The freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis
Don't Call It "Anti-Folk"
Around the dawn of the 21st Century, Jeffrey Lewis began to perform in the neighborhood where he grew up, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Lewis’ apartment frequently hosted writers, folksingers, and professors, but Jeffrey Lewis’ dream was to become an artist. He’s always published his own comic books and provided illustrations for his records, but his music is what connected most with the public – specifically as part of the “Anti-Folk” scene that grew up around the Sidewalk Café on Avenue A.
Lewis’ style – long rambling songs with witty, ruminative, and often humorous lyrics, set to simple two or three chord melodies – has won him an international following, with 14 albums and innumerable EP’s, singles, and cassettes to his credit. Lewis’ latest, The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis on Don Giovanni Records, has been hailed as one of his best releases to date, and after recently returning from Australia, he’s currently touring through Europe. Lewis is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, “Roll Bus Roll: A Jeffrey Lewis Documentary,” which is currently making the festival circuit and makes its New York City debut on May 1.
Q: Congratulations on the new album and especially the review from Robert Christgau, who called it your best album ever, “or damn close to it.” Which made me curious: What does a review like that mean to you, both in terms of ego but also real life concerns. Do you even read your reviews (I know a lot of artists who don’t)? Can good reviews still sell records (or downloads, or drive streams?)
I don’t know if good reviews sell albums, but I guess it doesn’t hurt. Nowadays, you can take a look at your own streams and see if they go up; for example I got a sort of good review on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program for the new album, and you would think that would be great exposure, but there was zero bump in the streams from that, as far as I could see, so does that mean that literally nobody who heard that NPR review bothered to check me out? On the other hand, a woman came up to me at the merchandise table at my band’s gig in Buffalo that week and she said she’d booked tickets to the gig because she heard that NPR review and then noticed a listing that I was playing in her city that week, so without ever hearing of me before, she booked tickets. So maybe it all comes back to me in small ways that aren’t all noticeable at first.
As for the Christgau review, that sort of thing I do take a little more personally just because I sort of know him a bit from around the neighborhood, and from some of Peter Stampfel’s social gatherings, and because of Christgau’s general musical knowledge and background, so it’s interesting to me what he makes of it. It’s all seemingly random, some people really like something, other people don’t, and you just hope that the people who do really like it are the “tastemakers” that other people are going to pay attention to. Usually it seems to be the other way around, in my experience! The least-seen reviews are the most glowing, and the most high-profile reviews are often a bit more blah. But then even when I’ve gotten some glowing reviews from high profile outlets, it’s not like it changes my career overnight, everything mostly continues as normal, but I’m keeping my head above water somehow, so it’s all working somehow. I often think of the great Roches song “Big Nothing,” about how some supposedly life-changing or career-changing events end up not doing much. Great song! And yeah of course I do read or encounter most of my reviews, people send them to me or I stumble on them. I get too curious not to read them when I see them.
Q: You recorded most of the album in Nashville with producer Roger Moutenot but the arrangements vary from just acoustic guitar to sparse arrangements with violin and percussion, to a full-band workout that even includes an extended jam. Did you know as you wrote a song what kind of treatment it needed, or did you work that out with Roger and the band as you recorded?
I might have arrangement ideas in mind when I first write a song, sometimes my first home demo recordings of a song do include some of the additional elements overdubbed on top, like for example the bass part for “Sometimes Life Hits You” was part of the song from when I first wrote it and first made a little home demo of it so I wouldn’t forget it. But actually this sometimes creates problems for me, because the way I hear the bass part is the way it sounds to me when I play it on guitar, and then the final sound of the actual bass player in my band playing it on an actual bass guitar just doesn’t sound the same, and doesn’t have the feeling I was hoping. That happens a lot. Because a lot of my own home-recorded bass ideas are just me making stuff up with my usual same acoustic guitar.
Other times there’s some workshopping with my bandmates, we’ll try to throw around some arrangement ideas, trying to constantly improve things, rather than me being satisfied too easily. Just because there’s a beat on something and a bass on something, it can really make the song worse rather than better, if it’s not there for a reason. I’d rather just keep playing the song as a solo song if the extra instruments aren’t really adding something important to it.
That happens a lot, and there’s a lot of songs on my albums that might have had some additional bass or keyboard or drum parts on them in live performances or in rehearsals, that I eventually decided against keeping, it’s just useless clutter on top of the song if it’s not really doing something. The 2019 “Bad Wiring” album was a good recording experience because we had basically played all of those songs live quite a lot before going into the studio. That’s like the best way to do things I think, so you’ve already had enough time to workshop things, try out different ideas, see what works, you’re not trying to make the arrangements while you’re paying for studio recording time.
