indifferent, but distanced perfectly

Born in Las Vegas in 1978 and raised in California’s San Fernando Valley, Lewis started out as a child actress. She sidestepped into music in the late 90s, co-founding the LA indie four-piece Rilo Kiley. She has gone on to perform with her boyfriend, fellow musician Johnathan Rice, as one half of the duo Jenny and Johnny, and released three solo albums. Her latest, The Voyager, is out now on Warner Music.

THE FIRST RECORD I EVER BOUGHT Pass the Dutchie by Musical Youth (1982)

I must have been seven or eight when I bought this novelty reggae song on seven-inch. I was a working actor at the time – I’d been in 100 commercials, and guested on various TV shows – so I had a few dollars in my pocket. As I recall, this cost me $3.50. I took it home and couldn’t stop playing it: I was just obsessed with the upbeat rhythm. I had no idea what reggae music was, but it spoke to me. The fact it was being performed by children – Musical Youth were all kids – made me start to think that music might be something I could do, too. Of course I didn’t know what a dutchie was back then, though. I do now.

THE RECORD THAT INTRODUCED ME TO FEMALE SINGER-SONGWRITERS Gonna Take a Miracle by Laura Nyro (1971)

My mother had a great vinyl collection, and she was constantly playing female singer-songwriters. I first learned about classic song structures by listening to them, and Laura Nyro particularly stood out. Her voice was outside what you’d usually hear on the radio; that really appealed to me. I grew up singing with my mom and sister, so I loved its strong gospel feeling, with Labelle [a vocal group of the 60s and 70s, with Patti LaBelle as lead vocalist] backing Nyro. It seemed to fit in with the way we all related to each other as a family: whenever things were weird around the house, we’d sing a song.

THE ALBUM THAT SUMS UP MY YEARS AS A TEENAGE RAVER 3 Feet High and Rising by De La Soul (1989)

My mother’s records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn’t hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock’n’roll – so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno. My friends and I were all ravers – we went to those first underground raves in LA in the 90s, which were really wild. We were kids – 15 and 16 years old – driving around with strangers; we’d go to a shop at midnight on Melrose, and they’d have a little print-out with directions to the club. It could be out in Palm Springs, or downtown LA, or Orange Country; we’d get there at 2am and rave until 10. I can’t believe our parents let us stay out that late – I did sneak out my window a few times. But my mom was still down with hip-hop. She’d answer the phone to me, like, “Yo yo yo, what’s up?”

THE RECORD THAT REMINDS ME OF TRAVELLING Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair (1993)

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw, for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible. I listened to the album over and over again on my Walkman. I remember vividly taking a tiny ferryboat from Bangkok to a little island, listening to this and thinking, “Holy shit, I hope one day I can make music like this.”

THE ALBUM I WISH I’D MADE MYSELF Wit’s End by Cass McCombs (2011)

This is the perfect folk record. The songs are so classic, and I really love his direct way of songwriting. I’ve met Cass a couple of times out at this surf shop in Venice Beach called Mollusk. It’s a tiny little place where all these LA musicians get together; you can drink beer, sit on the floor, and watch these great improvisers riffing off one another. I saw Cass play there, and he was amazing. It all comes back to the songs: they are of such quality that I always want to hear what he has to say.

THE RECORD THAT MOST INSPIRES ME AS A SONGWRITER Dead Dog’s Eyeball by Kathy McCarty (2005)

McCarty is a former waitress from Austin, Texas. She befriended the great Daniel Johnston, and decided to make this record of his songs. It’s one of the best, most story-driven collection of songs I know. They’re both simple and profound; each line punches you in the gut. There’s a really beautiful song called Hey Joe; it’s about depression and mental illness, but you’d never know that unless you knew a little bit about Daniel Johnston’s backstory [Johnston has been diagnosed with an extreme form of bipolar disorder]. With a female vocalist interpreting these songs, they seem so much more polished.

THE ONE THAT CLEARS MY HEAD Reunion with Chet Baker by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet (1957)

When you’re talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music – especially jazz – helps me refocus. Jazz was, again, something my mum always played around the house – but this record is particularly special. There’s something about its west-coast sound – two horns, trumpet, baritone sax; it’s just beautiful, otherworldly. I have it on vinyl and on a CD I bought so long ago that it’s covered in scratches. The album acts like a reset button for me: whenever I put it on, it clears the decks.

THE RECORD THAT KEEPS ME IN TOUCH WITH HOME The Very Best of Ethiopiques (2007)

One of Jenny Lewis’s many appealing traits is a certain kind of rock star insouciance. So when she was announced as the support act for Harry Styles’s North American tour in autumn 2021, prompting many of his fans to respond with: “Who the fuck is Jenny Lewis?”, the singer-songwriter created a Spotify playlist of the same name. It showcased the many highlights of her 20-plus-year career in music, from her days as frontwoman of indie rock band Rilo Kiley, through various side projects, to her current solo career making shimmering pop songs infused with country and 1970s rock (“The more she goes on … the more she sounds like one of the greats,” wrote Kitty Empire in these pages, about her last album, 2019’s On the Line).

Despite their initial misgivings, the fans “were amazing from show one”, says Lewis. She had just come out of the pandemic and total isolation – “I hadn’t even gone to a restaurant or done anything” – and found herself on the biggest stages she had ever played, arenas filled with thousands of new young fans. “I got pure love and support and total attention,” she recalls, speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, sunlight streaming in through the wall-to-wall windows behind her. “They make signs at the shows to get Harry’s attention, but about four shows in, someone in the crowd had a sign that said: ‘I’m here for Bobby Rhubarb.’”

Bobby Rhubarb is Lewis’s two-year-old cockapoo, a present from a poet friend named Serengeti and the subject of the first single from her fifth solo album, Joy’All (“I need a dog that’s hypoallergenic / In the poodle milieu and photogenic”). The song, Puppy and a Truck, came out of an online songwriting workshop organised by Beck and is a sweet, moving bop about being single in her 40s and finding a deep sense of fulfilment in her new life. “I don’t got no kids / I don’t got no roots,” she sings at the end, in a tone that could be read as wistful, or liberated, or both.

Shit gets real, there’s a lot of suffering, and how are you going to weather it?

This balance of emotions is a central tenet of Joy’All, an album that came out of lockdown and Lewis’s first opportunity to stop and process everything that had happened to her in the preceding years. “I think going through a big tragedy, or the loss of both of your parents, or the end of a long-term relationship,” she says of this time, “the common theme as a human being is just: shit gets real, there’s a lot of suffering, of varying degrees, and how are you going to weather it?”

During her time alone, she experienced “a spiritual shift – I realised that the pursuit of joy is a really important thing”. She found this in Bobby Rhubarb, who brought new rhythms to her daily routine and reminded her of the things that truly matter – “Like play and going on a walk.” She read books by Hermann Hesse, Raymond Chandler and Ram Dass, consumed “a lot of murder content” and grew two massive weed plants (“pleased to meet you, Mary Jane”, goes new track Love Feel).

Joy’All is an uplifting, layered album filled with ear-worming hooks and memorable lines, preceded by a spate of career-best singles such as Psychos (featuring what she calls the “ultimate Tinder profile description line: ‘I’m not a psycho / I’m just tryna get laid’”) and Giddy Up, a Kacey Musgraves-esque country-pop tune about taking a chance on romance, and cognitive dissonance. Throughout the LP, difficult events are balanced out by joyous ones: “the essence of life / is suffering” goes one line, later becoming “the essence of life / is ecstasy”. The pain of a breakup sits alongside the thrill of a new liaison; there are references to an encounter at an after-school party that “almost destroyed” her, but also to listening to Marvin Gaye with an “ice-cold Modelo”.

On our call, Lewis is engaging company, with a sparkling intelligence and a warm, easy laugh. With her feathered red hair and a T-shirt bearing the logo of the Beastie Boys label Grand Royal, she exudes an energy halfway between Stevie Nicks and Natasha Lyonne, interrupting herself with a joke when she feels she is coming across as too LA (she divides her time between there and Nashville). She was born in Las Vegas in 1976 and by the 1980s had a thriving career as a child actor, with roles in TV shows such as The Twilight Zone, The Golden Girls, Baywatch and Murder, She Wrote, as well as films including Pleasantville, Foxfire – opposite a young Angelina Jolie – and the now cult classic Troop Beverly Hills.

Lewis learned a lot during those years: memorising lines, accessing emotion while performing (“You have to think of the worst possible thing to make yourself cry, which is such an interesting thing for a brain that is still forming”). But by the early 00s she was out of that world. She has spoken openly about the trials she faced in childhood: her absent musician father, Eddie, and the heroin addiction of her Vegas entertainer mother, Linda. Lewis’s deceptively cheerful-sounding 2019 track Wasted Youth is about her mother spending her acting earnings first on buying, then selling drugs: “I wasted my youth / On a poppy, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo / Just for fun.” Their relationship broke down, with Lewis becoming estranged from her father and mother for many years. She reconciled with them before their deaths in 2010 and 2017 respectively.

Having some time and distance has given her perspective, allowed her to see things from their point of view as well as her own. “My attitude is good, in that I accept my mom for who she was. I understand that it was probably really hard for her and she did what she had to do to survive. I appreciate all of her choices, even if they weren’t the greatest choices.” She understands now that some addicts don’t get clean. “The recovery rate for heroin addicts – it’s a very small percentage. So the more I’ve learned about that, the more I can accept the whole thing.” She is still unearthing memories from that time; a memoir is in the works (Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a touchstone). “My friends have heard some of the stories, but there’s some good ones I’ve been saving,” she says, rubbing her hands together.

There were also, she adds, many amazing moments in her youth. “I think sometimes the good ones get overshadowed. But my mom was so charismatic and funny and cool. She was a hipster.” One moment in particular springs to mind: “She was in this rehabilitation centre after surgery and I went to visit her. And when I got to her room she was passed out with a peanut butter sandwich listening to Tame Impala. I was like: ‘How is she so cool?’ There were these absurd moments – the context was very serious, but there was always something funny going on.”

Lewis’s upbringing has been an endless source of material. Many of her songs with Rilo Kiley were verbatim accounts of the incredible characters in her mother’s orbit. “Blake [Sennett, Lewis’s then boyfriend and bandmate] and I would get together, he’d be playing guitar and I would just start reciting this stuff. He’d go: ‘Where the heck did you get this?’ And I was like: ‘Ah, never mind.’” A Better Son/Daughter is still the song she gets approached about most. “I’ve seen some tattoos [of it] as well,” shes says, “which is always incredible – it’s like, was that a mistake? But people really connect with that song and share their experiences with depression and addiction and their relationship with their parents.”

As well as the fans who have been with her from the beginning, Lewis now has a cohort of admirers who were too young to appreciate the music at the time. Early 00s female pop-punk acts such as Paramore and Avril Lavigne are now being reappraised; echoes of Rilo Kiley can be heard in the catchy, emotionally literate breakup songs of Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift (the band’s hit Portions for Foxes was included in a list of 18-year-old Swift’s most listened to iPod songs). “It’s like the spin cycle on your washing machine,” cackles Lewis. “It’s the cool cycle: 20 years and suddenly you’re cool. You’re like, wait, you hated this shit back then.”

In addition to Rilo Kiley, Lewis has also been part of duo Jenny and Johnny – with former partner Johnathan Rice – and all-female indie supergroup Nice As Fuck, whose debut performance was at a Bernie Sanders rally in 2016. “I keep leaving behind versions of myself,” says Lewis. “The actor version, the girl in a band version, the start a band with your boyfriend version, the all-girl New York punk band version. I’m constantly starting these things and then moving forward.” While she loves collaboration and has learned a lot from it over the years – she has worked with the Postal Service, Vampire Weekend, Bright Eyes, She & Him, and Ringo Starr, who played drums on Heads Gonna Roll – for now she is happy having autonomy over her own work. “My relationship with my songwriting started out very solitary. I’ve only co-written with a couple of people. Mostly my boyfriends, whoever I’m going out with at the time. But now I’m totally free to do whatever I want to do creatively. What is interesting to me in a song might not be interesting to a collaborator, but I don’t really care because I’m writing more for myself.”

Maybe Elon Musk can throw a giant festival on Mars called CancelFest, where all the cancelled people go

Musician Ryan Adams did some early production work on her last album; he was later accused of sexual misconduct by several women. Lewis has talked about this on numerous occasions, standing in solidarity with his accusers, and is understandably keen to move on. “There’s a broader conversation on behaviour among rock’n’rollers and the bigger conversation of what to do with people who misbehave,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I think we should all be accountable for our own behaviour. But I don’t think you can cast people out completely. There has to be some sort of rehabilitation process.” Her eyes crinkle into a smile. “Maybe Elon Musk can throw a giant festival on Mars called CancelFest, where all the cancelled people go.” She turns serious again. “It’s such a complex question. I don’t have an answer. There are some shady characters in the world but I sometimes hope they’re on their karmic journey, and they will figure it out, if not in this lifetime in the next – in a Buddhist context. But I don’t believe people are all bad.”

Like everyone who lived through the dubious gender politics of the early 00s, Lewis still has some thought patterns of her own to unlearn. “I think my generation, we assumed there was only one spot if you were a woman. So in being ‘just one of the guys’ I was kind of getting into the club. And you’d be very protective of your role within that because there were so few women.” On the Styles tour, when she introduced her song Just One of the Guys, she dedicated it to all the tomboys in the crowd. “I could feel my band cringing when I said that. And I thought: ‘Oh wow, I guess tomboy is not a term that we use any more.’ And then I looked it up and it’s got a totally negative historical meaning.” So she is adapting. “Here’s the thing: things are changing, language is changing. We just have to learn and accept the fact that we may not understand right away. I don’t have a problem with addressing people in a way that makes them feel comfortable. I don’t understand why people get pissed – do you want others to feel bad? It doesn’t make sense.”

