Ben Lee takes in Capitol View

"I have to call you back," says Ben Lee from California before quickly hanging up.

The 38-year-old Australian-born singer-songwriter was on vacation with his wife, actress Ione Skye, and their daughter in California when his attention was called away from a phone chat about his coming show in Little Rock.

"We're actually in an RV and had to make a sudden stop and people went flying through the RV," he says with a laugh after reconnecting a few minutes later. No worries, though, everyone is fine. "This is only our second day in an RV, so that's probably why we had people flying through it."

Lee and family were traveling between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, Calif., earlier this month, but this week he'll be in Arkansas for an intimate set at Capitol View Studios.

As best he can recall, this will be his first trip to Arkansas, though he has a connection to the state. Lee, along with his longtime pal and fellow Australian Lara Meyerratken and Dinosaur Jr.'s Lou Barlow, recorded "Let Your Heart Decide It" for '79 LTD, a compilation album released by Arkansas label Thick Syrup Records that also included BMX Bandits, Damien Juardo, Mike Watt and others.

Presented by Thick Syrup, Saturday's show is a one-off and isn't part of a larger tour.

"[Thick Syrup founder Travis McElroy] is part of our extended community of like-minded musical people," says Lee, who has lived in the United States for the past 20 years. "Every now and then I post on Facebook that I'm open to doing shows if they can work out, and this worked out."

As a teenager in the suburbs of Sydney, Lee was part of the punk outfit Noise Addict, whose acoustic "I Wish I Was Him" was a gleeful and loving shot at stoner heartthrob Evan Dando of The Lemonheads. The band was signed to the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label and released a pair of albums before Lee went solo in 1995. He resurrected Noise Addict in 2009 with Barlow and Meyerratken and released one album, It Was Never About the Audience.

Lee's solo debut was 1995's low-fi Grandpaw Would and was the beginning of a curious and restless career that has found him recording 13 albums, including a song-for-song acoustic take on New Wave by punk rockers Against Me!, the catchy folk pop of 2005's Awake Is the New Sleep (which contains the breezy hit "Catch My Disease"), last year's Freedom, Love and the Recuperation of the Human Mind and Ben Lee Sings Songs About Islam for the Whole Family from earlier this year, with proceeds benefiting the American Civil Liberties Union.

Next up on the recording front: Lee is teaming with his buddy Josh Radnor, the actor best known for his work on the series How I Met Your Mother, under the moniker Radnor and Lee. Expect an album later this year, he says.

Saturday's show will be just Lee and his guitar, although he has no idea of what the gig will entail.

"What can people expect? I do not think about it until about a half-hour before the show," he says, laughing. His is a much more Zen-driven approach to performing. "In some ways the decision of what songs to play is less important than me just showing up with an open heart and connecting with my audience."

He's not the only Lee set to perform Saturday at Capitol View.

Tiffany Lee -- no relation -- is the 20-year-old Maumelle singer-songwriter whose debut EP, the soul-pop Jailbird, came out last year.

She has been making music since she was 14, when she started writing her own songs, and was 19 when Jailbird was recorded at a home studio in Conway.

The title cut, she says, "was really fun, but I was struggling to figure out musically how I wanted to build that song and figure out what percussion I wanted."

She ended up beat-boxing in an effort to relay to her producers and friends, Matt Huber and brothers Michael and Josh Hoover, how she wanted the drums to sound.

"That is not a skill that I actually possess," she says with a laugh, but her beat-boxed vocals actually ended up mixed into the recording, along with organic percussion made from objects around the studio. The result is a simmering track that oozes warmth and mystery.

Tiffany Lee has played a few gigs around central Arkansas, but this will be her first appearance at Capitol View. She has also been listening to the headliner's work.

"I wasn't super familiar with him before this show, but I've started listening to him and he's got some really great stuff."

Weekend on 06/22/2017