Weirder Together with Ben Lee and Ione Skye

We’re back in Sydney from Japan (still mourning the bidets) and we have a special guest in town from LA — our friend Franki Chan, founder of IHEARTCOMIX.
Franki started IHEARTCOMIX in 2003 throwing parties with Steve Aoki in the indie sleaze era, with the Cobra Snake taking photos and MySpace making it global. Within a year of that first party, Franki went from living in his car to being a global DJ. He and Steve Aoki had a very public and very competitive split — Cinespace Tuesdays vs. Check Your Ponytail, same night, same scene — “there’s a limited series in it” — but the competition helped make LA one of the most important music scenes of the 2000s.
Now 22 years later, IHEARTCOMIX is a creative marketing agency behind campaigns for Marvel, Olivia Rodrigo and Johnny Depp. Franki literally built a park — trees, grass, the whole thing — for Olivia Rodrigo’s album campaign. He’s producing the first US premiere Toho has ever done for Godzilla in 65 years. And he came up on a political DIY punk scene, which is what makes his arc so interesting: the guy who wouldn’t sell out is now working at the biggest scale in entertainment. His take: “As the internet happened, we won. Why are we fighting the old fights?”
We also talk about the philosophy of nightlife, how every major relationship Franki has ever made he met by being out, including the time he randomly sat next to a stranger at a South by Southwest after-party who turned out to write all the modern Spider-Man films. Plus: Franki gives us his honest advice on where Weirder Together goes from here — and why being based in Sydney is a bigger advantage than we might think.

We're recording from the Sequence Hotel in Miyashita Park, Shibuya. First time back in Tokyo in over two decades — Ione's mom and our teenager are both along for the trip.
Ben wraps the Two Most Annoying People You Love tour with Georgia Maq: why this tour was harder to sell than Awake Is In Your Sleep but a true creative victory, and why he ended the last night in Canberra saying there are only three artists in his career he's ever felt truly safe sharing a stage with for two hours.
He also saw Digger in IMAX on the final day of the tour, called Ione afterwards slightly shaken, and is now firmly in the camp that it is a bomb because it's difficult — not because it's bad.
Plus: the vintage band shirt economy in Tokyo (Minutemen tees, $400 a pop), Ione's mom being captivated by a radio show broadcast from a Shibuya window, Rick Rubin doing prayer beads at Fred Siegel during Ione's first nausea-free meal of her pregnancy, and why Australian artists should stop chasing LA and start building in Asia.
Up next: Ghibli Park in Nagoya, an in-store at Flake Records in Osaka with the Shonen Knife ladies, and a gig with Mophing People.

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.
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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