Kweller, just to be straight the fuck up about it.” Still, Kweller doesn’t let it all languish, leaving room for hope in the final act. “I like the song because it goes to this other place at the end and doesn't ever return to the beginning,” he says. “It goes off into the sunset.”

The arena-ready “Don’t Cave” follows, written with Jimmy Robbins and Natalie Hemby in Nashville. Originally, the track was written for a country artist, but when Kweller was assembling songs for the album, he reworked it to be more personal — about his struggle with loss. “I sat down and really just kind of channeled where I was feeling in my life, and pretty much rewrote all the verses,” he says. “I got real — right down to the guts. It’s a hopeful song in the end; I’m going to keep the flame burning.”

Kweller’s outlook gets bleaker, ironically enough, on “Optimystic,” a thrashing banger that he wrote before Dorian passed. “It's a dark one,” he says. “It sounds upbeat, power pop, but it's extremely dark.” In some ways, Kweller says, the track foretold his future heartache — the pain, the violence, the loss. “Sometimes these songs, they hold the future,” he says.

Then “Brakes” slows the tempo down, a meditative track about missing and loving and letting go. “When you think about being away from your one true love, you convince yourself it'll be OK, but it's not enough,” Kweller sings. “People say that distance makes the heart grow fonder but I don’t buy into that — yeah, there are times you need to pump the brakes in life, but when it comes to love, I’m full on.” The Flaming Lips-featuring “Killer Bee” keeps us in this introspective space, a woozy 70’s offering about “being a misunderstood outsider,” Kweller says. 

And then there’s “Letter to Agony,” what Kweller calls his “emo track” —  “emo” as in Elliott Smith, not eyeliner. A faceoff with mortality, the song sees Kweller grappling with the realities of death and dying. “It starts off like: I've never been scared to die but now I am scared to die,” he says. “But by the end, I’m no longer scared.” Hope surges back in on what will surely be a live show standout, “Save Yourself,” a kind of aural bid for those in need. “It’s about moving forward,” Kweller says. “Just reach your hand out — I'm gonna help you get across this river.”

Album closer “Oh Dorian” handily subverts any expectations of a mourning tune. Wreathed in an airy Sixties vibe, the MJ Lenderman-featuring track is more about memory than loss.

“I took the approach of: I'm actually talking to a really great friend I haven’t seen in a while — and I can’t wait to hang out again,” Kweller says, adding that he wrote the song, in part, for Dorian’s high school friends who still come and visit his grave. “He’s not really gone. I’ll see him again.”

Death, memories, love, and road dust, Cover the Mirrors is about grieving, sure, but it’s also about going on — both for Dorian and Kweller, who carries his son with him every step of every day. “My life is the catalog of songs that I write — my diary,” Kweller says. “When I listen back to old songs, I instantly remember where I was when I wrote them — what I was going through.” And in those pages, in those notes, Dorian lives on. Forever.