A Listener's Journey: Travelling a path with Ben Lee

First published March 17, 2006.

I: REPRESENTATION:

I throw my hockey bag into the boot, then climb into the front passenger seat of Mum’s Holden Commodore. We drive out of the leafy grounds of Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School, past bushland coloured by eucalyptus trees and kangaroo paw plants and out onto Old Coast Road. In its entirety, the highway extends from Perth all the way south to Walpole, near the bottom of Western Australia. On this occasion, it’s use will be limited to the quiet 20 minute drive from high school back to my home town of Australind. Originally a failed English colony designed to combine qualities of both Australia and India, it was in my time a place of smaller adventure and scope. It is here that Dad had first taken the tricycle wheels off of my bike, here where I would hunt down tennis balls struck over the backyard fence in father-son cricket tussles which employed gumboots for wickets and firewood for bats.

As Mum chats loosely in my direction about my brother and the prospect of Dad going on another business trip to America, I duly change the radio station from the local news to Triple J, the public national youth station whose attentive listenership played a not insignificant part in any aspiring high schoolers shot at true popularity. I roll down my knee-length gold-and-blue socks in order to remove the sweaty, grimy leg guards which save young hockey players from the dual perils: fast-moving balls and errant flying sticks. As we pull into the community centre to scoop up my brother from his tutoring program, the deejay spins “Cigarettes Will Kill You,” Ben Lee’s breakthrough hit song. With its skipping electronic beat, irrepressible piano vamp and plaintive vocals, the song is only narrowly pipped by the Offspring’s unmistakably heartfelt composition—“Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”—for the number one song in Australia for 1998.

“It must feel good to stand above me / While I make you so proud of me /It must feel good that I’m now gone / I wish I could say that everyone was wrong,” Ben sings during the song’s climax. And I sing along, shielding the glare of the bright Australian sun with my hand, mulling over pubescent crushes on girls in blue uniform frocks with names like Nicola and Cassandra. At the time, balancing a routine built around piano eisteddfods, hawk-like observation of the hem length of schoolgirl skirts and birthday parties (often a cover for 14 year-old pyromaniacal gallivanting), I was consuming a pop diet limited almost exclusively to heavy rock along the lines of Korn and Nirvana. But that afternoon, something about the singer’s straight-forwardness and fragility resonated sharply with me.

II. REVIVAL:

I slide the two thin wires of my iPod earbuds inside my scarf. Leavng my Globalization and Governance course, I mention to my professor an apparent theoretical bias in the assigned reading. Ascending the spiraling stairway, packed in amongst dozens of undergraduates adorned in red University of Maryland sweatshirts, I glance over headlines involving off-campus robbery and basketball spectator etiquette (or lack thereof) in the campus daily. “Catch My Disease,” the lead single from Ben’s most recent album and one of the most dangerously catchy pieces of bubblegum pop this decade, re-enters my aural stream. I walk across the streaming sidewalks and into the student union, where I will volunteer an hour at a vegetarian co-op, making sandwiches for computer programmer types from Italy and singers in training from the Ukraine. In the midst of completing a degree in the often somber field of international politics amongst classes peppered with future Defense Department Osama-hunters, the warmth and purity of Ben’s vocal offers startling contrast to my immediate surrounds. “So please / Open your heart / And catch my disease,” he pleads. (Live, courtesy of Joy from Pinkbeltrage)

And the disease he speaks of is jubilation. Awake is the New Sleep, which won Record of the Year at the most recent Australian music industry awards, is filled with sugary, pick-me-up slices of tuneful secular preaching which champions “making eye contact with strangers” and being “all in this together.” Which, in this time of Christian anti-ism and Islamophobafascism, seems strangely revelatory.

III: REALIZATION:

A chill wind blows through the deserted cobbled streets of Fells Point as we make our way from local music oasis Soundgarden to Fletcher’s Bar in Baltimore. It takes approximately two minutes for me to meet another Aussie expat, a rangy bloke from Melbourne whose accent displays far less sway to the hegemonic tongue of his adopted community than my own. Inside, Ben receives a good-humoured reception from the mostly 20-something, mostly white, mostly female audience. Wearing trousers that I can’t imagine him paying more than seven dollars for at some tour stop thrift store, grandpa-meets-Jay Z white reeboks, an unruly tangle of Jewfro hair and a broad smile, he looks comfortable and occasionally ecstatic on stage. His partner on stage, a disarmingly cute red-head who “kicks a deep groove” while seated on a cabron, reminds me of some Australian actress whose name is not Nicole Kidman.

“I’m going to make everybody feel as not-cool as possible,” he says jokingly, following an obscure kick-off song from one of his early albums. “If you were a kitty / I’d be the litter / But I don’t think that’s a suitable metaphor,” I croak along, in my flu-strangled tenor. The crowd warms quickly to songs from his latest album, laughter erupting at Ben’s self-deprecating stage humour and reverent silence upheld for the ballads. On numerous occasions, he stops mid-way through songs to provide impromptu back-up vocal advice to the crowd or to take suggestions for improvised lyrics. The strength of his stage presence and mandate is readily apparent: as requested, the show is almost completely devoid of pretension or indier-than-thou oneupsmanship. The Johns Hopkins couple, of which the Y chromosone half is sporting an unfortunate double Polo popped collar ensemble, leave early. The one goon whose attempt at the sideswept emo coiffe is actively failing stands alone as the sole audience member who refuses to give in to the geeky charms and simplicity of Ben’s songs.

After the show, I ask Ben about his recent interest in Eastern spirituality and the personal growth that is clearly apparent in his energy on stage. Avoiding affiliation of any sort, he stresses the importance of the individual’s own journey. “For me, it’s really about unconditional love,” he offers. When I explained to him how I recently took his song “Gamble Everything for Love” a little too literally during a painful recently aborted relationship, he provides similar guidance: “Have the courage to take your own path, to follow something you believe in,” he explains.

The next morning, I receive a call. After an apprehensive week of waiting, I have been hired full-time as a development officer for CHF International. Soon afterward, my thoughts began to stretch out beyond the confines of 21-year-old existential vocation crisis and towards the people I entered the business for in the first place. I am reminded of three-year-old Carla’s playful hands, oceans away in Timor-Leste. Of the unconditional love and the precious gifts that have been showered upon me. And the dream of seeing those gifts showered upon thousands of others, from the unemployed of the West Bank and Mongolia, to the HIV-ravaged of Rwanda and Honduras.

“Tell me the truth and I’ll tell you the truth / If you gamble everything for love / You’re gonna be alright,” Ben sings. It isn’t the first time our thoughts have fused together in the sort of listener/performer dialectic popular music is built upon. And it certainly won’t be the last.