Ben Lee is coming to Perth this month for the Escape in the Park Festival. He told OUTinPerth’s Zoe Carter about crafting performances for festival events…

‘I aspire to create something that’s both intimate and communal at the same time. And the intimate side I don’t really need an audience there for … It’s just about me singing, intimately, from the heart. But there’s a whole other side to my music that’s like ‘We’re all in this together’ and ‘Catch my disease’ and songs like that, that are hopefully giving people a sense that they’re part of a community and feeling connected to each other. Often what I’ll do for those kind of songs, is I’ll bring a lot of friends into the studio, because essentially you’re trying to create your own festival vibe. It has to work with 20 of your friends before it will work with 20,000 people!

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‘I guess I focus on those songs more when I’m playing a festival because it can be a little bit hard to draw the audience in super intimately. Playing the Commonwealth Games…to 80,000 people, was something that I’ve never experienced. And you know, if you start doing those things enough, you start thinking like U2 and crafting those moments in the studio to pull out. Until I’d played big audiences like that I couldn’t imagine having to write a chorus that could stand up to that experience, so it does add a different goal for you a little bit.

‘Writing songs from experiences – That’s the best part of it, I love that. The hard side of it is that there’s a sad sort of a truth about us as human beings, we can often connect in a crowd with feelings of anger, aggression and violence, than we can about connectedness. But that’s just something that I’ve come to deal with, You’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but at the end of the day I’d rather have the experience of playing something that’s quite honest and positive. I don’t know if I could, just for the sake of it, just to get the crowd really into it., play something that wasn’t me, you know?!

‘Common sense of community or something bigger – I think it’s one thing for the musician to make the commitment, and another for the audience! At the end of the day, I still think a lot of people go to a rock show just to get drunk, and party!’

Ben Lee is playing at Escape to the Park on Nov 29. For a chance to win a double pass to the event log on to www.www.outinperth.com