With Lizzie and the kids in a hotel room in New Orleans, Ben Kweller has a day off before the big US tour begins behind his new self-titled album. With his band he’s been rehearsing and fine-tuning, as well as playing several promo shows with his band in Europe to get back into the swing of things.

Part of the reason for all this preparation is that the new self-titled record is very much an artistic statement by Ben Kweller about Ben Kweller – he recorded every instrument that appears on it. “It’s a lot of fun to be playing with other humans,” he says. “I really want to try to reproduce the album live, but it requires a lot of people to do the job. I’m hoping at some point I’ll be able to have a six-piece band, but it’s so much fun to play with a band again – they’re great musicians and great friends.”

In this new format, Ben is also tweaking the older songs and the arrangements of them to match the catchy, direct pop vibe to the songs features on Ben Kweller. As such, the likes of “My Apartment” from solo debut Sha Sha had had piano added to them, while the cuts from On My Way are having their straight-up rock vibe softened somewhere. Ben explains that making Ben Kweller was a deliberate reaction to that previous album’s more rock basis.

“I really wanted to make something very layered and thick and grand, and really put some work into the album,” he comments. With all the songs being intensely personal and about his life, he goes on to say that it was producer Gil Norton’s idea that he play all the instruments on the album. “I’m glad he made me do it because these songs are so personal – my fingerprints are on all the tracks, and it was this total diary. I didn’t set out to make a record after On My Way to do the complete opposite thing, but it just sort of happened naturally. I naturally don’t like doing the same thing twice.

“To work with someone like him was a complete honour,” he says of his time in the studio with the legendary producer of the Pixies’ Doolittle, and Gang of Four member. “I know that if I was going to be playing all the instruments that having someone like Gil with all the experience and wisdom and knowledge that he had it would give me confidence.”

Compared to On My Way producer Ethan Jones, Ben explains that Gil is much more song-based, being a producer first, then an engineer, where Ethan is an engineer and then a producer. As such, he believes that Ethan was the perfect guy for On My Way. “I just wanted someone to come in and take a polaroid picture of the music, and that’s what Ethan does best.” On the other hand, for Ben Kweller, he wanted to work with someone who would get down and dirty with the songs and help map them out, talking about the arrangements, and questioning the moves that Ben wanted to make in terms of things like as going to the middle-eight or going to the chorus, or shortening a verse to get to the guitar solo. “He really wants to know why you’re doing this part, what you’re trying to say here, and I wanted that. They both have the highest standards in terms of sound, but I think it’s just different ways of getting it.”

The songs on Ben Kweller are intensely personal, but the beauty of the album is that they’re not introspective but instead bouncy and joyous. “I guess it’s just the Ben Kweller way,” he offers as to how he came to make them that way. “They are personal, all my songs are personal, but it is important for me to have songs that sound universal – I want people to be able to connect to them and relate to them, and it’s just something that happens when I make music.”

In many respects, the personal nature of Ben Kweller reminds to some degree of Bob Dylan’s magnum opus Blood on the Tracks. It’s similar in that its intensely personal, and an individual experience, but with absolutely amazing songs too that are able to connect directly with the listener. “I’m much more of an early, early Dylan fan,” he says. “I’ve got to get into it, and I know that Lizzie loves it, and from what I’ve heard of that album I can see what you’re talking about – “Penny on the Train Tracks” could fit right in there.”

In thhe two years leading up to the new album the music that he was particularly listening to was Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. “I love Into the Fever, but at the same time I was getting into that Phil Spector wall-of-sound thing. I’m working among the traditional arrangements and instruments of rock ‘n roll, so I’m not really listening to anything in the studio because I don’t want to get influenced by other people’s work – I want to make the music that in ten of fifteen years people look back and say ‘I want this song to sound like that Ben Kweller song’.”

Ben Kweller has been living the life of a musician and performer from the age of 13, 14 as part of Radish – before he was barely out of the first few years of his teens, Ben had feature stories in the likes of Rolling Stone about him, stating that he was ‘the next Kurt Cobain’. He agrees that it’s definitely made him a lot more mature a lot sooner. “The experiences that I had had definitely make me older-feeling, and hopefully wiser,” he comments. “I feel very lucky to have all the experiences that I’ve had under my belt. I felt like I’ve seen so much of the music – the dark side and the light side. Everything I experienced as Radish helped me make really good decisions as a solo artist.”

Ben Kweller’s self-titled third album is out now.