Weirder Together with Ben Lee and Ione Skye

No guest this week — just Ben and Ione, back from half the Australian leg of the Two Most Annoying People You Love Tour with Georgia Maq. Ben recaps a Melbourne show that stopped the room: Georgia singing "Rearranging Chairs on the Titanic" in front of her family for the first time, breaking down mid-song, her sister calling out from the crowd. Ben describes playing through it like a "Werner Herzog director" — wanting to preserve the moment while also quietly directing traffic. Also this week: Kate gave Ben a signed early edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which sent him down a rabbit hole back to a night at Sean Lennon's house and a poem that became one of his songs. Ben and Ione unpack the viral lesbian bar mask mandate story — and why it might actually be the left's most useful mirror in years. Plus: Sylvester Stallone's surprising New York Times interview, a Bukowski side nobody saw coming, and why going to the MoMA every day when you're broke and lost might be the best advice anyone's ever given. Next episode: coming to you from Tokyo. Dive deeper into our world at https://weirdertogether.substack.com

This week we're joined by Daine — and if you don't know her yet, you will soon. She's the Australian artist who's the darling of the pop underground, and her album drops November 6th. We talk about being 16 and sitting across from a major label exec who told her she was going to be bigger than Billie Eilish. It didn't happen. She's grateful. We talk about what she calls her three-tier music success pyramid — quality at the bottom, tolerance for failure in the middle, and the thing most people won't admit at the top. She explains it better than we could, and we all believe in the best Martin Scorsese quote you've heard in a while. We also get into the album itself, which was made when she and her producer were deeply in love, and is being rolled out now that they're exes. "It's like a child of divorce," she says. "And it's this really pure, beautiful thing." Plus: the nepo baby allegations she cannot shake (her parents are, in her words, "radical Marxist academics"), why being conventionally attractive works against you in indie music, what it was like watching Nina go from first-show friend to Coachella, and Ben's encounter with Russell Crowe at a New York restaurant urinal that changed his life.

This week: the first-ever returning guest on Weirder Together; Georgia Maq is officially in the Two Timers Club. Three years into LA, Georgia talks about why Melbourne’s cool music scene made her feel like a loser with an acoustic guitar, and why a city with no healthcare turns out to produce the most intense friendships. She reads Kelly’s book for the first time, sitting in our house, and finds herself as a central character. Her verdict on the band dynamic: “Camp Cope was an airplane with one pilot seat. Me and Thommo were both fighting to be the pilot. Kelly was in the back taking a Valium and drinking red wine.” Georgia’s dad was the lead singer of Redgum. She talks about the guitar he gave her at 15, the cancer he hid, and how estrogen during treatment turned him into the person she’d always wanted him to be. The guitar she plays today is the one she was ungrateful for at 15. Also: why she’s going all black after rewatching Walk the Line, her plan to play a youth detention centre on this Australian tour, Camp Cope’s Tiny Desk story (they had no idea what Tiny Desk was), and why AI gives us four years and what to do with borrowed time. https://weirdertogether.substack.com

This week: Sydney weather as business class: once you’ve had it, going back to coach is brutal….and the ethics of putting your dog to sleep, covered in the first four minutes. We went to Cybele Malinowski’s photography show “Deep Fake”, portraits of Las Vegas celebrity impersonators, including the story of one MJ impersonator who took a homeless man under his wing and taught him the craft. Plus our Vegas stories: Ione at the Hard Rock Hotel opening in the early 90s with Sofia Coppola, Stephen Dorff and Zoe Cassavetes (the politics of free chips for famous people), and Ben waking up at Lollapalooza 93 to what may be the worst smell in human history. We hung with Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson: his song is going viral on TikTok across American college campuses, and he shared a piece of songwriting wisdom we can’t stop thinking about. Ben is processing his hair transplant fork in the road. We fell down an Etsy witches rabbit hole. And we had a full psychic moment playing Rummy Tiles. Weirder Together is officially calling it: collective Joan Armatrading rediscovery moment incoming.

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