Ben Lee's Guide To Life
Being a serial hit-maker must be a strange experience. You create a song you like and put it out in the world. Then people listen to it, react to it, and react to it again – and inevitably a TikTok dance emerges. In 2021, you can’t really control where that song of yours will end up, and in which ways people will receive it – artists just have to let go and enjoy the ride. Ben Lee knows this unease better than most – his 15-year-old hit “Catch My Disease”, having recently enjoyed a pandemic revival as an ironic anti-anthem.
All of this is to say that Ben Lee is, at 43, a bona fide grown up. He’s navigated several huge hits, made a ridiculous 20-plus albums and performed Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” in a Professor costume on live television for ‘fun’. He is – as the first single from his forthcoming album puts it – “Born For This Bullshit”.
Given his many successes, Ben seems like the perfect person to ask: how can we do it? What can we glean from his daily existence that will undoubtedly help us fumble our own way through? How (but seriously how) can we get to sleep quicker?
Here is Ben Lee, here to save us from ourselves as our next Guide To Life columnist. Thank fucking god.
Content you’d recommend
My fave show in the last few years is “The Show About the Show” a web series by Caveh Zahedi. Every episode is about the making of the one before it. It’s super meta and awesome. Watch it in order! Musically, I love everything Georgia Maq is doing – Camp Cope, her solo work, vaxxing people! All good things.
Ways to save some dollars
Hot chips are a full meal!!!
Spotify playlist you’d recommend
Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion. It's all drone and noise stuff, this is the playlist that accompanies the book by the same name. It’s got great stuff like The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Ravi Shankar, Coltrane, Velvet Underground, Butthole Surfers and Flipper. Great way to enter the void and revel in it.
Food combination few people know about, but should
Peanut butter and avocado. I don’t know why people think it’s weird. So good. Just a scoop of peanut butter and then straight into half an avo. Pure magic!
Stress reliever you’d recommend
Exercise, sex and jumping in the ocean. These three are an incredible combo. I try and do all of them every day. 2/3 aint bad though.
The best product of all time
Guitars. I have a new one from Gibson, a beautiful J45 that I got painted neon pink. It’s masculine and feminine at the same time. Every time I walk past it in my house it makes me happy.
How do you sleep?
I have certain podcasts that feel so intimate they help me relax. Like Thought Spiral or Threedom. The relationships between the hosts and the imagined ones I have with them. It's like being a kid falling asleep in the backseat of your parents car while they are chatting. But you gotta beware of loud theme song stingers!
One way you’d recommend trying to make the world a better place
Start thinking of your life in terms of being a “value-adding” person. The details don't really matter, it's all about when you show up in a room, being someone that contributes rather than draining [the positive energy]. The details will figure themselves out later. Be someone that adds good vibes to a room, and it will amaze you the rooms you will be invited into. Rooms where solutions are formed.
Ben Lee’s new single “Born For This Bullshit” is out everywhere now. The singer-songwriter's new album I'm Fun! will arrive mid-next year.
Intro written by Alice Griffin, editor-in-chief of MTV.com.au. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @_alicegriffin.
