Ben Lee had barely cracked the puberty code when he fronted renowned Aussie alt-rock combo Noise Addict, and as a well-weathered 16-year-old, he began his debut solo album, the mature yet still naive Grandpaw Would. Lee’s third album, Breathing Tornados, garnered best male artist and album of the year nominations in Australia. After 2002’s big-selling hey you. yes you., Lee started his own label and released the most upbeat album in his increasingly dark catalog, 2005’s Awake Is The New Sleep, requiring him to compose acceptance speeches for best male artist, best independent release and single of the year wins at home. Lee’s impressive string of successes continued with 2007’s Ripe, but the streak stopped with 2009’s The Rebirth Of Venus. The quasi-concept album of Lee’s ruminations on women was almost universally derided as half-baked philosophical twaddle set to a weirdly diverse pop soundtrack. Simultaneously, he was also examining the inherent power of dreams with Dr. Jan Lloyd, whose death last year inspired Lee to again brave the concept-album waters with Deeper Into Dream (Dangerbird), a loosely threaded set about the mind movies our brains script, direct and discard every single night. Lee will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Lee: Dude, I was incredibly late to the Twitter bandwagon. But I’m having so much fun with it. It’s incredible having the direct access to people when I have new music, ideas or other people’s work I want to disseminate. It kind of caught me off-guard that for so many people, Twitter is like a part-time job. Especially comedians. Wow, the pressure to be funny all day long must be driving these funny people to even darker places than the ones they usually inhabit. Anyway, for now, I’m totally enjoying the interactivity and feeling my world getting smaller by the moment. I was super uncool to join Twitter so late, and I’m going to be even uncooler for talking about it on magnetmagazine.com now as if it’s the latest thing! Anyway, I’m @benleemusic, so tweet me…
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AN4_N5N52U