One way in which society isn’t moving forward as fast as she would like is the pressure to have children and be in a relationship. “If you’re not, and you’re in your 40s, there’s this old maid thing. But I feel better now than I have felt in my life. I’m totally single and I’m in complete control of my creative output and my schedule – not to say that, you know, I don’t have my romantic dalliances.” She is on a dating app, largely for entertainment value (she points out the remarkable number of men who include photos of Larry David among their own pictures). She went on a date recently, which “ended up being very fun, even though he wasn’t the one”, she laughs. “He was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt when he walked up and I was like: ‘Oh, I’ve never seen Star Wars. This just can’t work.’”

Lewis has addressed the fact she doesn’t have children in a number of songs, something about which her feelings fluctuate. “The other day I had a visceral reaction to reading that Robert De Niro [just had] a baby and he’s 79. It’s the luxury of being a man or a Peter Pan – I also consider myself to be a sort of Peter Pan figure.” Most of her friends don’t have kids, but now some of the men are reaching their mid-40s and starting families. As a woman on the road for many years, there wasn’t a moment where she felt the need to stop and take care of a child.

“I’d never imagined myself as a bride or a mother. And, of course, there’s a little bit of fear when you come from a relationship like I had with my mom, which was very complex. So I didn’t care, didn’t care, didn’t care, and then when it’s no longer an option, there’s a sense of Fomo. But ultimately, I made this choice. And I’m totally good with it.” Her affection gets lavished on Bobby Rhubarb. “She gets all of my love and I treat her in all the ways I wish my mom had. So I just snuggle the shit out of her.”

From writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland, Song One tells a beautiful story about how music connects and transforms people.  Henry (Ben Rosenfield) is trying to become a musician and, when tragedy strikes, his sister Franny (Anne Hathaway) turns to his music, as well as the music of James Forester (Johnny Flynn) that inspired him, to discover the artist and person that he is.

At the film’s press day, singer/songwriters Jenny Lewis and Jonathan Rice spoke to Collider for this exclusive interview about how they came to write the music for the film, how quickly they decided that they wanted to get involved, the collaborative process with the filmmakers, the challenges in writing for someone else and always remembering that it has to come from their point of view, how many songs they wrote versus how many actually made it into the film, how this experience has changed the way they work now, what it’s like to be a singer/songwriter in the music business today, and that they’ve already finished work on another film.

Collider:  How did you guys come to write the music for Song One?

JONATHAN RICE:  Adam Shulman sent me a script in the later part of 2012, and they were looking for songs. There were seven or eight full songs built into the script, with imaginary titles. The dialogue existed, but the songs did not.  We just decided to try it.  They were also looking to cast the James Forester character, as well.  We knew Anne [Hathaway] and Adam.  We were friendly.  And then, they introduced us to (writer/director) Kate Barker-Froyland.  She came over one day and we went for a hike.

JENNY LEWIS:  She didn’t have any hiking shoes, so she borrowed a pair of Jonathan’s tennis shoes and we went on a long hike.  When we said goodbye, we decided that we were going to write a song that night and have it in their inboxes by the following day.  So, we sat down and worked on a song and we sent it off.

RICE:  We wrote “Little Yellow Dress” that night.

LEWIS:  We really wanted the job.

RICE:  I’ve always wanted to write for film.  Jenny had done one film prior to that.

LEWIS:  And I wrote for the Disney movie Bolt.  It’s exciting for us, as writers, to get outside of our own narratives.  To be given an assignment and be told, “This is what you’re writing about,” we would go off and write separately, and then come together with the song ideas.  

This sounds like it was a really collaborative process with you and the filmmakers.

LEWIS:  We could also tell a little bit of the secret backstory through the lyrics of the songs.  We were in constant contact with Kate, who wrote and directed the film, and we would always defer to her on things like where he’s from, what his relationship is like with his parents, whether they’re still with us, and what his first girlfriend was like.  We sculpted this backstory.  

RICE:  It’s probably more evident when you’re listening to the soundtrack and can absorb all of the songs.  It’s almost a maternal concept record.  That’s what we conceived.  We decided that his album was called Iris Across the Sea because his mother left him as a child and moved somewhere overseas.  A lot of the lyrics are referential of his mother.

LEWIS:  I don’t know if most people would catch it necessarily, but we had endless discussions.  

RICE:  For us, it helped ‘cause that’s how we write songs.  Generally, we’re drawing from within ourselves, but this time, we were projecting onto him.

What are the challenges in writing for someone else and always remembering that it has to come from their point of view?

RICE:  First and foremost, we’re trying to write something really good, every time we write a song.  That’s the goal.  So, we knew that if we wrote something really good, they would inevitably like it.

LEWIS:  But sometimes, they didn’t because it wasn’t appropriate.  Sometimes things just don’t work, and sometimes you can over-think the process a little bit. You don’t want to put a hat on a hat.  If the scene has a certain weight to it, you don’t want to write something musically that is going to take away from what’s on the page.  We had to create a tone and telling the backstory, but also having the songs be open-ended enough where they could be accessible, in a way, to everyone.  You don’t have to have this backstory, in order to relate to the lyrics in the songs.

How was it to then see the movie with all of the music in it?

RICE:  It was somewhat surprising to us, pleasantly.  Kate acted as a go-between, between us and Johnny Flynn.  We had little to no contact with him, during the writing process.  We would write a song, submit it to the production, and then, if the song got accepted by Kate, Adam and Jonathan Demme, who was a big part of that, it would then make its way to Johnny Flynn, who’s a singer and songwriter, in his own right, as well as an actor.  I’m really glad they cast someone who’s an actual musician.  I think it makes it all the more believable.  He’s this English singer/songwriter and he put this uniquely British folk sensibility into the songs, which we didn’t expect, but really enjoyed.  So, his interpretations of the songs are very much his own.  He used our chords, our lyrics and our melodies, but he spun it in his way.  When we got to the shoot in New York, we were at the Bowery Ballroom, where we’ve both played many times, and he was performing our songs back at us while we were in the audience.  It was a really interesting experience.

LEWIS:  Film work is so collaborative.  Certainly, making records can be, as well, but it doesn’t have to be.  You learn how to become a better collaborator, and you allow this thing that you’ve created in the privacy of your own home to take on a new life.

Unless you’re a part of a Broadway musical movie, you don’t often get a full song in a movie.  Was it important to you that people would get to hear the full songs in the movie?

LEWIS:  We didn’t know what would end up in the final film.  We just submitted all of the songs and hoped that they would be represented, in some way.

RICE:  It ended up being pretty faithful to the script, in that respect.  There are large chunks of the film that are just music, and music alone.  That was a very challenging thing, but also attractive.  You’re getting that much of your music out there.

Jenny, was this a different process to what you went through with the first film that you scored?

LEWIS:  I scored one film by myself, which was the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done.  I was relieved, a year later, to work with Jonathan and Nate Walcott.  I don’t know if I want that responsibility, all by myself, again.  The collaborative process can be very difficult.  People that work in film don’t speak the language of music, necessarily.  Some do, but some will say, “What is that low humming sound?”  And you’re like, “Oh, you mean the bass guitar?”  You have to decipher the critique.  So, working with Jonathan, for me, was something that was a relief. And there was the fact that I had someone to bounce ideas off of.  Making movies is all about being a great collaborator and learning how to do that.

RICE:  Just the enormity of the undertaking never ceases to amaze me.  We go in for a relatively finite experience, with three weeks of recording and a couple weeks of mixing.  We’ve made records really quickly, and we’ve made records that take a little longer, but it would never take as long as it takes to make a movie.  The amount of people and the amount of money, and all of that stuff, is why people are so shocked when you tell them that you wrote music for a movie and it got made.  It’s a wonder they get made, at all.

LEWIS:  We went to Sundance a year ago, and we’re still talking about it because it’s taken that long to find a home.  In the end, I really enjoyed the process.  And any opportunity to write songs and to be given a homework assignment that involves writing, I’ll take it.  I’m not always as disciplined as I should be.  I don’t sit down and write every day, but I should.  So, to be able to write seven new songs that would have never been in the world before is a real privilege.

RICE:  And if we’re being completely honest, we probably wrote 11 or 12 for the film, and some of them didn’t make it, but they found their way back to our own work.  There’s a song on Jenny’s new record, The Voyager, which is called “The New You,” that was originally intended as a Song One song, but got politely rejected by the production.  She took it to Ryan Adams’ studio and they recorded it.

LEWIS:  And it didn’t matter that it got rejected.

Was this a situation where the script evolved and you had to keep changing what you were writing to evolve with it?

LEWIS:  I think the script, once we got it, was pretty much intact.  For the character that we were writing for, James Forester, his backstory changed a little bit, when they cast an English guy.  We thought he was American when we started writing, so we had to go back over the songs and adjust them to have them make sense within the character.  You never know how things are going to turn out in a movie.  You can imagine a scene one way, and it can turn out to be completely the polar opposite of what you expected.  You just have to roll with the punches.  It wasn’t about the money.  It was about bringing new songs into the world, and working with our friends who we deepened our friendships with, throughout the process of working on the film for a year.  In the end, it can be really fulfilling.

Were you given any specific writing parameters?

LEWIS:  There were song titles that were like breadcrumbs, in a way.

RICE:  It was pretty wide open.  It would say, “James Forester walks into the hospital.  He plays a song.  The song is beautiful.”  So, we knew it wasn’t Norwegian black metal.  We had some semblance of an idea, but a lot of freedom.  Once we had submitted the first two songs and solidified our job, Jonathan Demme came to our* house for a meeting with Kate and Adam, and he really chimed in with a lot of positivity and said, “Do what you think.  Go as far as you want with it.  We’ll let you know, if it’s gone too far.”  He really granted us the ultimate freedom to write the songs that we felt were appropriate.

LEWIS:  And they hired us based on our records, so I think they knew what they were going to get.  The hired us because the character is not dissimilar.

RICE:  Kate mentioned songs of ours that she liked.

LEWIS:  It’s funny to reference your own work when you’re writing another song, which I’ve never done.  To go back through your catalog and try to identify with the moment that you wrote a song that the production is referencing, at that point in your life, and put yourself back in that headspace was interesting.

Has the process you went through for this affected the way you write stuff now?

RICE:  Absolutely!  For me, at least.  It sent me on a tear of writing songs for other people.  My last record, Good Graces, didn’t do very well, at all, commercially speaking.  I liked the record a lot.  So, it really got me thinking, “In the meantime, while I’m writing my next record, I’m going to try to get as many songs to other artists as I can, as collaboratively as possible.”  More of my music came out in 2014 than in my entire career, but none of it was sung by me.  So, it really did open up my mind to that possibility of being a songwriter, outside of being a performer.  I used to be much more precious about only me singing my songs, and my songs not being for anyone else.  I didn’t co-write with anyone, except for Jenny.

LEWIS: Once you open that door, the possibilities are really endless.  Once you open yourself up to collaboration, there are so many amazing things that you can discover.  You just can’t get there on your own.  For me, this process brought me back to myself and my own narrative.  I had taken such a long break that I was ready to tell my story.  Once we had turned in all the songs for Song One, I was like, “Okay, I’ve gotta get back to my own narrative.”

What’s it like to even be a singer/songwriter, with the way the music business is now?  Does it really have to be about the love of it?

RICE:  That really is the only true path, to do something that you love.

LEWIS:  We do what we can to survive.  We’re on our hustle, at all times. There’s never a moment where we’re not thinking about the next thing.  My record came out in July, and I’m thinking about the next one now.  I have to.  I’ve been fortunate enough to grow up in a time, musically, where when I first started, it was still lucrative, just not necessarily for my band.  But I’ve been able to build a career over a 15-year period, so now I can go out and make part of my living on the road.  For new artists starting now, there’s so much traffic out there that I don’t know how people pay their rent.  There’s not a lot of money out there for everyone.  There’s a lot of money out there for a handful of people, and they’re scooping it up.

RICE:  It’s easy to lament it.  If a young Elliott Smith existed in this day and age, would he be cultivating his fan base on Instagram?  I don’t think so.  But he would be writing those gorgeous, beautiful songs, and would they be reaching an audience?  There is a certain star-making ability that the major labels had. It’s been interesting to be in the palace while it’s crumbling.

LEWIS:  But, who cares?

RICE:  You have to just try to write the best songs that you can.  Most of the people that I admired died pretty penniless.

LEWIS:  I don’t write songs, play music and tour, really, for anyone else but myself.  It’s something that I have to do to stay alive.

RICE:  Ditto.

How do you feel about performing live?

As Entertainment Director for Marie Claire, I'm lucky enough to meet a lot of amazing celebrities. It's a cool job, what can I say! One celeb I've had the pleasure of getting to know—ironically not through my day gig, but by virtue of living in celebrity friendly Los Angeles—is singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis, of the acclaimed band Rilo Kiley, and now uber hip solo artist. This girl is truly talented, just ask the flock of Hollywood heavyweights whom she counts amongst her fans. When I heard that Lewis has a new song featured on the soundtrack for HBO's hit series Girls—one of our obsessions here at Marie Claire—I had to track her down! Read on for the scoop behind Jenny's Girls collaboration…and grab a listen here.

