BREAKING: Ben Lee is fun! 

Ask him, he’ll tell you.  

“I’m Fun!” is not only the name of his most recent album of pop gems full of songs with  names like “Born for this Bullshit” “Arsehold” and “Parents Get High”, it is also the mission  statement that has guided him through a 3 decade long career.  

“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”. 

There are basically no rules in Ben’s creative world, and his live show 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." 

Mid-pandemic, Ben moved his family from the US to Sydney – playing 40 live shows around  Australia before touring wound down again. He’d started working on a new album while  touring 2019’s Quarter Century Classix – a record of cover versions of songs he loved as a  teenager (Pixies, The Breeders, Sebadoh, Smudge, Fugazi). 

His original plan to record with a live band became another victim of the pandemic. Ben  instead made the album remotely, with producers including Jon Brion, Shamir, Sadie Dupuis 

and Darren Seltmann and guests Zooey Deschanel, Christian Lee Hutson, Money Mark,  Megan Washington, Sally Seltmann, Georgia Maq and Eric D Johnson. 

“The collaborators come from different worlds. Some I met on the road or in clubs over the  years, like Money Mark or Jon Brion, others I met through social media, like Georgia and  Shamir. You gotta stay open. I was mentored by Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys, and those  artists made a conscious effort to stay connected to the edges of things, to younger artists.  Being connecting with young creative people is how you stay vibrant and inspired as you get  older. I always like to pay attention to what's new. I always want to hear something I haven't  heard." 

After years as an indie artist (including for his biggest album, 2005's Awake is the New  Asleep), Ben has signed an international deal with Warner to release I'm Fun! – exactly the  way he made it.  

"That's something I've earned through years of dong it my own way. Look, not everything I  do is going to be genius, but it's going to be interesting. Because I work from a place of  passion. I like to work with record labels that let me do my thing.” 

‘I'm Fun!’ features songs about surviving lockdown (of Parents Get High he says, "There's  something terrifying and exciting for kids knowing their parents are still exploring what  consciousness means"), celebrating being different (“Crooked Tree” a tune inspired by a  bedtime story about uniqueness that Tom Waits supposedly told his children when they  were small), and embracing positivity with first single ‘Born for This Bullshit’. "That song is like a We're All in This Together for 2021. Last year we felt all in this together. In  2021 - what’s needed is pure resilience.” he chuckles 

“‘Born for this Bullshit’ has got the same energy as some of my best songs. I reckon anyone  who is a casual listener will hear it and go ‘Oh yeah, that’s him. I remember’. Those types of  songs don’t come along every day.” 

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

But for people like me? It’s fun.”