Ben Kweller paid Salt Lake City’s Urban Lounge a visit on Monday (July 14, 2025). Everyone was as happy to see him arrive as they were sad to see him leave.
It’d been a few years since he played here and, judging from Monday’s crowd, the locals missed him hard. From the time he and his band of merry men showed until the time they called it a night, it felt like a long and intimate embrace, one of those where neither quite wants to let go. Kweller and his band (which notably included Christopher Mintz-Plasse on bass, aka Superbad’s McLovin) played a loose, fast set that borrowed heavily from his latest effort, 2025’s Cover The Mirrors without leaving behind longtime favorites like “Falling,” “Family Tree” and “Sundress.” The 20-song setlist he bounced his way through allowed for a lot of joy (onstage and off) and, considering his latest album is about his late sixteen-year-old son, that’s saying something. It wasn’t a somber look back, but a celebration of a life abbreviated.
Photography by Nathan Christianson, @npcplus
If you were a more a casual fan than a memorize-every-lyric sort, it was nearly an out-of-body experience to not only watch Kweller thrill, very ably playing musical chairs with himself (flitting from piano to harmonica to guitar and so on), but to be surrounded by so many enthusiastic echoes, fans singing his own words back at him. He invited that response, encouraged it even; he ditched the microphone and guitar to sing most of “On My Way” acapella, leading all like an enthusiastic choir director.
If there were any tears shed that night, they had to have been the happy kind.
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