Marie Claire: What's the story behind you being asked to record a song for Girls? Are you a fan? Jenny Lewis: I was asked to come in, watch a scene and write something inspired by the episode. I was somewhat reluctant to watch [the episode] out of order, as I am a fan of the show. I was fully prepared to shield my eyes from any potential spoiler moments.

MC: What's "Completely Not Me" about? JL: My friend Rostam from Vampire Weekend sent me a beautiful track to write over. My band Jenny and Johnny [with boyfriend and frequent collaborator Johnathan Rice] did some serious touring with those guys some years back and I was taken with their minimalist approach to pop music. Rostam and I worked at his friend's studio in the San Fernando Valley. The lyrics are inspired by Teen Wolf and the feeling that you can't control a sudden transformation.

MC: What's a typical day in your rock star world? We admit we're a little jealous! JL: Coffee/hike/write/feed the fish/water the plants/red wine/play the drums/talk shit/Netflix

MC: You have some majorly famous friends and fans—who would we be most surprised to know is a Jenny Lewis groupie? JL: I would never tell! Ok. The Mayor of Los Angeles.

MC: What brings you your greatest joy? JL: The feeling when you finish a new song and you play it through in its entirety for the first time.

MC: Who are your music idols? JL: Laura Nyro, Keith Richards, and Jerry Garcia

MC: One person you'd kill to collaborate with? JL: Jack White

MC: I happen to know that you started out as a child actor. Anything people still recognize you from? JL: Troop Beverly Hills and The Wizard!

MC: How did you earn your first dollar? JL: In a Jell-O commercial when I was 3.

MC: What's the best advice you've ever received? JL: Forgiveness will save your life.

MC: Give us a glimpse at the songs at the top of your playlist right now? JL: Real Estate - "Talking Backwards"; Skip Spence - "Weighted Down"; Parquet Courts - "Stoned and Starving"; Califone - "On the Steeple with the Shakers (X-Mas Tigers)"; and Cass McCombs - "Robin Egg"

It’s been six long years since the last solo album by Jenny Lewis, the sunny-and-sad songstress with the striking red tresses. As the front woman of the rock band Rilo Kiley, Lewis helped shepherd a generation of angsty kids through their rocky teen years with her personable tales of love and heartbreak.

But Rilo Kiley is no more. The band split in 2011. To make matters worse, the break happened just one year after Lewis lost her father, Eddie Gordon—a harmonica virtuoso who served as a member of the Harmonica Gang and played with Sinatra. Gordon left Lewis and her mother Linda, also a singer, when she was just two. Shortly thereafter, Lewis got into acting, appearing on a variety of shows like the sitcoms Life with Lucy, The Golden Girls, and Roseanne, before appearing in a number of teen-targeting flicks such as The Wizard, opposite a young Angelina Jolie in Foxfire, and the notorious Don’s Plum, whose up-and-coming stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire blocked from being released stateside.

Following the death of her father, the Rilo Kiley split, and a two-year battle with imsomnia, Lewis is back with her third solo album, The Voyager—a beauteous pop record awash in melancholy. It was produced by Ryan Adams, with a little help from Beck. And the album, surprisingly, became Lewis’s first Top 10 album ever, bowing at No. 9 on Billboard’s Top 200. The success comes thanks, in no small part, to debut single “Just One of the Guys,” whose video features Lewis’s A-list pals Kristen Stewart, Anne Hathaway, and Brie Larson rocking out in drag.

What was the initial pang of inspiration for The Voyager?

It was a long period of time. The voyage was extensive, so there are songs from five years ago that I’ve been playing out for a while. Certainly when I get to Ryan’s studio, Pax-Am, it was just the scenery that I needed. For the first time, I relaxed and gave up a certain amount of control and when you hit a wall, that can be a very scary and good thing to do. And we only worked together for like two weeks.

What kind of wall did you hit? Was it like writer’s block?

I wouldn’t call it writer’s block because I even tend to write through those periods, even though nothing seems to be any good. It was at a point in between bands, and having recorded many versions of these songs, I was a bit clueless as to what I wanted it to sound like. I was screaming for a spirit guide, and it showed up in the form of Ryan Adams.

He was your Virgil. I did hear that he tested you a bit by making you listen to Creed. That doesn’t sound too inspiring.

I don’t think he was screwing with me—I think there was some sort of hidden meaning in everything that he does. It may be hard to decipher in the moment. He told me he was going to explain to me why he made me listen to Creed, but he hasn’t yet.

Maybe that’s the ultimate palate-cleanser. Listening to Creed is perhaps his way of saying, “Forget everything you think you know about music, and start with a blank slate.”

Yeah, it sort of clears the deck. [Laughs]

I grew up listening to Rilo Kiley… what happened there? Was there a straw that broke the camel’s back, or was it a gradual parting of ways?

I think it was just a slow fade of love that ended it in the end. It’s such a complex thing—these relationships are twenty years strong, and it’s very hard being in a band because it’s like being in another family. I was stoked that we were able to get together to put out Rkives. We got together, looked at old pictures, and put together these old songs from our hard drive.

So it wasn’t acrimonious?

Um… I wouldn’t use that word. I think any break-up is painful.

What was your rationale behind ending Rilo Kiley and moving on to the next phase of your career?

It’s hard to speak to… it’s such a long answer, I’m not even going to get into it.

How do you think the break-up informed The Voyager?

The Kiley has always informed my music—particularly my solo stuff, because I had a rock band. The sonics were pointedly different with my other projects than they were with the band, so with this record, having the freedom to do anything and work with anyone and create a sound based on what the songs needed was cool. I felt liberated—single and ready to mingle vibe.

The opening track “Head Underwater” contains a line that really struck me: “I never thought I would ever be here / Looking out on my life as if there was no there there.” It’s a very dark track. Were you struggling with depression?

That’s a Gertrude Stein quote: “There is no there there.” But I wouldn’t say I was struggling with depression. I was actually experiencing insomnia pretty intensely, and that experience informed that song. I’d never experienced it before and had always been a 9-hour-a-night girl, and my sleep was interrupted very suddenly, so it took me a couple of years to get back to sleep. All the while, I was continuing to plug away on my record and keep myself occupied. I also scored a movie during that time, Very Good Girls, which kept me very occupied. [Director] Naomi Foner is the one that told me that Gertrude Stein quote. While I was having a hard time getting back to sleep, we’d talk and she told me that and it really stuck with me.

How did you defeat your insomnia?

A number of things, like exercise, hypnotherapy, nerve feedback, talk therapy. It took a perfect storm of things to take me down, and the same kinds of things to get me back. It was two years; a very long path. Looking back on it, I don’t want to experience it again, but I’m grateful because it forced me to take care of myself. When you’re on the road, sometimes you neglect your health because you’re constantly working and traveling.

You also experienced a very personal tragedy, which seemed to inform many of the songs on The Voyager, which is the loss of your father.

You can’t really predict how the loss of a parent is going to affect you, and it took a moment for it to set in with me, but once it did, it was very difficult. You start asking those big questions when you lose someone like that, and that definitely informed the title track of the record. Where do we go?

You two had a somewhat fraught relationship from what I’ve read—he’d left the family early on, and you and your mother lived on your own in California.

He stayed in Vegas and we moved to California, so he… wasn’t around a whole lot. He was on the road as well.

Do you have a favorite song on the record?

Maybe “Late Bloomer.” That one’s feeling pretty good right now.

I enjoyed that tune as well. It struck me as being about your rebellious teenage years.

Well, the coming of age years. I knew a lot of kids that backpacked across Europe, and I was one of those kids. I went all over—Paris, Amsterdam, and Germany. I’m grateful that it was pre-Hostel movie franchise. I definitely drank too many Space Shakes in a short amount of time, which I don’t advise doing. They just tasted so good!

“Late Bloomer” got me thinking of your teenage years, and then I thought about Foxfire, which I saw as a kid and was pretty badass and ahead of its time. You do have such a great line in that movie where you slam the rapey professor’s head against the bench.

What did I say?

“If you ever put your hands on me again, I'm gonna snip your little nuts off with my toenail clippers!”

Oh… so embarrassing! [Laughs] Don’t I wield a gun in that movie? I can’t remember.

You shoot a character's father in the chest, I believe.

Oh, wow. Very bad.

Are you still friends with your Foxfire co-star, Angelina Jolie?

Oh no, I haven’t seen her since then. I don’t think I’ve seen her once since then! I also went to high school with her for a short amount of time. We had the same English class and she sat in the back of the class, and I remember wondering who she was—the most beautiful girl of all-time.

Speaking of movie stars, you got a lot of your celeb friends out for the “Just One of the Guys” video, including Kristen Stewart, Anne Hathaway, and Brie Larson. How did that come about?

It was a concept that I’d been thinking about, and I wanted to direct the first video. Based on my Instagram account, where I make these little Lynchian movies, that’s how I convinced my record label that I could direct it. And then I called* my friends up and told them, “Oh, my friends Annie and Kristen and Brie are going to be in this thing,” and they said, “OK, you can direct it.” My only goal as a director was to make everyone look badass, and I didn’t have to do much because those girls were born to do it.

Do you have any favorite moments from shooting the video? It seems like a very fun time.

It was so great. When Annie started breakdancing, I nearly lost my shit. That was all her idea and we just rolled the camera, and she proceeded to do the best/worst breakdancing I’d ever seen. I laughed so, so hard.

Was releasing the video through GQ meant to be ironic? To release this feminist anthem through what is essentially a lad mag that guys read at barbershops?

I chose it because I thought it would be funny to release it on the Gentlemen’s Quarterly website, but I genuinely love GQ. The food and drink stuff that they cover in that magazine is so sick.

Wasn’t there a time, in the ‘90s, where you were “just one of the guys?” Back when you were hanging with Leonardo DiCaprio’s posse and appeared in Don’s Plum?

I guess I was a Tomboy back then. I’ve always been a Tomboy since I was a little, tiny chicken. But I can’t remember Don’s Plum. It was so long ago and such a different time. But I think we had a good time! We were kids.

Are you still friendly with Leo and the gang?

I don’t really see those dudes so much anymore. I’ve reconnected with some people from my past, like Soleil Moon Frye, who was Punky Brewster. She was my best friend when I was 10, and we’ve become friends again and it’s so great because so few people know me from that part of my life, growing up in Hollywood. It’s nice to have someone to corroborate the strange tales from the past.

What are some of the strangest?

There was this club that we used to go to Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, and it was this dance club for kid actors. Corey Feldman used to show up in full Michael Jackson gear and dance in the middle of the dancefloor. It was just great. Alyssa Milano, Corey Haim, you name it—they were all there. And I was sort of on the fringe.

Were you ever in love with acting, or was it just something that you were thrust into at an early age?

I think I was very serious—as serious as a 7-year-old can be—about work, and I liked the work and I liked the people. I just got to a certain age where I wanted more creative control over the words. I’d always been interested in words, and it felt a bit weird to not have any particular say in that respect. And music, with me, was just supposed to be. My parents were musicians, my grandparents did vaudeville, and it’s just a part of my soul. It couldn’t be stopped.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask if Rilo Kiley is done for good, or do you think there’s a chance at a reunion somewhere down the line?

MARIE CLAIRE: You wrote the music for Very Good Girls, the new movie starring Elizabeth Olsen as an aspiring songwriter. What's it like to see her singing your songs? JENNY LEWIS: She did an amazing job. It was cool to write from the perspective of a woman creating her first 10 songs. I kind of had to dumb down the lyrics and get a lot more emo.

MC: Let's talk about your intimate new album, The Voyager. It's been six years since your last solo work—though I'm Having Fun Now, your album of duets with your boyfriend, Johnathan Rice, came out in 2010—what happened in the interim? JL: I lost my father and my band broke up. Usually I write and record an album every one to two years. But I hit a wall in my personal life in 2010, basically at 11:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve.

MC: You've talked a lot about the insomnia that was part of your breakdown. JL: I had these five days where I just could not sleep. Like with a car accident, you don't heal as quickly as you were broken.

MC: These songs are intensely personal. Is it hard or healing to play them live?

Confucius once wrote, “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

Jenny Lewis, who boasts a career path decorated with accomplishments most only undertake in dreams, lives her life by this mantra. Currently promoting her recent solo album, Acid Tongue, Lewis is touring her way from Australia and across California on the proverbial road to Coachella, the big-time festival in Southern California.

“We were on an airplane yesterday with two rival rugby teams. They were growling at each other,” Lewis recounts, laughing, during an interview last week.

Lewis is the lead singer of Rilo Kiley, but her career actually began when she was 3 years old and starred in a Jell-O commercial. And her Hollywood calling spanned over 15 years, with highlights including roles in The Wizard with Fred Savage, Foxfire with Angelina Jolie, Pleasantville with Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, and the ’80s classic Troop Beverly Hills.

But if you ask her about these experiences, she claims she was too young to remember any of it.

So it goes. The acting side of her career went on permanent hiatus in 2001 after Don’s Plum, but recently Lewis was asked to contribute a song to the Disney animated film Bolt. And when the song was finished, the filmmakers also asked her to do a line for the movie.

“It was one line. It was something like, ‘We’ve gotta boom, Mike!’” Lewis explains. “It’s funny. You go in and you just kind of say the line in a recording studio, and you say the line maybe 25 times in different ways.

“It was pretty exciting to see myself as this strange animated brunette.”

Like an ensemble film, Lewis’ latest album is a special collaborative effort that came to life while she and friends were living in Laurel Canyon, Calif., at bandmate Jonathan Wilson’s house.

“I wouldn’t say that it was the sole inspiration, but it definitely opened up some of the player possibilities,” she says of recording at a home with pals. “I met a bunch of people up at his house, and we’re neighbors … so there is definitely that kind of spirit going on on the record.”

