WANT TO GO?

"Mountain Stage" with Ben Kweller, Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women, Cyril Neville, Samantha Crain and Midnight Shivers and The Duke and The King

WHERE: Culture Center Theater, State Capitol complex

WHEN: 7 p.m. Sunday,

TICKETS: Advance $12.50, at the door $18

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Texas-born singer-songwriter Ben Kweller comes to Mountain Stage Sunday. The baby-faced 28-year-old multi-instrumentalist is best known for quirky pop and rock songs, as well as convincing his 82-year-old grandmother to dance in a music video.

"She's my biggest fan," he said. "Her 85th birthday is coming up, and she's just as snappy as a 30-year-old."

He says there wasn't much effort involved with getting his grandmother to appear in the video for "Penny on the Train Track." All he had to do was bring a camera. She was already dancing to the song. He scarcely did more than just record it.

"We shot it in the gym at her apartment building, did it in only four takes," he said. "It actually made 'Total Request Live' on MTV."

Kweller's family has always been very supportive. He credits his father for getting him started on the drums at age 7. This, he says, led to piano lessons, then learning to play the guitar and writing songs.

In junior high, he formed bands and played around Greenville, Texas. One of these bands, Radish, recorded a couple of songs to sell after shows.

"It just kept snowballing," he said. "But it was so incremental, it didn't seem like an overnight thing."

Through a friend of his father's, the band's CD ended up in the hands of a record producer. It all seemed pretty normal until the record executives started showing up in the black limousines. They wanted to make Ben Kweller a rock star.

He was 15 at the time.

By the time he was barely able to drive, his band was performing with Faith No More in Europe and playing The Reading Festival in the UK. Kweller says his mother had some reservations, but his father just went with it.

"He always had the rock 'n' roll gene."

Radish recorded and released songs but had limited success.

"Luckily, I kept a clear head through most of it," Kweller said.

Kweller says he resisted some of the posing and positioning he was asked to do by the record label. He didn't entirely trust their advice.

A few months before Radish started playing nationally, another teenage group, Australia's Silverchair, was gaining fame. Silverchair arrived at the end of the grunge era when alternative music became mainstream. The band's initial success ran into a growing public backlash as alternative gave way to more dance-oriented fare in the U.S.

Silverchair disappeared as fast as they arrived. Kweller says he din't want to share that fate. He wanted to make a career of music and be taken seriously.

"So I didn't listen to the record company very much when they made those 'Hollywood' suggestions," he said.

Eventually, he got out of his major record contract, went solo and played the independent music circuit. It's probably allowed him more creative freedom than he might have found strictly working with major record companies. His latest album, "Changing Horses," largely steps away from the alternative pop and rock he's played most of his career. It has a rough folk and country sound to it.

Kweller says "Changing Horses" wasn't an overnight process. He didn't flip a switch one day and decide to start writing country songs. He's always been writing them, along with everything else, including rock and even some reggae. The trick was putting them together.

He said, "I'd write a song like 'Fight' or "Wanting Her Again" and I loved them so much, but I wasn't just ready to throw them randomly on an album."

He didn't want his country songs to be novelties, so he waited until he'd written enough for an entire album before finally releasing them.

As for his abbreviated childhood, Kweller doesn't think much about it. He came out on the other end of being a child "rock star" better than most.

A good family probably helped.