Ben Lee

BREAKING: Ben Lee is fun!

Ask him, he’ll tell you. His last album after all, the indie-pop masterpiece that Rolling Stone called “the best album of his career”, was called “I’m Fun!”

“Professionals are the worst part of the music industry, they’re pretty much ruining it,” he tells me with a wink “I’ve always put adventure as my first priority. Full-tilt, all the time. Fun is the unexpected. Fun is building something, burning it down, then building it back, bigger, weirder and better.”

Writer of iconic Australian indie-pop hits like “Catch My Disease”, “We’re All in this Together” and “Cigarettes Will Kill You”, Ben is also a renown collaborator with friends and allies like Ben Folds, Sarah Silverman, Lena Dunham, Shamir, Christian Lee Hutson, Zooey Deschanel, Washington, Georgia Maq, Money Mark, Tom Robbins and Josh Radnor. He also runs a podcast network with his wife, actress Ione Skye, built around the couple’s flagship show “Weirder Together” and releasing podcasts with legends like Jello Biafra, Lou Barlow and Brock Enright.

There are basically no rules in Ben’s creative world, and his career follows the same policy: Fun is always the compass.

He’s collaborated with Josh Radnor (Radnor and Lee), Ben Folds and Ben Kweller (The Bens) and wrote the musical B is For Beer with US author Tom Robbins – soon to become a movie that Ben and actor wife Ione Skye will co-direct. He even collaborated with Lena Dunham on a live tongue-in-cheek tribute to Oasis with the live event “Champagne Superanalysis: Celebrating the Gallagher Brothers through songs and readings” that contained a Brad Pitt cameo.

During the pandemic, his 2006 hit “We're All in This Together” became an unofficial anthem of unity. "One of the things that really came out of the journey of that song for me, was the realization that it's genuinely not up to us when our art is going to be useful to people. It opened me up to this feeling of not knowing what was going to happen, and that was really cool."

And it is Ben’s history and expertise as a songwriter, that led to his latest exploration and incarnation - his alter ego: DJ DADBOD.

It is yet another unexpected turn from the “titular troublemaker” that led to his instagram mashup videos such as “MGMT x Bob Dylan”, “The Pixies x Natasha Bedingfield” and “White Stripes x Beastie Boys” going quickly viral. But it was his mashup of the “Theme from Bluey” with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” that really sealed the deal for music fans - these were mashups unlike anything his peers are doing, all based on an encyclopedia-like knowledge of the science of songwriting.

“I’m a natural party host. I want people to feel safe but have a wild time. That's when you see people dancing and getting in touch with the kid in them. Their playfulness and curiosity and silliness. That's the secret of having a good time.”

The current live show Ben has bringing to festivals around the world is a celebratory, profound and a little bit silly greatest hits set full of songs you can sing along to, oversized props and a killer band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QFaADP4ZGE

Lee ends the conversation reminding me "It's a good time, man. Getting older, getting weirder, getting better… Being an artist moving to the beat of your own drum, it's a perilous adventure not for the faint of heart.

But for people like me? It’s fun.”