Lewis says the musicians on the album brought a unique spirit to the songs, in part because she was recording essentially with two different band configurations. “Some of the songs were left over from the tours I did for Rabbit Fur Coat … so I wanted to record those in almost a live setting,” Lewis explains. “And then some of the other songs were written during the last Rilo Kiley album, Under the Blacklight, and some were tried there, and some kinda ended up on my record and a couple I just wrote in the studio while we were working.”

A star-studded collection of guests also shows up to help out with the album. M. Ward and actress Zooey Deschanel, a.k.a. the band She & Him, along with superstud Elvis Costello, make appearances on the record.

But in some ways, there’s just one guest musician that stands out: Lewis’ father, Eddie Gordon, who plays harmonica on the track “Jack Killed Mom.” Gordon, a former member of Johnny Puleo’s Harmonica Gang, a popular novelty act in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and Lewis have played together “in the studio, but never live,” Lewis shares.

“But I would love to play with him in a live context,” she adds.

So what does the future hold for this ginger-haired darling of the indie-rock world? In addition to her current tour, her band Rilo Kiley is currently compiling an album of B-sides and rarities. “It’s really exciting. We have been friends and playing music for so long, so we had to dust off the ol’ hard drive,” Lewis says.

There was a point about six years ago when the most common term associated with singer Jenny Lewis would be prolific. She was in the middle of an extensive tour with her country pop band Rilo Kiley in support of their album Under The Blacklight, working on a new solo album that would be titled Acid Tongue and be released that year, lending her voice to a role in animated flick Bolt as well as helping Elvis Costello out with his new album.

Cut to six years later and things are very different. Rilo Kiley are done, they broke up in 2011 and bookended their career with an epic compilation named Rkives last year, and her new solo album, which she began in 2010, is only just coming out.

Not that she’s been sitting around watching box sets, alongside working on the album, she released a record with her boyfriend, singer-songwriter Jonathan Rice, under the name Jenny & Johnny, which is titled I’m Having Fun Now. The pair also completed a film score for Song One, which stars Anne Hathaway, while Lewis also toured with The Postal Service on their hugely successful world tour last year, reprising her role as the backing vocalist on their beloved debut Give Up.

Now she’s back out on her own with a new album named The Voyager. Recorded over four years, it is largely produced by Ryan Adams at his PAX-AM Studios, but also features collaborations with Beck, Mike Viola and Rice, of course. Channelling the classic sound and swing of Rumours era Fleetwood Mac, Stax Motown and vintage Jefferson Airplane, it’s a brilliant record.

Speaking to hmv.com ahead of release, Lewis opened up about the album’s difficult journey into the world, working with Ryan Adams and why this album represents a clean slate for her.

This is your first solo album in six years, and your first release in almost four years, are you feeling nervous at all? “I’m not nervous. When you make as many records as I have, the butterflies start to subside. I’m really proud of the record and I know people will find it.”

How long did the record take to make? “Four years, in all four years. But that included many sessions that I scrapped. The main bulk of the record was produced by Ryan Adams at Pax-Am, that was the last stop of this Ferris wheel that was The Voyager.”

So what made the process take so long? Was it working with different producers? Getting the songs right? Or just not the right studio? “All of the above. I was producing the sessions with Jonathan Rice over a two-year period and we kept trying out different studios, different musicians, Dawes came in and played with us for a while, Mickey from Maroon 5, the Watson Twins, Blake Mills, they all came in and played, we just couldn't get it right. At the same time I was also working very intermittently with Beck, I mean like once a year we’d work on this song. Finally, I went in to PAX-AM with Ryan and he gave the songs an energy and a drive, a brilliant new perspective.”

What’s Ryan Adams like as a producer? “He’s a lot more like Phil Spector than not. He’s eccentric in the studio, you have to bend to his rule, there’s no room for you to be late or slack off, Ryan has so much energy and so much drive. His methods are difficult to understand at first, but by the end you’re like ‘This guy is an amazing producer’. He would wind me up, but always to make sure he got a good performance out of me.”

What’s PAX-AM like? “It’s amazing! It’s so f*****g cool. There’s so much beautiful vintage gear, beautiful analogue equipment, guitars everywhere and it's full of portraits of his cats and Star Wars paraphernalia. It’s right on the Sunset Strip, it’s really inspiring.”

How does it compare to other studios you’ve worked on? “I’ve recorded at Sound City, which I love and at some other great places, but this is by far the coolest place I’ve ever worked. This is Ryan’s personal studio, it’s not for the public, it was such an amazing space.”

In what you’ve said so far about the album, you’ve made it clear it was quite a difficult album to write and record, can you put your finger on why that was? “I guess I just wasn’t happy. I didn’t want to put something out unless it felt right. I struggled to get a couple of songs, actually when we finished at PAX-AM, Ryan instructed me to go home and write a couple more songs, one of which ended up being the title track.”

What kind of album is it lyrically? “I think it’s very diverse, they range and touch on lots of things. There’s not one through line.”

Is it a personal record? “All my records are I think. I’m always finishing songs in my head. For this batch there are the earlier tracks, and the ones I was told to write by Ryan. ‘Just One Of The Guys’ has been around for years though, I actually played that on the Jenny and Johnny tour, we work shopped it around before it ended up as the song it has."

Has the album come out sounding like you expecting it would when you started? “I didn’t know what I wanted, that’s why it took me so long, normally I have a really clear idea of the record I want to make and the story I want to tell. This time I had no idea what kind of record I wanted to make, that’s why it took me so long. That’s why I needed the guidance of a very strong-willed producer.”

Were there things you wanted to change from Acid Tongue? “No, I don’t think of records like that, they’re moments in time. I wouldn’t change anything about it, maybe the tracklisting, but nothing else. It was a wonderful time, a very fertile artistic time in Los Angeles, it’s a very honest portrayal of a moment. This record isn’t a moment in time, it was all about trying to make it cohesive.”

Given you’re the writer and arranger, how do you go about making sure you don’t add too much to track? “Ryan was an incredible gauge for that, he helped me assemble a band and he would give me two or three takes to get it right, and he’d say ‘You know what, if there are mistakes, they stay in there’. He kept it very limited, he wanted a live feel and it to feel like a band playing in a room.”

When did you settle on the title? “At the very end. Ryan told me to go home and write ‘Wonderwall’. And I was like ‘What? I can’t do that, that’s basically the most perfect song ever’. So I went home and wrote my version, it really resonated with me emotionally and it made itself the title.”

It sums up the album nicely, it feels like a real journey… “I think so, it bookends the whole thing so well.”

So after the record comes out, do you have much touring lined up? “So much. Lots of festivals, lots of shows, I want to make sure I keep busy and go and play to as many people as I can.”

What kind of band do you have with you? You’ve toured with quite a few different troupes over the last few years… “It’s actually all new people, with the exception of one of my guitar players, who played with Rilo Kiley years ago. I auditioned all these female players in Nashville, Megan, my guitar player and Natalie, who plays keyboards, they auditioned for me on their iPhones, they filmed themselves singing along to my songs. I couldn’t find players in Los Angeles, no one I wanted could commit to a year of touring.”

Have you enjoying start over with a new band? “I really have. I usually play with my boyfriend, or with Jason from Rilo Kiley, he's played with me for years, so it’s nice to be the boss, I’m the band leader, I decide the set list and it’s so much fun. It’s a lot of responsibility, but the best kind.”

Jonathan’s played with you pretty much constantly for the last few years, will it be weird to go on the road without him? “I hope he’ll visit obviously… I think it’s good, you can’t do everything together, you can’t be with your partner constantly. I feel like I can disappear into this new band a bit more, I can become the character in the songs, I’m not up there with my friends.”

You bookended your time with Rilo Kiley with the release of Rkives last year, was it nice to put that time in your career to bed? “It was so cool, so fun to go through all the old photos and songs, it took us years to put it together, I’m proud of those songs, I know why we didn’t put them on records, but I think they hold up really well.”

Jenny Lewis has always been a prolific storyteller, and On the Line—her fourth studio album, out tomorrow by Warner Bros.—is a true testament to that. The former child star and Rilo Kiley singer's writing chops are on full display throughout the 11-track LP, her first solo album since the release of her critically acclaimed album The Voyager in 2014. Laced with Lewis’ unique, L.A.-style grit and infused with the star-studded backing of music legends like Ringo Starr, Jim Keltner, The Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench, Don Was, and Beck, On the Line is shimmery, melodic gold. It’s worth noting that much of the production was done by frequent collaborator Ryan Adams, though Lewis declined to comment further on the recent allegations against him.

Lewis pegs On the Line as a rebound record, “and not just in the romantic sense,” she tells CR, alluding to the recent death of her mother, who also inspired her album cover. She also describes is as a “play,” a continuation of sorts from her past few albums. Still, On the Line sees a slower, more emotional version of Lewis—not any less raw, just slightly more visceral. A product of the mid-aughts indie-rock explosion (she’ll open for Death Cab For Cutie later this year), the 43-year-old Las Vegas native says that at its core, On the Line is a story about “recovering, falling down, and getting back up again.” Below, the songstress opens up to CR about her most personal album yet.

On the Line, your first solo album in five years, is being released tomorrow. How are you feeling right now? “I’m excited. It’s been a long process with this album. I started writing for it four or five years ago, and there were many bumps in the road along the way. It took a whole community of people to help me finish it. It went through many incarnations, and I worked really hard on it for a really long time. I feel relieved that it’s done.”

How is On the Line different from The Voyager and Acid Tongue and some of your other past albums? “It’s a continuation of all of the work that I’ve done. In that sense, it’s not different at all. I’m telling a story that started about 25 years ago, and the albums reflect that. My collaborators along the way have informed the sound, but lyrically, the story has been somewhat the same. And it’s followed me throughout my life—as a teenager, in my 20s and 30s, and now in my 40s. I really feel like it’s a volume in a series.”

What’s the story about? “It’s about me, of course. How I see the world and relationships and being a woman and growing and learning and accepting and grieving and loving. I think it’s the spiritual half of an artist.”

You have quite a few contributions from fellow artists on this album. In particular, how did the Ringo Starr collaboration come about? “It was magic. I don’t know exactly. I put together a band for the record, starting with Jim Keltner, Benmont Tench, Don Was. I believe Don reached out to Ringo, and I think the idea was that Jim and Ringo would play double drums together like they had many years previously at The Concert for Bangladesh. The excitement was this idea of double drumming, and then Ringo ended up playing by himself on 'Heads Gonna Roll,' the first song on the album. That was just one of those magical moments. I mean, I would never think to ask Ringo Starr to play my music, but it was truly one of the most exciting moments of my life, being in the room with him and playing and singing live with his drumming. A dream come true.”

Are there any specific tracks on the album that you’re especially excited about or hope resonate with listeners? “I really think of the album as a play. It tells a story front to back. I think it begins as a breakup record, but it really is more of a rebound record—and not necessarily in the romantic sense. It’s hard to isolate a track. However, the center of the record, the emotional center, is the song called 'Dogwood,' which is a live vocal and piano track. I think it really encapsulates the feeling of the record. It’s my favorite one.”

You released “Heads Gonna Roll” on Valentine’s Day. Was that deliberate? “Well, initially, I wanted to release the whole record on Valentine’s Day, but we couldn’t get our shit together in time. I thought it would be cool to release kind of like a breakup-rebound record on Valentine’s Day. And I had all this merch in mind, like those little candies, but with different phrases. Instead of 'I love you,' 'F*ck you.' You can imagine. Anyway, it had to be a single, and 'Heads Gonna Roll' opens the record for a reason. Coincidentally, it dropped on Valentine’s Day. But it chronicles relationships. That’s vague—I know.”

Can you talk about the meaning behind “Red Bull & Hennessy”? Is it a metaphor or is that your go-to drink order? “Oh, god no. I’m so sorry I’ve put that into the consciousness as a cocktail recipe. Really, it’s a metaphor for a feeling. It’s evocative of a feeling. When you think of yourself on Red Bull, you’re just kind of wiry. I think people are trying to make a cocktails with that and I don’t condone that, but if you do, use the ingredients sparingly.”

You’re embarking on tour next week. Any cities you’re particularly excited about? “I go everywhere always. That’s just part of the gig. I’m a gypsy. I mean, there’s certain places I like less than others, but I find my beat in every town. There’s always a coffee shop to visit, a vintage store, a yoga class if I’m feeling up for it. You’ll find me in any city wandering the streets solo. Now that this whole scooter thing has happened, which I haven’t really indulged in yet, you might see me scooting along, heading toward the nearest Salvation Army. I actually had a dream I was on one of those scooters last night. I just remembered. I have mixed feelings about those scooters. I think they’re interesting, but also people just drop them on the side of the road willy nilly. It’s dangerous. What’s wrong with people?”

Can you speak on the visual aspect of this album? How do you hope the message of On the Line translates onto the stage? “I’m putting together some DIY lights for the show, which I’ve never been able to do. I’ve never had lights. I could never afford to do lights because you have to travel with a lighting person. It’s really expensive; you need a truck. I feel like there’s all these LED things at party shops that somehow we could incorporate into the live show. So, if it ends up being, like, a giant lava lamp, so be it. Imagine I go to Spencer’s at the mall and buy the whole floor?”

Why is now the right time to incorporate lighting into your show? “Well, it makes your job a little easier up there. When you see a big rock show with lights, that helps tell the story. But when you’re a DIY indie rocker, you kind of just have to tell the whole story with your guitar and your lungs. The tone is only in the music, which is great. I can put on a show—I have for years without the help of that kind of production, but I like the idea of creating a mood that feels kind of like a play, like the record. I’m kind of upping my costume situation a little bit, too. Although, I do the rainbow suits and that’s hard to top, but I do want to present a more refined, dressier version of myself.”

