Andy Seifert

We've all had that "guilty pleasures" conversation, the one where you and a couple of close buddies, after three or four beers and four bucks spent at the jukebox, reveal the embarrassing Top 40 passions locked within the trenches of your brain, inhibited by the hipster cortex. The late work of Hall & Oates, the soundtrack to "Armageddon," anything by the mid-nineties hair-metal demigods Jackyl—all valid answers and all drunkenly confessed.

But most revert back to suppressing themselves once sober; few actually continue indulging in such pleasures, and fewer produce albums heavily influenced by them, but this is precisely where Texas rocker Ben Kweller's heart and soul are at this stage of his career. He's on the cusp of releasing an album deeply rooted in—prepare yourself—mainstream country. And he doesn't even seem to feel all that guilty.

"I lived in east Texas in a small town, and there was one rock station but it was all the hair bands," Kweller says. "I listened to that a little bit, my first cassette was Twisted Sister's 'Stay Hungry,' but Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson were everywhere."

"If you made out with girls, it was always to like, a Garth Brooks song," he continues. "That was really something that really influenced me a lot, and I've rarely talked about it. But I've been writing these kinds of songs over the years, collecting them, picking my favorites. I always knew I wanted to make record with all of this stuff, and so finally that's what I've done.”

While his country/western kick doesn't come completely out of left field (Kweller's always had at least a tinge of country twang in his songwriting), it's surprising when considering Kweller's teenage band Radish were the epitome of adolescent grunge, his 2002 debut "Sha Sha" basically out-Weezer-ed the “Green Album,” and his sophomore effort "On My Way" featured a stripped-down live-performance production that completely rejects the decadent, glossy production on records that Nashville puts out. But nostalgia won Kweller over, as well as an appreciation of the new albums from honky-tonk mainstay Alan Jackson.

"The past few years I've bought some recent Alan Jackson records, and that guy is kind of a bad ass," Kweller says to counter the idea that mainstream country consists exclusively of ignorant wusses. "He's kind of punk rock within the confines of national country because he's one of the only guys who's allowed to write his own songs."

And with Alan Jackson in mind comes Kweller's "Changing Horses," due out in early 2009. Before diehard fans get all bent out of shape, Kweller says it leans on old-timey country heroes like Roger Miller and Hank Williams just as much as his modern country idols, and that it's still a "Ben Kweller record" written for Ben Kweller fans.

"I didn't change anything purposely," he says of writing the new album. "I certainly wasn't writing for country radio, or middle America, the heartland. I wasn't writing for Sarah Palin fans or anything like that."

Ben Kweller plays October 14 at Bottom Lounge, 1375 West Lake, (773)525-5300, at 7pm.

(2008-10-07)

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