How do you tell a 23 year-old musician -- one who's been through the major-label wringer several times since he was 15 -- that it's time to hang it up? Greenville, Texas, native Ben Kweller has been haunted by a ridiculously lengthy New Yorker profile for his long-dead band Radish ever since that trio signed a fat corporate contract in 1997. The avalanche of overhype that buried Kweller in the late '90s was not his fault, but the embarrassing sentiments and musical ineptitude contained in his latest studio work, On My Way, land squarely on his own bony shoulders.

Produced by Ethan Johns, son of legendary '70s hedonist-knob-twiddler Glynis Johns (Led Zeppelin, The Who), Kweller's second full-length solo album boasts that clichéd "stripped-down" approach, but it's a bad move, especially for a singer-songwriter whose decencies essentially beg for artfully applied studio make-up.

As a vocalist, Kweller is capable of a good John Cale impression, with little of the unsung VU singer's wit. Otherwise, he sounds stranded and scattered. "Hear Me Out" is typical of the album's irritating earnestness -- a wheezing, weary harmonica acts as prelude to the laughably infantile first verse: "Breakin' the Rubik's Cube / Makin' me lose the beat / Blue jean baby girl / We are an effigy / Down in the Christmas tree." "My Apartment" purports to be an ode to life in Brooklyn, but the songwriter can get no more detailed about living as a New York transplant than describing the titular pad as "the home where I hide / Away from all the darkness outside." The strummy title track is a rip-off of folkie outlaw sagas, including a plea of "Oh, Mama, I didn't realize I was a stealin'/murderin' man." In fact, Kweller sounds like a kid who'd 'fess up to swiping a candy bar shortly after the deed was done. One impression from On My Way is inescapable: At this point in his very young artistic life, Kweller has only sincerity on his side.