What kind of style are you going for on tour? “Human disco ball.”

Speaking of fashion, you recently attended Rodarte’s Fall/Winter 2019 show in L.A. What other designers or brands are you excited about right now? “I love the new Gucci. Whatever Gucci’s been doing for the last three years, I’m completely on board. I just bought a pair of little loafers on eBay. I don’t tend to buy designer retail—I can’t bring myself to do it—so all of my designer stuff is used on eBay. I have an amazing pair of Saint Laurent snake ankle boots that I bought used. I’ve been wearing them every day for about three years. I got to wear some of the new Gucci pieces for a shoot I did recently. I think they’re weirdly in the palette of my album cover.”

He strides into the room seeming impossibly tall and endlessly poised. In a silk scarf and all black, he looks as sharp as his wit has ever been, and downright Dickensian, as if the word “doff” was invented solely for use in reference to the hat sitting on his head. At 54, he’s got the perfect dappling of salt-and-pepper scruff, which frames a pair of lips in a perpetual mischievous grin, ever the unambiguous counterpoint to those trademark square-framed specs. Elvis is in the building—Costello, of course—and it’s enough to keep Jenny Lewis on her toes.

Well, somewhat. She’s sitting, currently, getting a light dusting of blush before the next round of photographs with her avuncular counterpart, but her dainty feet are neatly propped by a pair of light brown pumps. Los Angeles’ favorite daughter, our eternal indie darling regardless of her record label, is rightly stunning in a red dress and feathered cap, and as Lewis moves through the room, she hardly disturbs the air. Whether this is out of respect to the dust or due to an innate grace is unclear, but to not stare—at either of this pair—is to miss history in the making.

The duet is nothing new to music. Neither is the appearance of an elder statesman on the album of a young star for posterity, nor the reverse for the sake of a little shined-up sparkle. But when a legend with three decades and 34 albums to his hallowed name is coaxed out of retirement by the sheer energy experienced in a day of studio time with an inspired young songwriter, momentousness abounds. Last October, Costello told MOJO magazine he wasn’t “of a mind to record any more,” that the MP3 had “dismantled the intended shape of an album” and that fans could hear him live or not at all, essentially.

But on April 22, Costello sneaked out his 35th album, and a few days later issued the following via his website: “Some of you may have heard rumours of an album called Momofuku… [which] came about because of an invitation I received from Jenny Lewis to sing on her upcoming record.” He’d changed his mind. “That’s what I do,” he added. “The record was made so quickly that I didn’t even tell myself about it for two weeks.” His story only added to buzz surrounding an unnamed Lewis solo album reportedly recorded in organic and speedy contrast to Rilo Kiley’s 2007 LP, Under the Blacklight. Costello’s record was effectively a carry-over of Lewis’ January session, and he’d named it after the inventor of Cup Noodles because “all we had to do… was add water.”

Acid Tongue is now out, and it could be Lewis’ most immediate work yet. An all-analog rock and roll record that sears as much as it sways, the follow-up to 2006’s Rabbit Fur Coat trades in the alt-country scenery for further breadth and depth. Its sound is richer—a soulful mix of Southern-Gothic stomp, saturated balladry and campfire strum—and its inspiration digs deeper, with Lewis putting her pretty croon to use against the messy topics of sex, drugs, love, travel, illness and family. Sometimes she sings in character; in other moments, she’s addressing the very people recording with her: live-in beau Johnathan Rice, who co-wrote much of Acid Tongue; or her father, Eddie Gordon, a harmonica virtuoso estranged from Lewis until his recent cancer diagnosis reunited them.

Likewise, Costello’s Momofuku sounds refreshed, thanks in no small part to Lewis’ rag-tag gang. Though a few of her guests (Zooey Deschanel, M. Ward, and Rilo’s Jason Boesel among them) had evacuated Van Nuys’ Sound City Studios by the time Costello arrived, the “vocal supergroup” that lent his record so much of its particular vigor is also the core lineup behind Acid Tongue: Lewis, Rice, Dave Scher (Beachwood Sparks), and Jonathan Wilson (formerly of Eisley), along with Costello’s bassist Davey Faragher. Momofuku is another sound entry in Costello’s post-millennial rock catalogue, seething with the attitude and urgency he’d rediscovered with 2002’s When I Was Cruel. His own band, The Imposters, might have something to do with that as well: keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas have been playing with Costello since 1978—though not without the occasional break or falling out.

Truth be told, Costello has been threatening retirement since he was 26, according to his own liner notes for the Rykodisc reissue of 1981’s Trust (though when asked about it today, he asks back: “Did I say that?”). And more than their mutual passion for detailed narratives, heartful ballads and, now, double drummers (read on), Costello and Lewis share the kind of creative restlessness that can make or break a career. They approach each record anew, band members be damned; she pushed on by the persistent fear that one day her well will run dry, and he without enough time in the day to tend to the flood.

Will Costello quit? Not likely. He’s touring like a teenager these days, has a variety show debuting on Sundance Channel, and is finishing up a new album with T-Bone Burnett. Will Rilo Kiley split? It doesn’t matter. Lewis remains, and anyway, that’s a subject for another article at another time.

As we sit down to talk in one of the odd little atriums that dot a large woodsy yard, Elvis Costello removes his hat, while his unflagging cool and smirk remain. At his left, sharing a small divan, Jenny Lewis appears more petite than usual and a little bit nervous, despite the fact that she’s directly responsible for Elvis’ return to the studio. It’s hard not to marvel at the sight.

A conversation with Elvis Costello and Jenny Lewis

The beginning is a fine place to start… How did you two meet? Elvis Costello: It was mainly the doing of Tennessee Thomas [drummer for The Like]. The Imposters and I were down in Mississippi recording The Delivery Man, and Pete Thomas said his daughter had hipped him to [Rilo Kiley’s 2004 album] More Adventurous. He played me the record and I thought it was fantastic. [To Lewis] I think I got your number and called you.

Out of the blue? Jenny Lewis: Oh, yeah. My phone rang and I didn’t recognize the number. I picked it up and it was Elvis. I truly thought it must have been some sort of mean prank. Costello: I was in this cottage I was renting right by the woods where Faulkner used to walk. It was quite a good spot and I had a lot of time to listen to records. I became a fan, and when Jenny made her first solo record…it was a different world. The storytelling on that album is amazing.

So you instantly thought, “This young talent needs to be in my new music video.” Costello: [Laughs] We filmed the “Monkey to Man” video in L.A., at the old Ambassador Hotel, and I thought it’d be funny if Jenny walked across the set like she’d gotten lost while on a Universal Studios tour. Lewis: The awkward walk-by. Clutching my purse. Sweat on my brow. Costello: We’d decided the video would be populated by girls in bikinis and people in monkey suits. It was very tasteful; we were going for the feminist vote.

…And then one day in January, Jenny called you? Costello: And then it was fun for the whole family. I was at home in Vancouver and The Imposters’ bassist Davey Faragher—he lives in Southern California and was in the studio with Jenny—called and asked if I would sing a song on her new record. Lewis: And I emailed you a clip of myself, Johnathan Rice and a puppet doing “Carpetbaggers.” Costello: Obviously, I was being asked to do the puppet’s part. I told ’em I loved the song, but I thought I would sing it differently than the puppet.

So you flew out to record. At what point did you decide to stay and make a record? Costello: I didn’t stay actually. We cut “Carpetbaggers” in three takes, and the band didn’t have anything planned for the rest of that day. So I said, “Maybe we can cut something of mine.” I had two songs—“Go Away” and “Drum & Bone,” which I’d written literally the night before—and we just laid them down, Jenny and I in that little vocal booth, I’m playing rhythm guitar with a line out to the hallway, she’s reading the lyrics off a piece of paper. And I couldn’t believe it—she nailed every line. Lewis: I was thinking, “This is your big shot, kid, don’t blow it.” Costello: I had decided I was done with recording. Everything I’d have to do after the release of a record was making me miserable, but working with them reminded me of the bits that I liked. A week later, back in Vancouver, I called everybody up and said, “That was too good—let’s do it again.” That’s when the vocal group came together. Davey is the only person in The Imposters who can sing, and with The Attractions, I used to track myself for all the vocals. These guys were coming up with killer parts, and the will to do them, at 11 p.m. We made the record in six days, with the same live feeling as Jenny’s. Lewis: I was so impressed with your pace. Is that how you’ve recorded in the past? Costello: I think bands make more of a meal of it now because they can. We’re all guilty of it. I recorded Spike [1989] in four cities [Dublin, London, New Orleans, Los Angeles]; I had a ridiculous budget. But it’s gone around in one big circle—my first record [My Aim is True] was made in just 24 hours of studio time. The second album [This Year’s Model] took 11 days. We thought we were being decadent taking three weeks for Armed Forces, and with Imperial Bedroom, we were making our big statement in the studio, hiring harpsichords and glockenspiels: “Let’s take six entire weeks!” Now you hear of bands spending six months on a single.

Acid Tongue was done at an impressive clip as well, Jenny. What inspired you to make that record in only three weeks’ time? Lewis: I think everything I do is a reaction to the thing before it. Having come out from under the polished intention of Under the Blacklight—which took quite a bit longer—I just wanted the vibe to run the show. I was finally able to connect with a band and have it go down like a live performance. It was really liberating. Costello: There’s nowhere to hide in that room. When you listen to Acid Tongue, there’s nothing there. It’s just a voice and a couple of instruments, and it works perfectly. The more you went on with the record, the more confidence you seemed to gain. To open with “Black Sand”… it’s the kind of confidence that marks great records. You know, “How could they open with that? That’s ridiculous!” But soon you can’t live without it.

You’re both artists who have continued to surprise us over the years, approaching each album with different angles, different sounds and, often, different bands. Is creative restlessness part of what makes a great—or at least an enduring—artist? Costello: I think too much is made of it—like it’s some sort of puzzle where eventually the pieces will all fit and there’ll be this big, smiling picture of Jenny going, “I told you so.” The reality is: that was just the way the artist was feeling at that moment, and now you’re in danger of missing what’s actually being said and the genuine feelings that are in those songs. It’s a trap that journalists fall into, which funnily enough never comes up with groups that have a strong, signature sound. It just doesn’t occur to anybody to compare their records: “This one’s got all those things that we already love!” Lewis: All I know is that I just tend to get a little bored and I like to try new things. And, really, anything is good subject matter for a song. But I don’t think that quality is exclusive to “the good artist.” Costello: Van Morrison has a signature sound, for instance, but he’s a singular artist. I don’t know that there’s one better way to do it. When I was younger, I was guilty of being more confrontational for the sake of getting attention, saying things like, “We’re here to completely ruin your life!” [Laughs] It’s true there was some dull music out there and we were coming along with a bit of attitude—trying to get it right, where just playing was really the thing—but tearing others down wasn’t the intention.

Neither of you have shied away from expressing the deeply personal on record, and you’ve dealt with an array of reactions to your public persona, from fan adoration to being dissected by the press. How does one stay level through all this? Costello: It’s true that since the mid ’60s, people have based their songwriting more overtly on their life’s experience than, say, Ira Gershwin did. In his day, they wrote songs that faded to black when the stickier subjects of love—physical love in particular—came up. But with people like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, that started to change. That was passed on to the next generation, then the next generation, then to me, then to Jenny, and we’re writing about these things that are increasingly raw. Fair or not, people associate you with these songs, and to whatever extent that you’re putting your experiences in there, your mistakes are in public view. Your heart is broken, the band splits, you find a new way to go in life, you have a drug problem, you sober up. There’s a fascination with human frailty and an entire industry that makes entertainment out of it. I got disenchanted when I was younger, but then I realized that’s just show business, and show business is based on the Menudo principal: They kick you out of the band when you’re 18 and get someone else to appeal to the 11-year-old girls who, in turn, hit 15 and peel off to go to the new thing. That’s not real life. Lewis: I’ve just started, over the last couple of years, to receive feedback in that way, as well as from people that assume songs are about them, and it’s all very uncomfortable. I still don’t know what to make of it, and I try not to acknowledge it. I’d rather just write songs without having to think about where they’ll end up or who will be offended. Costello: I’ve gone through my less glorious periods and other times where I’ve felt on top of the world, but it’s important to remember: You’re not living in real time by writing songs. Even if you think you’re writing the honest diary of your love affair, you’re not—you’re writing an edited version of it. Otherwise the album would be 20-years long.

So, 2003’s North, for instance… Costello: North is a very specific album about recognizing the end of one way of living and the beginning of another, but it’s a song-written explanation of what it felt like to go through that. It’s not the same thing, and it certainly doesn’t take into account the feelings of the other people involved. Art is selfish; it’s not a democracy, not even in a band. But if you’re smart, you take the best of what people bring you—to a collaborative form like recording, for instance. I was just the beneficiary of that, when Jenny said, “Why don’t we get Tennessee in here to play with Pete?” Lewis: The fantastic father-daughter drumming duo. Costello: I never knew that was going to sound so good. Next thing I knew, we had a record. And you know, Tennessee joined us onstage at the El Rey in Los Angeles after we played the Hollywood Bowl with The Police. I’ve been turning around to see Pete playing behind me for 30 years, and I look back that night and see him and his daughter. I’ve known her since she was born but, more than being a matter of pride, it just sounded fantastic. [To Lewis] Thank you for that.

