Ben Kweller, Sufjan Stevens, and the Challenge of Reviewing a Grief Album
Grief is an unavoidable part of the human experience, but is it too personal to critique?
At the risk of stating the obvious, grief is a challenging subject matter.
In twenty years of medical practice, I have gained considerable experience communicating with grieving relatives, but it doesn’t get any easier. While I have developed an internal script for explaining common conditions, such as gout or sciatica, this is an area where it feels inappropriate to rely on generic turns of phrase. “I’m sorry for your loss” sounds more like an automatic reflex than a heartfelt response. I tend to rely more on my intuition and the right words usually follow, but I do find death by suicide or the death of a child particularly challenging.
I recently read a fascinating NPR interview with Sufjan Stevens, in which he looked back at 2015’s widely acclaimed study of loss, Carrie & Lowell:
I think this album is evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point. I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless. I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.
— Sufjan Stevens
Stevens wrote the album in the aftermath of his mother’s death. As he details in the same NPR interview, his relationship with Carrie was distant. He feels he didn’t know her particularly well and consequently, Carrie & Lowell features a lot of fabricated anecdotes and reflections on what a different relationship could have looked like. Regardless of their authenticity, songs like “Fourth of July” and “Death with Dignity” pack an emotional punch quite unlike pretty much anything I’ve ever heard.
While Stevens views Carrie & Lowell as a failure, from my perspective it is a work of staggering beauty and one of the defining artistic works on grief. Both interpretations are valid, of course, but knowing that an artist regrets making a record does force you to re-evaluate your relationship with it. Am I just projecting my own feelings? When I’m moved to tears, am I responding to Stevens’ grief or the submerged memories of my formative relationships with loved ones that his sparse compositions invariably awaken?
The same questions come to mind when listening to Ben Kweller’s latest effort, Cover The Mirrors, which sees the singer-songwriter explore his grief in the aftermath of his teenage son Dorian’s tragic death.
I hadn’t paid attention to Kweller since 2004’s On My Way — if I’m brutally honest, I’d pretty much forgotten about him — but his wonderfully charming 2002 album Sha Sha was a vitally important record to me in a critical year for No Ripcord. Buoyed by a series of brilliant releases, I felt energised enough to reboot the stalled website after a very quiet 2001. Sha Sha sounds a little rough around the edges now, but at the time it was a joyous, youthful blast from an artist the same age as me, with very similar influences.
In the aftermath of Sha Sha, Kweller got married (to “Lizzy” from the tender acoustic song of the same name) and the couple went on to have two sons. Their oldest, Dorian, a budding young musician, was all set to make his live debut at SXSW when he was killed in a freak car accident in 2023. Memories of Dorian and a sense of the void his loss has created resonate throughout Cover The Mirrors. At times it is desperately sad, but there is also a real sense of Kweller celebrating the impact of Dorian’s short life.
The superficially jolly “Oh Dorian” (featuring a lovely contribution by MJ Lenderman) captures the shifting, contrasting emotions of grief wonderfully, its final lines a reminder that happy memories can give way to tears in a heartbeat:
Oh Dorian, my best friend
I just call your name
Life just ain't the same
I can't wait to hang with you again— Ben Kweller, from “Oh Dorian”
And there are many more beautiful moments scattered throughout Cover The Mirrors, as Kweller moves back and forth between the emotional stages described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. (Although The Simpsons memorably demonstrated progression through these five stages as a linear process — a clip I still use in teaching sessions as a discussion point — they are most certainly not.)
“Don’t Cave” honestly addresses the impact Dorian’s death has had on Kweller and his wife Liz’s relationship. Direct lines like “Don't let the bridge between us break apart” and “We're not lost, we're on the brink of a goodbye we shouldn't say” hit particularly hard.
“Trapped” is the conclusion of a song that Dorian began to write but was never able to finish. Kweller touches on the process in a brilliantly written interview with Jayson Greene for Vulture:
“It nagged at me. Just this sadness that it would never see the light of day, that he never got to finish such an incredible song.”
Ben Kweller, talking to Vulture
Perhaps the finest song on the record is one that doesn’t directly address grief. The Waxahatchee collaboration “Dollar Store” definitely fits the mood of Cover The Mirrors, even if its subject matter is more non-specific.
While I can’t get enough of the central guitar riff, the moment where the song explodes at 2:38 is such a pure, exhilarating burst of catharsis that I can’t stop listening to it.
The more chaotic “Park Harvey Fire Drill” (chorus line: “I'm just glad I don't have to talk to anyone”) is more reminiscent of Kweller’s anti-folk period. It features a not-so-subtle reference to both Sha Sha and its standout track “Falling”, which triggered a rush of nostalgia in me. “Has it really been 23 years?” Yes. 23 years of highs and lows for both the artist and the listener — but for Kweller, an incomparable lowest of lows.
Indeed, Cover The Mirrors is not without its flaws — but is it worthwhile or even appropriate to pick through these? I enjoy critiquing music, but to find fault with someone navigating their very personal grief seems particularly heartless. Grief is messy. Progress is non-linear. Ben Kweller’s backstory lends some of these superficially decent songs an extra weight — but what if the listener isn’t aware of the context? Albums about grief raise these same questions time and time again.
Ultimately, I approach a record like Cover The Mirrors in much the same way I negotiate conversations with grieving relatives: by going with my gut. Kweller is honest, authentic, and warm. He has crafted a beautifully vulnerable collection of songs celebrating his son’s life and detailing the family’s struggles in the aftermath of his death. Cover The Mirrors is bold, uncompromising, and mighty. And sometimes, that’s all that needs to be said.
i hate that your posts are getting lost because this was really lovely.
So glad you wrote this David as it provided the opportunity to give this album another listen. It didn’t grab me on first listen as I just wasn’t in the right headspace.
The additional context you provided on the grief at the heart of the album definitely piqued my curiosity and prompted a reevaluation. Knowing the challenges I faced with grief after my mother’s passing in 2018 I’m interested in hearing, particularly through music and poetry, how people struggle to cope with their own grief.
Not sure whether you’ve ever listened to Mount Eerie’s “A Crow Looked At Me” but when I think of grief it’s the first album that comes to mind. It’s beautiful but devastating and makes for a difficult listen.