Ben Lee Celebrating First Valentine's as a Newlywed

Posted on Feb 9th 2009 3:00PM by Jolie Lash
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It's a good month for Aussie singer-songwriter Ben Lee.

He'll celebrate his first Valentine's Day as a newlywed, having tied the knot in India with actress Ione Skye a little over a month ago.

"We go two or three times a year," Lee tells Spinner of the country. "There's a temple there and the spiritual teacher that we go to visit [is there], and it just felt like the right way to enter into this next major phase of our lives."

Lee, who lives in L.A., said the couple invited around 300 guests, but only around 50, the amount they expected, traveled across the world for the traditional ceremony.

"We were surprised by which ones did come," he says. "They often weren't the ones we expected. India is a huge psychological leap for people to make. People have a lot of fear about travelling to India because it does represent a lifestyle that is radically different and a heritage that is very dissimilar to Western culture."

Eastern spiritual ideals weren't just a part of Lee's nuptials. They are peppered throughout his album, including on the record's second cut, 'Surrender,' which, at first, sounds like a love ode to his new wife.

"It's actually more of a song about the universe," Lee asserts. "It's a love song to life. I mean, it can be perceived as a love song to a person, but I really wrote it as a love song to the process of existence. Devotion -- it's all the same whether you have devotion to a person or devotion to music or to nature or to God or whatever you call it."

Recorded last year, the record finds Lee examining femininity (thus the title, 'The Rebirth of Venus'), and he admits it bares the influence of the women around him.

"My wife and my step-daughter Kate have been a huge influence," Lee says. "There's an amazing sense of creativity that flows from both of them that's incredibly natural ... and it's not just when they sit down to do a drawing or when they sing a song. It's the way they dress themselves in the morning. Mother and daughter, they both have this similar trait of being inherently super creative and going with the flow, and to me that opened me up to a new sense of playfulness."

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