Ben Lee -- canceled

Ben Lee's rock 'n' roll career started with a blur of headlines centered around his youth (15) and his famous fans (Thurston Moore, Beastie Boys, Liz Phair). It was a publicist's dream.

Now 30, Lee long ago settled into being a working songwriter and bandleader, albeit one who still makes headlines (marrying Ione Skye, getting dissed by fellow Australian rocker Bernard Fanning).

Lee's eighth album, “The Rebirth of Venus,” drops Feb. 10 and is a thoughtful look at a world that has lost touch with compassion and its feminine nature — in other words, the Divine Mother has left the building. It's also damn catchy.

Lee performs Friday at Bellarmine University's Frazier Hall, along with the local band Chemic. We caught up with him in Los Angeles, where he's now a legal immigrant.

The new album takes on some big subjects. Did anything in particular spark your thinking about these issues, especially the feminine aspect?

 I spend a lot of time in India at this temple for The Divine Mother. As with a lot of Eastern thought, it encouraged me to deal with a lot of programming I had about the universe and God and nature as being, like, this angry, vengeful, judgmental world we live in and to sort of reconfigure the way I look at life and nature and God as a more compassionate experience.

I think from there I started realizing that that applied to a lot of different things we face in the world, you know, the destruction of the natural world, the way we get into so many wars, the way we deal with people below the poverty line, the way we deal with ourselves. There's a tremendous lack of compassion and nurturing.

Do you see the record as a way of hopefully starting a trigger effect and getting people to think about some of these issues?

The whole thing about the effect your music has on the world, it's often very intangible. People come up to you at shows or write something on a message board to let you know that your music has broadened their minds or helped them in some way, but ultimately it's the personal experience of making music that explores the issues I need to explore that really has to bring the satisfaction. 'Cause you really never know what it's going to do. I guess for me the general feeling with whatever music I do is that I want it to be a service to people, to give them a little hope and a little inspiration.

When you were making the album, did you think about the fact that it would come out close to Obama taking office, or I guess when you hoped he be taking office.

I wasn't sure, 'cause (in) April of last year it was all still looking kind of dicey. I think I was aware that a lot of things I wanted to sing about were on a lot of young people's minds. You know, I'm an immigrant to America and I really believe in what this country is at its heart and could be, and I think that's the same feeling that got Obama elected.

Do you ever look back over your catalog of songs and see a definite arc in terms of style and subject matter?

I definitely see a common thread, and that is the search for authenticity of the moment. I've always been really concerned with trying to find my voice… and hopefully the thread I see is someone getting closer to who they are and obviously that journey has a lot of ups and downs.

I guess you really have grown up in public, and in your songs.

Yeah, that's been pretty weird. (Laughs)… At first it was “Ben Lee's so young,” then “Ben Lee's signed with the Beastie Boys,” then “Ben Lee's dating Claire Danes,” then we broke up. Now it's “Ben Lee has a guru in India” (Laughs). It's always some story, but I don't really worry about it too much. You have to let the public have their fantasy.