Which is your favorite song from each other’s new album? Lewis: “Go Away,” because it was the first. Costello: “Godspeed,” because it’s got such beautiful melody and mood. I was startled the first time I heard it. I also love the long, multi-parted songs like “The Next Messiah,” and I think “Sing a Song for Them,” the up-tempo one at the end of the album, is tremendous. And of course, “Carpetbaggers,” because we got to do that together. I also like the other version of it that we cut—a live take with the double drummers …

So basically, you like everything, including the outtakes. Costello: “Godspeed” is definitely my favorite, but I’m attracted to ballads, so you’re asking the wrong guy. I mean, I really love ballads—more than any other kind of music. Lewis: I actually wasn’t going to include “Trying My Best to Love You” because I was worried about Acid Tongue being too ballad-heavy—I wanted it to rock more than Rabbit Fur Coat—but Elvis was so set on it being on the record that I included it.

Elvis, were you impressed with Jenny’s use of double entendre for the album title? Costello: [Laughs] Old habits die hard. F

Snaring one of two songs in an animated Disney film is not exactly a low-profile gig. But when one of the songs in the movie is a duet between teen sensation Miley Cyrus and actor John Travolta, it's not hard to predict which tune is going to get the headlines.

Just a few weeks after the release of her second solo effort, "Acid Tongue," Los Angeles' own Jenny Lewis has resurfaced with a song in "Bolt." While a vehicle for Cyrus, Lewis' song, "Barking at the Moon," shouldn't be overlooked. It's an effortlessly comfortable country pop ditty, one complete with animal references ("I may not have nine lives," Lewis sings in the opening verses).

"I was excited at the prospect of having a subject matter other than myself to write about," Lewis told Pop & Hiss. "My new record has a sort of a dark undertone, so I was excited to write something from the perspective of a dog."

If may at first seem an odd turn for the songwriter. "Acid Tongue" is a loose mix of country and blues-inflected songs, an album that comes equipped with a murder ballad, and a singer who is "drunk and looking for company" in the title track.

But as a child actor-turned-singer, Lewis found plenty to be inspired by in the Disney tale. "Given my experience growing up here in Hollywood, when it was explained to me that Bolt was a child-actor dog who kind of had a difficult time distinguishing between Hollywood and reality, I could immediately relate to that," Lewis said. "I’m Bolt!"

And she almost had two songs in the film. Lewis said she was originally asked to write the song that would become the duet between Cyrus and Travolta. While on tour with her band Rilo Kiley last year, she recorded a song in Omaha with collaborator/producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes). In the end, Disney went with "I Thought I Lost You," which is co-written by Cyrus, but Lewis has no hard feelings.

"It was a pretty positive and upbeat song," Lewis said. "I submitted that. But they ended up asking Miley Cyrus to do something and using her song. But it was fun to just be able to write a song for myself and my friend. And now it’s mine. Now I have this weird song that I can play for children."

"Barking at the Moon" was recorded with singer/songwriters Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlings and Lewis' musician boyfriend Johnathan Rice. Lewis said the song in the film is as it was delivered to Disney, full of bright acoustics and singalong harmonies.

It was a challenge, Lewis said, to stay optimistic. "I do write character-driven songs, but they always seem to reflect my cynicism," Lewis said. "They always get run through this dark perspective. For this? This was totally removed from my own feelings. I really wanted to create something totally upbeat and positive. If you’re writing something for children, you don’t want to drop an unexpected bomb that might ruin them later."

But will the newfound positivity be reflected in Lewis' future songs? Lewis said she'll be taking the holidays off, but may sprinkle a few shows in Los Angeles to try out some new material and will tour again the spring of next year.

Your parents lived in Vegas and used to perform at the Sands. I read that your mom went into labor onstage there. Is that true? Best first question ever. Yeah, my mom says that she went into labor onstage at the Sands in the lounge where they played. I was born at the women’s hospital—I don’t know if that’s still around. I was born in the same hospital as Ryan Ross from Panic! At the Disco. (WHAT?????????????)

When did you move away? I was quite young. Three years old, maybe. My parents got divorced, and we moved to the San Fernando Valley. … My first memory ever is of my baby sitter at the time—we were living at this apartment building with a swimming pool in the middle and she was a female Elvis impersonator called Ellis.

Do you like playing here? I do. And you know, there wasn’t a great venue in Vegas for a long time. It was like, you’re playing in a casino, which is cool, but I feel like in the last 10 years some new spots have popped up. Like playing at the Cosmopolitan. Jonathan Rice and I made a record called Jenny and Johnny and we wanted to play the lounge at the Cosmo ’cause that’s what my parents did. So it was a very conscious effort to play in the lounge, old-school style.

You mention Las Vegas in the Rabbit Fur Coat song “Rise up With Fists.” Does this city symbolize something specific to you? It’s where I’m from. I have that working-class show-business blood coursing through my veins. That is the inception of my journey as a creative person—it happened in Las Vegas. That’s where my parents met. They were both auditioning for a band, they fell in love and made music together. They made me. And let me just tell you that my hair looks so good out in the desert, it’s unbelievable. It’s like perfectly not frizzy. (laughs)

You played Hannah in the 1989 film Troop Beverly Hills. Do you remember anything vividly from that experience? Do you keep in touch with any of the cast members? I have seen a couple of the girls over the years. Once in an exercise class I saw Kellie Martin, I was like “Omigod, Troop Beverly Hills!” But you know, I haven’t kept in touch with them, and the memories are vague. But it’s amazing how that movie has endured and how people love it. Generations of women love that movie, and some boys too. (laughs)

Two of the Haim sisters, who played Life Is Beautiful last year, played with you on a previous tour. What was that like? Danielle played on guitar in my band for the Acid Tongue tour. She was in my band, and then Este played with me as well a little bit later on. I did a bunch of shows with Danielle. It was her first tour ever. [She’s] such a sweetheart and such a badass, and I’m so very proud of them. They’re my friends. You know, we’re all Valley girls. Whenever I have a party or jam or whatever at my house, they’re always there, ’cause they’re really close by.

Tell me about the rainbow pantsuit. It’s on your album cover, in the video and you wear it onstage. I wanted to offset some of the darker themes on the record with colorful imagery, and in some ways, upbeat sounding music. But my friend Adam Siegel was a graffiti artist in the ’90s, and he painted on that suit for me. I work with this woman Autumn de Wilde, who’s taken all my album cover photos, so it was a big think tank on that rainbow suit.

The Voyager is a little bit poppier and has more ’80s undertones than your previous solo albums. Was that your intention, or did that come out more when you started working with Ryan Adams and Beck? It’s their production. I think Ryan loves ’80s, chimey-sounding guitars. I love Teenage Fanclub and Johnny Marr, so I think that feel comes from his guitar sound. But that’s the cool thing about collaborating; you really get someone and all of their influences.

I read that you wrote “She’s Not Me” after reading Keith Richards’ autobiography. How did that song evolve? In his book, Life, he talks a lot about this open tuning that he became quite famous for. So I tuned my guitar to this Keith tuning and started writing the music to “She’s Not Me.” And it got sort of buried in my hard drive. Jonathan [Rice] was like “Where’s that thing you were writing when you read that book?” And then we kind of brought it back from the dead. But Keith is just one of my favorite guys of all time, top three favorite guitar players. His are my favorite Stones songs. I’m more in the Stones camp than the Beatles camp.

Will we hear some Rilo Kiley songs at Life Is Beautiful? Yes, for sure. It always depends on how long my set is, how much I can fit in from the past and the present and the future, but for sure. It’s pretty up for grabs at this point. I think the more people get to know The Voyager songs, the more I want to play them. There’s just a lot to pull from. There’s so many songs from so many different records that sometimes I forget about them.

The last song on The Voyager ends with the line, “If you want to get to heaven, get out of this world.” How do you suggest people “get out of this world?” What do you mean by that? I think in some ways, it’s a reference to the cosmos or meditation or escape through whatever means—being more connected, a sort of spiritual assent in a way. I was reading a lot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and I think it informed some of that stuff. I was sort of pondering those big questions, like, where do you go?

Jenny Lewis and I are in her brown Volvo, idling outside her childhood home. On a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, we are two blocks from Van Nuys Middle School, where Lewis once sang “Killing Me Softly” in a talent show and got suspended for flashing a peace sign in a class photo (it was mistaken for a gang symbol). We are walking distance from what used to be a Sam Goody record store on Van Nuys Boulevard, where Lewis once bought a life-changing tape of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, stoking her obsession with magnetic wordplay, as well as her first Bright Eyes CD, Fevers and Mirrors, which she quickly shared with the three men in her burgeoning indie band, Rilo Kiley, in the early 2000s.

We are not far from the bar where Lewis’ older sister, Leslie, sings in a cover band every Saturday, following in the tradition of their parents, who sang covers in a Las Vegas lounge act called Love’s Way in the 1970s. And that strip-mall pub is just across from the movie theater where Lewis and her mother once conspired to steal a cardboard cutout of Lewis’ 13-year-old self—a souvenir from when, as one of the busiest child actors of her generation, she starred alongside Fred Savage in the 1989 video game flick The Wizard.

Lewis left the Valley alone when she was 16 and vowed to never go back. “That was my number one goal: just to get out,” she tells me now, at 43. But on the occasion of her fourth solo record, On the Line, I asked for a tour of her past life, and here we are—Lewis in a royal blue jumpsuit, with electric blue sneakers and eyeliner to match; me, staring up at the rainbow of buttons fastened to the sun visor of her passenger seat, a collage that includes Bob Dylan, a peace sign, and a hot-orange sad face.

From the driver’s seat, behind her oversized shades, Lewis mentions the Bob Marley blacklight poster that once hung in her Van Nuys bedroom, and I imagine the scores of teenage bedroom walls that have made space for her own iconic image through the years. Lewis’ catalog of cleverly morbid, storytelling songs with Rilo Kiley and the Watson Twins ushered a generation of young listeners through suburban ennui and personal becoming—like a wise older sister we could visit on our iPods, offering an example of how to do something smart and cool with your sadness and your solitude.

In the mid-2000s, Lewis was like an indie rock Joni Mitchell for the soul-bearing Livejournal era, or an emo Dylan, the poet laureate of AIM away messages. Words—some cryptic, some elegant, some brutally, achingly direct—burst from the edges of her diaristic songs, with a dash of Didion-esque deadpan for good measure. It’s no surprise that Lewis’ earliest bedroom recordings were just Casio beats and what she describes as “raps.” Lewis was the first feminine voice I ever encountered leading a band outside the mainstream, with a sound that initially befuddled my ears because it was, in that overwhelmingly male indie era, so rare: a woman’s plainspoken voice.

Cruising around L.A. together, my mind maps the California of her lyrics. What does it mean for the palm trees to “bow their heads”? What becomes of the cheating, California-bound man in Rilo Kiley’s filmic “Does He Love You”—the soulful rave-up where Lewis belted the heroic mantra, “I am flawed if I’m not free!”? But my most pressing question, the one I must ask Lewis: Is California still “a recipe for a black hole,” as she sang on 2001’s “Pictures of Success”? “I guess it’s all the void,” she tells me straight. “It’s not really geographical. That’s what you find out on your adventures. It doesn’t really matter where you go. You accompany yourself there.”

The main destination of our Van Nuys excursion is the small ranch home of Lewis’ youth—or rather, homes, as there are two, practically adjacent. It’s a little complicated, I learn, as are many things with Lewis’ upbringing.

Lewis was born in Vegas on Elvis Presley’s birthday. In 1976, her parents and sister were living out of suitcases on the road, playing Carpenters and Sonny and Cher songs at casinos like the Sands, the Mint, and the Tropicana. “My mom was so pregnant but she would not miss a show,” recalls Leslie, who was 8 at the time. “Jenny would be kicking her on stage, and I remember seeing my mom flinch. I think that was Jenny saying, ‘Let me out, I want to sing!’”

Soon after Lewis was born, her parents divorced, and her father, Eddie Gordon, left the family and continued his career as one of the world’s leading harmonica virtuosos. Lewis’ mother, Linda, moved back to her native Los Angeles, working three jobs to rebuild a life with her daughters. At 2-and-a-half years old, Lewis was discovered by the powerful Hollywood agent Iris Burton (a young Drew Barrymore and the Olsen Twins were among her clients) after the toddler spontaneously wandered over to her table in a restaurant.

When Lewis was 5, she was already supporting Leslie and their mom with her commercial and TV acting, and they bought their humble first home, the one we’re visiting. “But we always used to dream about the house on the corner,” Lewis says, slowly circling the block, “so then my mom bought that house, too.” It’s two doors down, looks pretty similar—why dream of it? “Because it was right there,” Lewis says, “and it was nicer than the one we had!” (A 1992 L.A. Times headline dubbed Lewis “A Teen-Age Actress With 3 Mortgages”—she owned a townhouse in North Hollywood by then as well—calling her “the youngest member of the United Homeowners Association.”) “I know it’s confusing,” Lewis says. “This is part of the simulation; this is craziness. Why did we also want that house?” She erupts into a cackle. “None of this makes any fucking sense.”

In life as in her songs, Lewis is a consummate storyteller, mindful of how tiny details make a great tale. In the car, for instance, she tells me about the time she played Lucille Ball’s granddaughter on the notoriously bad 1986 sitcom “Life With Lucy.” It was the last show Lucy ever starred in, and it was canceled before the first season even finished. The mood was blue, but a wrap party was still planned, and Lewis’ mother convinced Lucy to have the gathering at their little house in Van Nuys. “So Lucy rolled up with her two dogs,” Lewis remembers. “She walked in the front door, looked around, and said, ‘What a dump!’”

