Ben Lee and Josh Radnor Are Touring and Wait, They’re a Band and WHAT, There’s an Album?!

The passage of time in our lives is often marked by our proximity to world-shaking events.

As such, I will never forget where I was when I heard Aussie songwriter Ben Lee and American actor Josh Radnor were an acoustic folk duo with an album under their belt, a ravenous following in Brazil and an upcoming Australian tour.

(It was today, and I am currently wrapped in an emergency foil blanket.)

How can one capture such a paradigm-shifting revelation in mere words? Everything I once thought I knew about the limits of acoustic folk, the musical skills of non-NPH How I Met Your Mother alumni, and, indeed, Brazil, was rocked by the casual discovery of an online ad for Radnor & Lee’s upcoming Australian tour, which didn’t even come with a blurry ‘content warning’ like you sometimes get on Facebook. I was unprepared.

Content warning: Here's the confronting ad in question.

Turns out Radnor & Lee actually recorded and released a collaborative album in 2017. I should have known this was a thing. The clues were there all along. Radnor is now starring in Rise, a TV show about an English teacher who harbours a not-so-secret love of musicals. But I was blinded by his character’s catastrophic incompetence as both a theatre director and caretaker of children, unable to see that this was an additional opportunity for Radnor to showcase his silky singing voice.

He’s far from the first actor to try his hand at music, and not without talent. But there’s something unusual and unexpected about the pairing that we just can’t shake. Maybe because an 'acoustic folk duo with Ben Lee' is exactly Ted Mosby’s kind-of band. Maybe it’s because Ben Lee’s previous singing partners were the known-for-singing talents Ben Folds and Ben Kweller. Or maybe it’s because, on their album’s first track, "Be Like the Being" (actual title), Radnor sings leeeeeeeeeeeeeead?

Radnor & Lee’s Facebook page has more than 20,000 fans and several dozen photographs of the two in Simon & Garfunkel poses. There’s even a shot of them standing before a sell-out crowd in São Paulo.

Is there a music video? You better believe there’s a music video. Here’s one they made with their legions of fans from across the globe. (I repeat: If you, like me, are only just discovering this duo, we are exceptionally late to the party.)

They also jammed in a van one time:

Is the music being made by Liberal Arts director Josh Radnor and Aussie music mainstay Ben Lee any good? There is no answer, only because most reasonable minds would melt halfway through that question, and I can’t reach any kind of conclusion without tripping over the fact that this is a real thing and not some fever dream.

I mean, their music is certainly very gentle. It sounds like... beards. I don’t think I like it very much. But so many Brazilians adore Radnor & Lee, and would an entire South American nation gaslight me?

Anyway, Radnor & Lee are playing The Triffid in Brisbane on 17 May, the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne on 19 May and Metro Theatre in Sydney on 20 May. Get your tickets now?

Photo: YouTube (Jam In the Van)