‘What am I about?’ Ben Lee takes on QAnon, the wellness industry and himself
On 4 December, Ben Lee tweeted in a genre that has become familiar this year: “Day 0 of our mandatory 14 day military hotel lockdown in Sydney. Will do our best not to go insane. Will keep you posted!”
After living through 2020 in Los Angeles, where Covid-19 cases continue to rise at alarming rates, the Australian musician and his family – wife Ione Skye Lee and two daughters – looked at the road ahead and changed course.
“I think if anything, this entire year has been about pivoting, seeing opportunity in darkness, and sort of dancing,” Lee tells me over the phone. “It’s almost like our move to Australia was rooted in the idea of trying to demonstrate, for the kids, that you can change your plan.”
A random message from a stranger illustrated that again. Max Quinn, a musician who works at Triple J, had seen Lee’s tweet and had an idea.
“I was sitting at the pub and was like, ‘I’m going to DM Ben Lee and ask him if he wants to do a podcast every day for two weeks’, and within half an hour he was like, ‘Yep, cool, let’s do it.’”
The result, a 13-episode podcast called Ben Lee in Quarantine began recording the following day.
Max Quinn and Ben Lee recorded Ben Lee in Quarantine podcast over Zoom for each day of Lee’s self-isolation in Sydney.
Far from a classic interview with a musician (listeners are spared any version of “tell me about your new album”-style questions), Quinn used the parameters (one 30-minute phone call each afternoon, and little to no contact between) to dig into Lee’s life, persona, surprising left-turns and personal campaigns to right wrongs.
In opening up to the questions, Lee also dissects the nature of what it means to be susceptible, or vulnerable – whether that’s to an audience, the music industry, a guru, a romantic partner or a podcast host.
For Quinn, the project was about filling in the gaps in the image of an artist who’s well-known in many respects and entirely misunderstood in others, while getting a grasp on his creative impulses.
“He’s a man who has been in and out of my periphery for 15 years. Whether that be for Catch My Disease or Ripe when I was [a teenager], or three or four years ago being like, ‘Why is Ben Lee making essential oils videos on YouTube? What’s happening here?’”
Those divergences in Lee’s career as an artist apparently include time spent in different cults and a side project in cryptocurrency; they make headlines and conjure scepticism because we only know him as a musical artist. More recently, Lee’s affiliation with the multi-level marketing scheme dōTERRA culminated in a standoff between Lee and the brand after another proponent of their essential oils – celebrity chef-turned-rightwing conspiracy theorist Pete Evans – posted neo-Nazi imagery online.
Lee says that his own experience in cults, and time spent under the influence of a guru, have made him highly attuned to the link between spirituality, wellness and the slide into conspiracy and radicalisation. He has also publicly taken on QAnon this year.
Ben Lee
(@benleemusic)Hi QAnon I’ve been in a cult before and from experience I can see you are one love Ben
As the seventh episode of the Ben Lee in Quarantine podcast, “Serial Killer Groupies”, comes to a close, Quinn and Lee discuss these layers to the musician’s public image, and wonder at what point they might begin to alienate audiences. Lee says he’s finally accepted the fact that his brand, in whatever form it takes, must “include [his] own eclecticism and [his] fickleness”.
As he tells Quinn: “Whatever version of capitalism I was living in [in the past], I was not a good match for it unless it gave me the freedom to be as weird as I wanted to be.”
This podcast experiment, which treats the footnotes in Lee’s career as distinct chapters of their own, relishes in the weirdness.
Ben Lee’s recording set-up in Sydney’s hotel quarantine in December 2020. Photograph: Supplied by Ben Lee
Over the course of 13 episodes, Lee expands on his experiences as an artist moving through these complicated and often highly secretive spaces, and in doing so reveals the mental and emotional links between them.
“[I’m] a little bit of a sceptic when it comes to spirituality or psychedelics, or whatever it happens to be,” Quinn tells the Guardian. “I wanted to know what influenced the decision-making process of this incredibly affable man who I’ve come to quite appreciate as a person and as a friend over the last couple of weeks, where I just think, like, ‘How did you get there?’”
Explaining what drew him to the podcast, Lee says: “I think the longer a career goes on, the more dynamic a person’s life is. And for me, there are all these chapters that I might’ve gotten to touch on in interviews over the course of my career, but I haven’t had the chance yet to examine them as a whole and say, ‘What am I about? Why have I been attracted to all these things? What are the common threads?’”
With a career now over a quarter-century long, he posits, now is the time to start taking a step back and examining the larger arcs connecting his “attraction to different extreme influences or extreme forces”.
As someone who provided a safe and playful space, Quinn also offered the vital combination, Lee says, of respect without being “overly reverential”.
“He was willing to attempt to deconstruct me – and also it helped me deconstruct myself.”
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Guardian can be found here ***