Lewis’ mother typically attracted fascinating characters to the house—like the producers of the TV special “Circus of the Stars,” who trained Lewis in trapeze; or “Fantasy Island” star Hervé Villechaize, who came over for a scammy “Pyramid Party”; or The Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty. One year on Halloween, at the recommendation of the family’s illusionist friend—who, according to Leslie, levitated Jenny in their house—her mother invited over Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd’s brother Peter, who was himself a real-life ghost buster. Peter planned to “check out the levels” of the house.

Intrigued by the Lewis’ paranormal investigation, the local news showed up. Back then, Lewis was hanging out with fellow child actors Sarah Gilbert, Toby Maguire, and Leonardo DiCaprio—who also came through to scope things out. Recalling the ghost-busting scene, Lewis says, “They came over and set up their vague, infrared equipment and they captured some sort of reading coming down the hallway and going into my childhood bedroom.”

I ask Lewis if the ghostbusters’ findings felt accurate. “Well, totally,” she says. “Something was going on. We always had weird vibes in the house. Very dark vibes.”

In person, Lewis’ temperament is one of constant cheer. She radiates positivity, takes bong rips in her kitchen, says “dope” and “vibe” often. This sunny disposition is occasionally punctuated by looks of deep, welling concern for others—as if she is on the brink of tears for humanity. Still, she calls herself a “total skeptic,” and tells me that show business trained her, early on, to master the art of getting along. “I didn’t ever wanna be one of the dicks on set—like in a family situation, where one person can really fuck up Thanksgiving,” she says, before veering into more existential territory. “We all know we’re careening towards the end of humanity. I just wanna do my work and hang out with my people.”

It’s only later, while sipping Modelos at the dining room table of her quaint ranch house in the hills of Studio City, that Lewis reveals the source of her childhood home’s “dark vibes” was her mother’s lifelong heroin addiction. “It is painful to go back there,” Lewis tells me. “I get a weird feeling. I don’t know if the ghostbusters could have detected it, but there was some kind of energy that was not conducive to survival. So when I left, I left.”

“My mom was an addict my entire life, and it was a fucking rollercoaster,” she continues. “It lent itself to some amazing situations, but it was manic as fuck, and there were drugs constantly. It’s a lifestyle, and it’s a community to grow up around. I feel grateful for having been witness to some pretty outrageous human behavior from a young age. Nothing really shocks me.”

Leslie attests to their complicated home environment, and recalls “stepping over people trying to find my books to go to school.” She became a mother figure to Jenny, taking her little sister to school on her bicycle and making sure she did her homework. Leslie was just a teenager when she put it together that their mother was pushing Jenny’s acting money into buying drugs and, ultimately, selling them. “It was a terrible realization for both Jenny and I to have,” Leslie says. “I give our mom a lot of credit for being resourceful prior to that. We probably wouldn’t be talking to you today if she hadn’t been so inventive and so diligent. But it escalated.”

When Jenny quit acting in her early 20s, Leslie wasn’t surprised. “I remember her finally having the burden lifted off her shoulders, that she didn’t need to support our mom anymore, and she didn’t need to be told what to do anymore—she was free,” Leslie says. “Her agents were calling me, asking ‘What the hell’s going on? We’re booking her in all this stuff.’ It was a big deal for her to walk away. But she had to do it. I think she didn’t want to be saying other people’s words anymore.” Leslie recalls the bubbly dialogue Lewis would have to recite on screen and adds, “That’s just not where she was at in her life.”

Focusing on her own words, Lewis arrived instead at death, disease, loneliness, deflated dreams. Rilo Kiley’s 2002 breakthrough The Execution of All Things opens with a hushed monologue from Lewis about the melting ground. On the title track, she sings genially of a will to “murder what matters to you most and move on to your neighbors and kids.” Disguised by twee album art, Rilo Kiley created an indie rock uncanny valley, a sweet-sung pop moroseness of Morrissey-like proportions.

The centerpiece of Execution is a gritted-teeth fight song called “A Better Son/Daughter.” It bursts from a music-box twinkle to a monumental marching-band wallop, from a depressed paralysis to refurbished self-worth, from “your mother […] calling you insane and high, swearing it’s different this time” to “not giving in to the cries and wails of the Valley below.” In the past, Lewis has rarely discussed how her own biography fits into her songs, but the sense of hard-earned triumph and conviction powering this particular song is unequivocal. When I ask what might have inspired its climax—“But the lows are so extreme/That the good seems fucking cheap”—she simply remarks, “I mean everything I say.”

In 2006, Lewis wrote the fablistic title ballad of her solo masterpiece, Rabbit Fur Coat, to convey the feeling of her story—a mother waitressing on welfare in the Valley, the promise of a working child, a fortune that fades—if not the concrete details, which, she says, don’t really matter. But the haunting “Rabbit Fur Coat” laid her mythology bare. “I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid/When I was old enough to realize/Wiped the dust from my mother’s eyes,” Lewis sings, the last line quivering into a moment of piercing a capella. “Is all this for that rabbit fur coat?”

I ask Lewis where she thinks her optimism comes from, and she just says “survival.” This summarizes an equation of emotional resilience that more women than not are tasked with solving young. “Jenny has basically been on her own her entire life,” says her best friend, the musician Morgan Nagler. “She’s the definition of buoyant.”

It’s hard to imagine rock in 2019 without Lewis’ radical honesty, without her hyper-lyrical mix of the sweet and the sinister. “In the early 2000s, the really big indie artists were Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie, and Jenny was one of the only women fronting that kind of music,” says Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee. “But in the next generation after that in indie music, there are so many women. How could she not have been a huge part of that?”

Crutchfield, now an indie figurehead in her own right, says no songwriter has directly influenced her more than Lewis. When she was still a 20-year-old punk living in Alabama, Crutchfield got the cover of The Execution of All Things tattooed prominently on her arm. Lewis’ odd, poppy, poetic songs had a musicality she hadn’t found in punk, but they still spoke to her as an outcast.

Seeing Rilo Kiley play for the first time—at a Birmingham venue she would go on to play herself—was a watershed moment. Crutchfield and her two sisters stood front row center, sang every word, and cried. “It was so huge to see a woman on stage holding a guitar, being powerful but still very feminine,” Crutchfield says. “That was my first foray into seeing that as a possibility for myself.” She recalls the exact outfit Lewis wore that night: red leather skirt, knee socks, T-shirt tucked in, and “a belt that was like a ruler—something you would see on a teacher.”

When Eva Hendricks, singer of sugarrushing New York pop-rock band Charly Bliss, was still in high school, she would spend days writing Lewis’ lyrics in her notebooks over and over, becoming attuned to the virtues of unsparing openness in songwriting. “Listening to that music unlocked something I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to understand about myself,” says Hendricks, who also appreciated how Lewis never downplayed her femininity. She distinctly recalls going to a Lewis record signing around 2014’s The Voyager: “I waited in line and when it got to be my turn, the only thing I could think to say was, ‘I can’t believe that your voice is coming out of a real human being.’”

Harmony Tividad, of Girlpool, was 12 the first time she heard Rilo Kiley, and calls Execution’s “The Good That Won’t Come Out” one of her favorite songs of all time. “That song is more like a diary entry, and vulnerable in this way that feels like a secret,” Tividad says. The unvarnished album opener peaks with Lewis speak-singing, “You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me/Maybe you’re right.”

“I was a really emotional, awkward young person and felt kind of socially trapped,” Tividad, now 23, reflects. “I was a freak. And that song is about exploring all of this stuff inside of yourself that you can’t really show people. It’s about isolation, which I have felt a lot. This music was a soundtrack to that recalibration of personhood. It was very integral in me developing a sense of self.”

Lewis has resided in the quiet show-biz neighborhood of Studio City—which she refers to as “Stud City”—for 11 years. She mentions that her current home is still, technically, located in the Valley, and shoots me a conspiratorial look: “Don’t tell anyone.” There are retro-looking landlines all around the house (cell service is poor), and eye-catching vintage Christmas bulbs strung in the kitchen window. The house was previously owned by the late Disney animator Art Stevens, who worked on Fantasia and Peter Pan. Standing amid dozens of plants in the little green room at the heart of her home, sipping a coconut La Croix, Lewis enthuses about Mort Garson’s obscure 1976 electronic record, called Mother Earth’s Plantasia. The whole place has an air of magic.

Its infrastructure has been unchanged for decades, which stuck out to a location scout for Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Charles Manson film, who knocked on the door one day and asked to take some photos. He did not return, but his business card is on Lewis’ refrigerator, alongside one from legendary songwriter Van Dyke Parks, and a Bob Dylan backstage pass. The fridge is mostly covered with hospital stickers from when Lewis was visiting her mom, who died of cancer in 2017, and inspired her new song “Little White Dove.”

The other big change in Lewis’ life was the dissolution of her 12-year relationship with singer-songwriter Jonathan Rice—after which, to shake up the energy of the house, Lewis’ friend and photographer Autumn de Wilde painted the walls of her bedroom a striking shade of rose. Directly outside the door is a life-size photo of her best friend Morgan, and the window of her bedroom, spanning the right wall, looks out to a built-in pool. The sill holds carefully arranged objects: ruby slippers, her passport, a candle, a plethora of sunglasses, and a violet notebook labeled “Lewis homework for On the Line.”

Talking with Lewis, the despairing elephant in the room is Ryan Adams, who played on the album. Two weeks before we meet, Adams was accused of sexual misconduct and emotional manipulation from musician Phoebe Bridgers, his ex-wife Mandy Moore, and others, including a woman who was allegedly 14 at the time, prompting a criminal investigation by the FBI. “The allegations are so serious and shocking and really fucked up, and I was so sad on so many levels when I heard,” Lewis tells me. “I hate that he’s on this album, but you can’t rewrite how things went. We started the record together two years ago, and he worked on it—we were in the studio for five days. Then he pretty much bounced, and I had to finish the album by myself.”

“This is part of my lifelong catalog,” Lewis continues. “The album is an extension of that thing that started back at my mom’s house—I had to save myself and my music, and get away from the toxicity. Ultimately, it’s me and my songs. I began in my bedroom with a tape recorder, and it was like my own fantasy world. I’ve taken all these weird turns in my life—with mostly men, sometimes women—but I feel like I’m finally back to that place, which is autonomy.”

Though On the Line features an impressive array of players—Beck, Rolling Stones producer Don Was, Dylan drummer Jim Keltner, literally Ringo Starr—the album marks the first time Lewis has penned an album of songs solo, without co-writers, since Rabbit Fur Coat. “I’m not fully myself when I’m co-writing,” Lewis admits, describing a directness to the songs she’s penned with men, like Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes,” as opposed to songs she’s written alone, like “Silver Lining.” “With the songs I’ve co-written, it’s almost as if there’s a trimming of the emotional, rambling, poetic hysteria, which is where I live when I’m writing by myself,” Lewis says. “I don’t think of songs structurally. It’s a feeling, and I’m chasing the feeling.”

The cover of On the Line is a close-up of Lewis’ chest in an ornate blue gown. She chose the snapshot intuitively, from a pile of Polaroids taken by de Wilde, and only later recognized it as a deep homage to her mom, who once dressed similarly in Vegas and had an identical mole between her breasts. “Over the years I’ve become more comfortable in my skin,” Lewis says. “It’s funny to feel good in your skin when it’s not quite as tight as it used to be.”

With her voice sounding more refined than ever, On the Line finds Lewis singing about getting head in a black Corvette, feeling “wicked,” and—on the devastatingly delicate “Taffy”—sending nudes to a lover she knows will leave. “There’s a lot of fantasy in my songs,” Lewis tells me. “Sadly, I don’t get that much action. I should have gotten more.” She says she has always written about sex as “character projection,” but when she did so on Rilo Kiley’s final album, 2007’s Under the Black Light, it polarized fans. Lewis recalls one journalist who made a flow chart claiming to correlate the declining quality of the band’s music and the shrinking size of her hot pants. “It was so puritanical,” she says. But as the borders between the underground, mainstream, and genre have broken down, the artists who Lewis inspired are continuing to make space for more expansive expressions of sexuality.

The new record’s sound is warm and sleek, and when Lewis says she listened primarily to Kanye’s recent work while mixing it, I recall yet another wacky tale she shared with me at her house: Once, circa 2008, Lewis chanced upon Kanye at an airport. He played her a cut from 808s and Heartbreaks, and she played him her sprawling psych-rock triptych “The Next Messiah.”

Listening to On the Line, I find myself fixated on “Wasted Youth,” which uses a jaunty piano arrangement to deliver its neatly bleak refrain: “I wasted my youth on a poppy.” Lewis then slyly draws a line from the drugs to our numbing daily realities. When she sings, “Everybody knows we’re in trouble/Doo doo doo doo doo/Candy Crush,” I can feel my phone festering in my palm.

“I feel like that song is more about Candy Crush than heroin, if that’s even fucking possible,” Lewis says. “That’s the fuckin’ end: Candy Crush. It’s terrifying. I feel like my brain has been taken over by one of those weird fungi that grow out of the head of an ant in the rainforest. It’s like we’re spracked out on our Instagrams. It makes me feel like shit even talking about it.”

By the bridge, however, Lewis offers a blunt jolt of hope: “We’re all here, then we’re gone/Do something while your heart is thumping!” That’s a surprisingly heartening sentiment from a songwriter who has referred to herself as “a walking corpse,” who once made a springy emo anthem entitled “Jenny, You’re Barely Alive.”