But then a lot of songs just keep evolving over time; like, “Tylenol PM” had been getting played live for a while before we recorded it in Nashville for this record but that arrangement has now gotten a lot better really, and the way we play it live now has a different keyboard and bass part from what we recorded on the album. I wish we had the current version on the album instead of the previous version. Sometimes Roger the producer might suggest an idea in the studio, but I was mostly trying to avoid adding anything that we can’t play live, even if his ideas were good ideas, which they usually are
Q: The songs on this album, like all your work, range from laugh-out-loud funny to whimsical and clever, to serious and contemplative. Songwriting is a process that fascinates me, and I’m curious how these ideas germinate. When you start a song, do you know immediately that you’re writing a funny song or a serious song, or does the song dictate that as it develops? What starts the process? A line of lyric, a general idea of what you want to do, a title?
A lot of times I’ll sit with a guitar, with the intention of writing a song. I’ll mess with a bit of musical options, just still a certain thing starts to stick, even if it’s just two chords, anything that seems a little suggestive to me, in some way. And then I try to think of what it’s suggestive of, what is it evoking for me, what kind of song is it trying to tell me it wants to be, what feeling, or maybe it reminds me that there’s a song idea that I’ve got that I haven’t used yet, maybe this could be the song in which I try to manifest that unused idea. Then it’s a matter of sitting with a notebook and trying to hammer out the actual lyrics, with a pen, and constantly trying to sing them with the guitar part to make sure it still fits and hasn’t strayed away. Once I’ve got enough of a start, or even a full batch of verses, I’ll type it all into my laptop, because then I can really do a lot more editing and rewriting and moving things around, because my handwritten notebook stuff is pretty messy, things jotted in the margins, things crossed out, arrows and circles telling me where I ought to move different lines. My main thing is that I finish the song. Even if it seems like the worst song I’ve ever written, it’s terribly important not to stop it until there’s a song with a beginning and middle and end.
Once it actually exists as a song, then I can fix it, improve the lyrics, work on it. And I also always try to immediately record the song, so I don’t forget how it goes. Just writing down the chords and the words isn’t enough to remember how the melody or delivery or structure goes, and it’s obviously maddening when you just can’t remember how you wanted it to go, it’s gone forever, so it has to be recorded immediately. Often just onto my phone, or a little recording device, anything where I don’t need any set-up time, I can just hit one button and record it.
Out of every ten or twenty songs I write, there’s maybe only one or two that I think are worth holding on to, but in recent years I’ve been putting most of the “extra” songs on my Bandcamp page, at the end of each year, as these “Tapes,” so I’ve got my “2019 Tape” and my “2020 Tape” etc, if anybody wants to get a glimpse at my songwriting process, you can hear all the stuff on those annual Bandcamp releases and that’s like a look at my personal songwriting sketchbook.
Q: You just did a fairly extensive tour of Australia. What kind of feedback did you get from the fans there about what’s going on in the U.S. with Trump? This summer, you’re going to Canada, our “51st state.” Do you think there’s a danger than anti-American sentiment might swell to the point where it negatively affects touring musicians?
I assume people would know my political leanings from my songs and comic books and projects, but that also doesn’t mean I feel like talking about it regularly with people who want to talk about this stuff. There was a night on the Australia tour after a gig where people were sitting around and going into all these Trump-disaster conversations and wanting to get my input, I’m just too tired of it to get engaged. It’s just so boring to go through all of this again, the daily outrage click-bait, the names, the faces, the obnoxiousness, the same old tired discussions about it, at this point I’d almost rather people go back to asking “what is anti-folk”.
Q: Speaking of the president, this album must have come together during the election year when we didn’t know who’d be the 47th president; the topics tend to focus on the personal. Do you think you might delve into more political songwriting and commenting on the current state of affairs? Do you think there’s a role for that kind of songwriting and protest in 2025?
I’ve already written so many of those songs, from 2016 through to 2024. Some of them are findable on my Bandcamp page, like on the “2020 Tapes” release or on the “Both Ways” album or elsewhere, plus there’s other songs that I played live that didn’t end up on any of my releases; some of these are pretty good songs I think!
And there’s songs about voting for Biden, voting for Harris, all that sort of stuff, I’m always writing and performing stuff like that, these topical songs that have a shelf life as the situation changes. I could assemble a whole album of these political songs of mine from over the years.
I can’t help myself when I have an idea that I want to write, even though I often get a lot of blowback. I don’t know if there’s a “role” for this songwriting, but I just do it because I get inspiration for it.
I don’t see any other modern songwriters really doing this. When I make a song like “WWPRD” or “One-State Solution” or “Harris & Walz” or “Keep it Chill in the East Vill” or “Reparations,” is there anybody else writing songs like this? Taylor Swift or Jay Z or Kendric Lamar or whoever the top writers are in the modern era, they don’t have the willingness or the guts to try to wrestle these things out in their work, they’re too scared of losing revenue, I think, or scared of being wrong maybe.
I’m not scared of being wrong, I accept that sometimes I can be wrong. And I like the challenge of making a well-crafted song about something, that hits all the marks I want to hit, about my thoughts on something
.Q: There’s a ying/yang on this album; for every song that’s self-deprecating (sometimes to the point of self-loathing,) there’s another that’s optimistic and happy. And many of the songs just seem like you doing a lot of thinking about your life. Is that duality part of your art – balancing dire songs with funny and happy ones – or is it simply how your mind works?
