“I’m generally interested in things I haven’t done” – Ben Lee breaks down 20 years of Awake Is The New Asleep.

In 2005, Australia was covered in infectious diseases as a national outbreak sent the media into frenzy.

Fear not, it wasn’t pertaining to a major health crisis. The carrier was Ben Lee and the widespread virus was from his song ‘Catch My Disease’ from the album Awake Is The New Asleep. 

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20 years later, Lee is honouring the album by spreading it around to the far corners of Australia on an eleven date tour, including stop-ins to Castlemaine to play the Theatre Royal on Thursday 9 October, Torquay Hotel on Friday 10 October and Melbourne’s Northcote Theatre on Saturday 11 October.

The tour is making Lee revisit and relearn the album that catapulted him to household name.

 

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“My songs are not that difficult. They all at the most have four chords in them and I’ve kept up to date with those four chords pretty easily so that shouldn’t be too bad,” he laughs.

“I think it’s more the emotional challenge of occupying the same space as that album. I’m really interested in that, it’s nothing I can plan for or anticipate but I think the journey of that album was a very specific journey in my life at a certain point and for the listeners too and I’m really excited to find my way into that and see what it sounds like.”

The album is transportive taking listeners back to a time, perhaps in their youth when they would listen to the album on their iPod nano. For Lee, nostalgia doesn’t drive the song choices of his sets generally. Instead he has to tap into the feeling he had when writing the songs, and connect with the context more to want to jump back in.

“It seems very non-linear. There have been times where I will be touring and just suddenly remember a song I wrote when I was 18 and just start planning it again. I don’t know if I can make sense of why that song becomes relevant to me again with the exception of every show I have to play ‘Cigarettes May Kill You’, ‘Catch My Disease’ and ‘Gamble Everything for Love’. Everything else I only play songs that I feel I can connect with,” he explains.

“I’d never even been to one of these types of shows where people celebrate an album and play it all the way through, until I saw The Lemonhead’s play It’s A Shame About Ray. It’s not about the songs but it’s about the order in which they are played. For me growing up, not so much any more, we listened to albums in full in order, the way they were intended to be played. There’s certain emotional and muscle reactions that have to do with the next song to come in, and I’m really excited to play with that.”

It was a surprise that Lee decided to honour his landmark album with an anniversary tour. Lee is notoriously never one to feed into the fans wants, and his progressive nature means he is always focused on his next creative output.  

“It was sort of an experiment, to be honest. I’m generally interested in things I haven’t done and twenty years for this album felt like ‘Okay if I’m going to do it this is the time’, but honestly part of the reason I felt comfortable, I don’t say this as a way to brag or anything, but culturally my career is very relevant still. I’m part of the dialogue culturally still. If I wasn’t I would be very conflicted about celebrating the past. I know people are interested in what I’m saying and the way I think and what I have to say about culture. It felt to me that I could afford to indulge the audience a little bit in something they care about and some of it is that as I’m getting older, I have more bandwidth for doing things for other people. When I was younger I didn’t do anything that the audience wanted because I didn’t care, I was like ‘I’m here for me’. It’s the right time and right place.”

Ben Lee is still very much an active figure in the music sector, not only with creating new music, like with ‘Lover’ last year, but through his podcast with wife Iona Skye, Weirder Together. Together the two discuss important topics pertaining to the cultural landscape across music, pop culture, politics and more, as well as launching Skye’s book, Say Everything: A Memoir.

He is also collaborating with Melbourne’s Dealers of God for a song and Sydney-siders Funeral, along with contributing music to a “money-grab” Netflix Christmas movie. On his own solo songwriting Lee is taking it each day as it comes.

“I remember once I was in between projects and I was saying to the author Tim Robbins, who I had collaborated with, “I’m kind of scared, I’m in this period when I don’t know what’s about to come next,” and he was like “how exciting”. I’m in that period and in receptivity mode and when it happens it happens.”

For full tour dates and ticketing for the upcoming anniversary tour, head here.