14. Ben Kweller – Cover the Mirrors

I’ve been a fan of Ben Kweller since my friend and I pooled the tiny amount of money we had to buy a shared copy of Radish’s ‘Little Pink Stars’ single in April 1997 (when Kweller, my friend and I were all still 15) and all but one of the solo records he has put out since he left Radish at the end of the 90s have made this List (sorry Go Fly a Kite). He’s always seemed such a nice person, he’s less than a month older than me, and he grew up in basically the same place that my wife did: I feel a connection to him in a way I do few artists. All of which adds to Cover the Mirrors being such a gut punch. Working his way through the tragic death of his teenage son Dorian, this is a record full of pain in a way no breakup album could ever touch. For a long while I found it all a bit much, tugging away, as it does, on my own parental anxieties. Indeed, I thought it would miss out on this List despite it being brilliant musically (this is about as good as Kweller’s americana indie rock has ever been) simply because it was such a difficult listen. Hearing him talk about it on Zane Lowe’s podcast, though, finally unlocked the hope and strength that’s to be found in the record alongside all that pain: “don’t give in when your heart aches...”. Probably deserves to be placed a lot higher than 14th but – while I learnt to love it – Cover the Mirrors remains a record that is so uncomfortably real that I can only listen to it when I steel myself.