I don’t feel like I have much control over what kinds of songs I write. I discard a lot of songs that don’t seem like they are the kind of thing I’d need to hold on to. The songs that I tend to keep usually have a mix that I personally like, a combination of emotional elements; those seem richer to me or better in some stronger way.
But in general, I’m just hoping to end up with songs that I think are my better songs, regardless of what the topic is. And then when I’m trying to put together a batch of songs for a set list or for an album, I do feel conscious about whether it’s too many depressing songs, or too many silly songs, or too many quiet songs, or too many songs in the key of D minor, or any of those sorts of considerations, to avoid feeling like I’m assembling something that feels too repetitive.
And then overall, I’d say it does form some kind of portrait of how my mind works, but that must be the same for anybody doing anything.
Q: Speaking of your brain, I’ve asked this before, but I think this is something your fans must think about. A Jeffrey Lewis concert contains about as many words as an actor recites doing “Hamlet.” Your songs go on and on and often never repeat, yet I’ve never seen you botch a line. Do all those lyrics live in your head, do you ever have to go back and relearn a song if you haven’t done it in a while?
I’ll forget lyrics on stage sometimes. Luckily it doesn’t happen too often. It’s amazing to me that my mouth seems to remember how to do all this delivery, sometimes somebody requests a song that I haven’t done in a while, or sometimes I just start playing one I haven’t prepared at all, and somehow the words are all there; it’s like one of those things where it’s probably better to not think too much about what you’re doing or you might lose it.
I think this is one of the good things about playing different set lists each night, as much as I can do, because it means that there’s a lot of songs that don’t have to go too long without ever being played, they don’t have a chance to fall out of working memory if they are all getting a chance to cycle through my performances rather than being set aside for years. When it’s really been years and years since I played something, it’s annoying to have to relearn it and re-memorize it, that happens a lot.
Q: Don Giovanni Records re-released a few of your albums on vinyl but it looks like the new one is only streaming. For someone who tours extensively, does not having vinyl crimp your profitability, or can you get by with t-shirts and old merch? And just out of curiosity, does anyone still buy CD’s?
The new album is on LP and on CD but it’s essentially a self-released thing, I’ve personally manufactured all the items and if you come to my apartment, you’ll see it’s piled high with boxes! Records and CDs plus comic books and lots of other stuff.
Don Giovanni Records is partnering with me on this release to the extent that they are distributing and soliciting distribution for the album, but they are buying those units from me, so it’s a reversal of the usual label-to-artist relationship. Instead of me buying records from the label for my tours, the label buys records from me for their distribution.
So Don Giovanni Records really should have my stuff available, but if they don’t have it then I certainly do have all that stuff in stock on my own website, people order all this stuff from me all the time, including my new album. Yes, people do buy CDs! Not as much as they used to, though.
Q: The documentary “Roll, Bus, Roll: A Jeffrey Lewis Documentary” screens in New York City on May 1 Have you seen the final cut? It must be incredibly weird watching a documentary about yourself, can you describe the experience?
I flew to London on Nov. 5 to be at the debut screening, it was a good plan for me because I was able to vote for Harris and then be up in the sky overnight out of contact with the world so I wouldn’t have to go thru the stress of watching the election returns coming in that evening. I woke up in London in the morning and started to hear people chatting about the results, and I basically haven’t checked the news since then! The screening itself was a good surreal experience to have as a distraction, although nobody was in a very good mood.
Q: It’s been great seeing Peter Stampfel doing so well, it seems like he’s recovered much of his voice after that medical issue. Can we look forward to another Stampfel/Lewis album at some point?
I kind of put my all into that last one, the double album, it was hard to put it all together and without being able to tour with Stampfel to support it, I don’t think it made much headway in the world. The previous two albums I’d done with Peter Stampfel in 2011 and 2013 were based around having tour stuff together, so that we’d be able to sell the albums on tour, but when we tried to do it a third time it ran into big problems when Peter broke his hip early in the tour in Ireland, that was the tour where we would have been playing a lot of the material from that third album. And it just took a long time to put the album recordings all together; the first two albums were able to be done very fast and cheap but the third one took years, and we don’t have the ability to perform or tour that stuff. That album, “Both Ways,” is on my Bandcamp page but I’ve never made physical copies of it. Maybe I will someday.
Q: Fee free to plug anything else you want people to know about, and thanks for doing this.
There’s my recently printed book “Revelations in the Wink of an Eye: My Insane Musings on Watchmen” which took me many years to finally put out. I’ve never done a book before, just lots of comic books, which is a different process. This was a big risk and now I have an apartment full of boxes of them! So I should plug that more. If anybody is a fan of the Watchmen comic book from 1986, they should read my book about it. Thanks! Jeffrey
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