STACK #214 August 2022

MUSIC FEATURE

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Joel [Madden] saying ,"Our favourite artists are Rancid, Ben Lee and Morrissey,” and I just thought, 'OK, the times they are a-changing!' Now, none of it matters. It’s a big, cultural, cosmic soup. “Stronger and stranger every day” ( Crooked Tree ) is a wonderful philosophy to live by. Do you think those two descriptors aren't combined as often as they deserve to be?

Yeah, my goal has always been to become more and more idiosyncratic, more unique, and at the same time more accessible, more successful, as I get older. There are lots of different ways you can live yourself. I say, get weirder and get better. That feels like the right trajectory for me. V i n y l c o l o u r T B C

Prince of positivity Ben Lee has crafted a rather astonishing guide to life in his musical manifesto I'M FUN! .We put some questions to the insightful singer-songwriter; read the whole Q&A online. Words Zoë Radas BEN LEE I'M FUN! by Ben Lee is out Aug 19, including on llimited edition glow-in-the-dark vinyl, via Warner.

The poorly-recorded, lo-fi, piano and-voice bits in My Adventure inexplicably add so much heart to an already heart-chockers love song.Why did you decide to include them? Thank you. Yeah, I love those. Darren and Sally Seltmann had done all of this beautiful production on that song, and it was so lush and thick that I wanted to contrast it. It’s a funny song, 'cos the choruses actually slow down a little tempo-wise, which is something I haven’t done much. And because it was getting slower, it didn't feel right to make them bigger. So I pulled out my iPhone, popped it on the piano, and sang and played the choruses. Then we just dropped them into the track, and it was a bit magical. Thanks for noticing that!

fun. I guess it’s more just acknowledging what we are really talking about when we talk about art – we are talking about ourselves. But I have watched that kind of tribalising slowly dying. I remember the Good Charlotte guys were one of the first of the next generation of artists I met that had more of a 'streaming' mentality with music, rather than my generation, that had a 'record store' mentality. I remember

The excellent LikeThis or LikeThat pooh poohs binaries in music. Back when you were an A-sehole , what did you consider the musical yin to your yang? Well, that song doesnt exactly argue against the binary. Sure, it acknowledges that it is arbitrary and silly, but it still is useful in terms of explaining our values, dreams, fears... These are the games that make culture and society

Continue reading the full Q&A online at stack.com.au

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We look back at the stories behind some of our favourite album covers.

Joni Mitchell, Hejira (1976)

L ong before Photoshop (at least 12 years in fact), Joni Mitchell combined a portrait of herself taken by famed photographer Norman Seef (in which she looked "haunted, like an [Ingmar] Bergman figure") with 14 other photos shot by her long-time friend and artistic collaborator Joel Berenstein. Berenstein captured these

moody images while he and Mitchell were stopped at Wisconsin's foggy and frozen Lake Mendota, after a virulent ice storm. Wishing to communicate the album's themes of "melancholy and movement" and "romantic winter", Mitchell used an instrument called a Camera Lucida (nicknamed "Lucy") to play with the arrangements

and sizes of the photos, eventually shooting one big negative with all the resized photos in place. "If I had done the cover as a collage, it would've looked much more primitive," she has explained. She's also said it's the album cover of which she's most proud: "A lot of work went into that," she attested in 1994.

10 AUGUST 2022

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