“I’m in my 40s and something has shifted,” she says, when I ask what she does these days to help herself through. “Maybe you’re more aware of your own mortality, and have the balls to walk away from things, and be untethered, and do the reflection and the hard work—getting your ass out of bed and walking a couple miles, going to the gym, talking to a therapist.”

Lewis says her relationships with her female friends have deepened profoundly in recent years. “Maybe this is what we’re picking up on: the collective consciousness,” she says. “Women are talking to one another more. Reaching out to my girlfriends has helped me through these lessons that keep coming up. It’s the same lesson, where I’m like, ‘How am I in this situation with this fucking person that’s crazy… again? Why am I here and why have I stayed this long?’ And then my girlfriends are there to go: ‘Get the fuck out of there!’” (She is clear that this is not about her relationship with Rice, but rather about other romantic and working partnerships.)

I tell Lewis that these get-me-out predicaments remind me of her own song, “Godspeed,” from 2008’s Acid Tongue, which I had been revisiting quite a bit lately—a golden-hour piano ballad from one woman to another, a paean to “keep the lighthouse in sight,” to get “up and out of his house,” because “no man should treat you like he do.” “I wrote that for my friend,” Lewis says. “But maybe I wrote it for myself now.”

By the end of my time at Lewis’ house, the sun has set and we’re sitting in near total darkness, save for the neon pink glow of one of her many landlines. “You have to make a choice to be happy, or try to be,” Lewis insists. “Sometimes that involves moving away from people that you love, or that hurt you, or that are toxic. You have to find your bliss in life, right?”

It’s late Saturday afternoon at a local Palm Springs mainstay, and Jenny Lewis, dressed in all white and chatting with a couple friends, is exactly where she wants to be. That is, until a video of her own performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live plays on the screens. “Make it stop,” she mouths with a smile.

A man puts colored leis around everyone’s necks and she picks up a glass of wine—her own wine, actually. We’re here to celebrate the first taste of this batch of Voyager, a natural wine developed in collaboration with Domaine LA and La Clarine farm. The first Voyager wine was released last summer, alongside Lewis’s critically-acclaimed third solo album, The Voyager. A brilliant marketing tie-in, sure, but the wine happens to be an aptly Californian extension of Lewis herself.

We talked with the singer-songwriter about her many appearances at Coachella, finding contentedness with her career, and taking advice from Lucille Ball.

How does it feel to be playing Coachella on your own? Was the last time you were here with Rilo Kiley? No, it was on my own, actually. This is either my sixth or seventh time playing Coachella. Twice with Rilo Kiley, and this is the second time on my own. Once with the Postal Service, and once with Jenny and Johnny.

In all those years, what’s been your oddest Coachella experience? I guess handling Arcade Fire’s balls. There were hundreds of balls, actually, and I ended up backstage with my friend Jenny Eliscu. They wouldn’t let us back out into the crowd and they wouldn’t let us side stage and it was right before they were unleashing these giant LED balloons. And so we ended up having to corral the balloons and throw them out into the crowd. So me, Jenny, and Ezra from Vampire Weekend somehow ended up together throwing these giant balls into the crowd. It was one of the coolest experiences of my life. I mean just being among that many balls, first of all (laughs).

The Voyager is an excellent album. It seems to be the one that’s broken through. How has that changed things for you? Well, I feel like with all the records I’ve made, it’s just been little baby steps since 2001. Every record hopefully reaches one more person. It really is linked to the very beginning and it feels just like an extension of the first song I ever wrote. But it’s amazing to be able to play the songs six months after the record came out, because things happen so quickly now that I’m lucky to have people pay attention beyond two weeks.

Do you look back at the material on your first solo album and feel like a different person? I’ve felt the same since I was three. Truly. But my first solo record was something that I never thought I could do on my own. I only did because my friend Conor Oberst was starting a label and he asked me to make a solo record. I’d truly never considered making something outside the context of my band. So with this one, I was a fully formed artist on my own and I could make whatever I wanted to and it wasn’t happenstance. It was like “this is the record I want to make, this is who I wanted to make it with, and this is the story I want to tell.”

Growing up acting and transitioning to music, was it your goal to be in showbiz? How did your career path evolve? I come from a long line of working-class showbiz people. My grandparents did Vaudeville. My parents had a lounge act in Las Vegas. It’s basically a way to not have a straight job. So I became an actor because someone needed to support my family when I was a little kid. It’s just been a part of our family tradition.

When did you start writing songs? When I was 10, maybe?

So this is something you grew up with. You never thought, “I’m an actor, but I’m going to try out music.” It’s just a hustle, man. I’m just on my hustle. And as an actor, you’re telling other peoples’ stories; as a writer, you’re telling your own. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell my weird little slice and find a little space for it.

At your Apogee Session a while back for KCRW you mentioned Ryan Adams made you listen to Creed while making The Voyager. Have you ever figured out why? No! I don’t understand [Ryan’s] methods. But I think it worked to get me out my own head so that I could record my own music. You’d have to ask Ryan about that, but by the sixth song, it was so loud, it was blasting in the studio and I thought, “Oh wow, I get this.” I mean, I get all music. There’s nothing that I don’t really like, you know? If it’s real music, I like it. I like electronic music as well. If it’s coming from a couple of humans, I’ll listen to it no matter what it is.

What’s on the horizon? What do you want to do now? Drink wine. (laughs)

Fair enough. What about in your music? I’m doing it. I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

You and Johnathan Rice wrote all the music Johnny Flynn sings in the film Song One. What was it like writing for him? He has such a distinct voice. He was so, so great. Johnathan and I wrote the songs and then we gave them to Johnny to interpret, and he did a really wonderful job. He was very respectful but brought his own vibe to it, which we really, really loved. We just like writing songs. If I can write for myself or for someone else, I’m totally down. I try to write every day.

Who would be your perfect main stage Coachella hologram to perform alongside? Lucille Ball. She was my mentor. I was on a show with her called Life with Lucy when I was a little kid. She played my grandmother. She was very tough on me but taught me a lot of important things. She was stern and she wanted me to focus and she taught me a lot of great lessons that I still carry with me.

Like what? “Learn your fucking lines, kid!” (laughs)

Who would be on your Coachella 2015 playlist? I’m so bad at mixes. It’s not my forte. I’m more of an album person. I still listen to records.

What was the last full record you listened to? To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar. Also Courtney Barnett. I do like compilations. I’ve been listening to this Thai compilation. It’s like ‘60s and ‘70s psychedelic Thai music called The Sound of Siam.

L.A. LOVEBIRDS: In the world of sweet-voiced, guitar-toting female folkies, Jenny Lewis has long been queen. Since busting onto the indie scene with Rilo Kiley’s debut, Take-Offs and Landings, back in 2001, Lewis has expertly walked the line between hipster messiah and bona fide musical megastar, even making the jump from band to solo project (and back again) without a hitch. It makes sense, then, that she’d eventually find her king in singer/songwriter Jonathan Rice. The part-time Virginian, part-time Scot has been making the rounds in and around Lewis’s L.A. hometown since the release of his debut album, 2005’s Trouble Is Real. And, as all good rock ’n’ roll love stories go, met Lewis by way of another musician, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. Since then, the pair have been touring and collaborating together, even teaming up to assist on Elvis Costello’s Momofuku in 2008.

Nowadays, these two music-making lovebirds have not only shacked up together; they’ve launched a band all their own. As Jenny and Johnny, the pair delivers a take on the male/female dynamic that’s as buoyant as it is personal. And their debut album, last year’s I’m Having Fun Now, is just that: Think rollicking guitars and lyrics that run the gamut from snakes (“We live in the woods, so we walk around in the hills a lot,” explained Rice) to afternoon naps. Better yet, Rice’s gravelly speak-sing and Lewis’s sometimes breathy, sometimes boisterous deliveries play fantastically off each other, creating something that’s part saccharine sweet, part in-your-face rock ’n’ roll.

“We definitely wanted the vocals to be the center point,” Lewis told me recently via phone from the pair’s L.A. pad. “At the core of this record are the harmonies, so we wanted that to be very prominent.”

Production-wise, I’m Having Fun Now is a true collaboration, with Lewis and Rice evenly sharing vocal, writing, and playing duties. “It’s a reaction to what we had both done before,” explained Rice. “[Our last solo albums] Further North and Acid Tongue were both made in the same studio with relatively the same cast of all-star L.A. session musicians. For this record, we wanted to get away from that and play as much as we could ourselves.”

In addition, the pair ventured out to Omaha to mix and master the record with production guru (and Monster of Folk) Mike Mogis. And the end result, as they describe it, is greatly due to his skills behind the board. “He elevated the sonic quality of everything to a level we would not have been able to get to,” Rice said. “It sounded a lot more lo-fi before he ran it through his magic machinery. He made it into a contenda.”

Still, at the heart of I’m Having Fun Now is Lewis, Rice, and an honesty that comes along with not only love, but genuine partnership. “If we hadn’t been involved personally with one another, I don’t think we would have made an album,” Rice said matter-of-factly. “I think I’m Having Fun Now is born of a lot of things, but mostly it’s proximity, and that level of creative comfort that can only be reached when you’re living out of each other’s pockets.”

I have never understood why reporters so rarely ask Jenny Lewis about the rich religious critique that has pervaded her work since the earlier days of Rilo Kiley. There is just so much there. I think I will scream if I hear another reporter ask her what it’s like to look hot in indie music, why Rilo Kiley really broke up, and whether or not her indie purist fans think the country album/major label/Jenny & Johnny project was a sellout.

Here’s the band singing their 2004 single, “It’s a Hit”:

The first song is about the simplistic way in which serious political issues are broken down and consumed in popular culture. That is, the moralistic framing of issues like war and peace obscures deeper analysis and makes us hypocrites. The second verse makes this clear, as I think the last two lines are meant sarcastically: “But it’s a jungle when war is made/And you’ll panic and throw your own shit at the enemy/The camera pulls back to reveal your true identity/Look, it’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing.” I always think of the repeated line, “It’s a holiday for hanging,” when I see a deposed leader’s remains displayed in the news media as spectacle and celebration. Then the last verse seems to be about both political and religious hypocrisy:

Any fool can play executioner for a day/And say with fingers pointed in both directions/’He went that way’/It’s only a switch or a syringe/I’m exempt from eternal sins/But the pardon never comes from upstairs/They’re always a moment too late/But it’s entertainment/To keep the crowd on their toes/It’s justice and we’re safe/It’s not a hit but a holiday.

Ultimately, then, religion can be manipulated in the name of political causes that, whether good or bad, are not innocent. Whatever the complexities, it all gets consumed as entertainment: War as reality TV.

While “It’s a Hit” is about the hypocrisy of a culture, I think “The Absence of God” is about what happens to a diverse range of individuals for whom god is literally absent. “The absence of God will bring you comfort,” the song begins. And it’s not as if there’s no conflict or disagreement without god since “we’d still be ruled by our dueling perspectives.”

“Rob,” the song goes on, “says you love love love/And then you die/I’ve watched him while sleeping/And seen him crying with closed eyes.” I think the meaning here is purposefully ambiguous. At one level, Rob weeps “with closed eyes,” like a believer conducting an emotional prayer; I think this suggests that his interior life is just as rich and meaningful as it could be with god. But the weeping may also hint at some kind of disappointment with the feeling that death marks the end.

Friend Morgan meanwhile “says maybe love won’t let you down/All of your failures are training grounds.” She believes that hard knocks ultimately bring salvation: “And just as your back’s turned/You’ll be surprised, she says/As your solitude subsides.”

But the absence of god, as the song makes clear, also leaves room for personal choice: “We could be daytime drunks if we wanted,” she notes. The absence of god means a degree of personal freedom that would not be possible with god, and it’s up to us to figure out what we believe and how we should live.

If religious themes were frequent in Rilo Kiley’s work, they emerged even more prominently when Lewis stepped out on her own as a solo artist. On the 2006 release, Rabbit Fur Coat, Lewis teamed up with the Watson Twins to release a gospel-tinged album that continued to ask questions.

In “The Big Guns,” Lewis take on the theme of betrayal, seemingly alluding to the figures of Jesus and Judas Iscariot: “Then you kiss his lips/ He forgives you for it/He forgives you for all you’ve done/But not me, I’m still angry.” I think this contrasts a very normal human reaction to betrayal with Jesus’ forgiveness of Judas, who betrayed Jesus with a kiss.

“Rise Up with Fists!!” is another fascinating song. I’ll post a video here because I think it highlights the song’s tongue-in-cheek tone:

I’m particularly partial to the rather straightforward verse on religious hypocrisy: “It’s hard to believe your prophets/When they’re asking you to change things/With their suspect lives, we look the other way/Are you really that pure, sir?/Thought I saw you in Vegas/It was not pretty, but she was…”  Then, in perfect harmony, the Watson Twins chime in to finish the phrase with, “Not your wife.” Plastic surgery is then juxtaposed with religious faith, both conceived as salvation via cosmetic quick fix.

“The Charging Sky” has a similar mocking tone, now directed at people who pursue faith as a form of insurance: “And it’s a surefire bet I’m going to die/So I’m taking up praying on Sunday nights/And it’s not that I believe in your all might/But I might as well/As insurance or bail.” This mindset seems to facilitate what she critiques next—faith as capitalist vehicle: “But what if God’s not there?/But his name is on your dollar bill/Which just became cab fare/For the evangelists, the communists, the lefts, and the rights.”

But the mocking tone is not found in every song. I understand this album as a genuine engagement with the frustrations and questions that any thoughtful person with—or without—faith must engage. “Born Secular” is probably the most gorgeous song on the album, and it is certainly one of the most heartfelt: