Ben Lee. You just have to be a little bit jealous of a man who's dated Claire Danes.

Juliet, A So Called Life. Yum.

Anyway - this was a great show. I have no idea why, but I ended up being late to the show. I walked in on the 3rd song, freaked out and ran to the soundboard to get a feed. I think I ended up missing one of the my favorite songs - Cigarettes Will Kill You from the Breathing Toronados record.. which is actually my favorite Ben Lee album.. Listening to his records chronologically, you get a sense that this is where he started moving away from a singer-songwriter mentality (or maybe it was just youth) to more production heavy record. Cigarettes... is an especially killer example of his focus on production - with slews of background harmonies that build up over the course of the song.

I managed to get over being late - and really enjoyed the show. Ben played a variety of songs - old ones, new songs from his then unreleased record (Awake is the New Sleep), covers and even a song from his collaborative album "the Bens" with Ben Folds and Ben Kweller. Here are a couple of tracks from the show for your listening pleasure.

Float On Okay (Modest Mouse Cover)
Catch My Disease

But the best bit of the show came after he played Catch My Disease. The venue where Ben was playing (Fat Cats) actually has a fenced off "back yard" - people wander back there between sets and smoke cigarettes. So Ben grabs an acoustic and tells everyone to come out back with him, he wants to play outside! You can actually hear this go down in the Catch My Disease MP3 above.

So we all wander outside and sit down on the ground. Ben jumps up on a picnic table and plays a few songs for the crowd. I was actually video taping the whole thing, and at one point Ben hops off the table, keeps playing his song while he walks through the crowd and plays directly for the camera for about 30 seconds. Great stuff. I've actually been planning on dumping that song to avi format for a while. When I get my laptop back into commision ill post that clip.