“Rise Up With Fists!”
from the album Rabbit Fur Coat
2006
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Jenny Lewis went looking for independence, God and love in all the wrong places. So she turned broken hearts and broken homes into a captivating solo bid.
“Somebody told me recently that my face smelled like a pencil,” says Jenny Lewis as she caresses her nose with an SAT-approved No. 2. “I got this pencil to kind of reference.” She pauses to think about how else her face could smell. She looks up and says, “It could be worse.” The auburn-haired Rilo Kiley frontwoman seated in the lobby of New York’s Maritime Hotel, dressed in a brown, long-sleeved top, short-short beige shorts and stockings pulled up high, but below her knees. She’s only now just beginning the long-overdue process of unwinding from the stress of touring.
Two days earlier, she was playing the final show of Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous tour in Coney Island, as part of the embarrassingly undersold Across the Narrows festival. When the countryish ballad “Does He Love You?” — a song about a failed extramarital affair — ended, she said, “Man, that was so good to play that the last time.” Her band had been opening for Coldplay, one of the most uncomfortable touring experiences of her life, prior to this show. Rilo Kiley played to near-empty arenas where their fans, if any were present, were miles away from the stage. Lewis says the difference between her fans and Coldplay’s is that fans of the indie-lite Brits aren’t “music people.” This was the one concert they were attending this year. “It’s hard to play for people that really don’t give a shit.”
Although only a few people gathered in the front that day at Coney Island, Lewis was just happy to see her fans there to help send off the band’s most successful album to date. Through the highs and lows of the tour, she’d always had something to look forward to, something to hold onto that was only hers — a solo album. A few years ago, a bright-eyed Conor Oberst offered to release her solo debut on his new label, Team Love. Lewis scoffed at the idea. “Conor, I’m not going make a solo record. What are you talking about?” He just said, “Sure you are.”
When Lewis began writing the songs that would become More Adventurous, she also wrote one titled “Rabbit Fur Coat,” a slightly fictitious story about her mother, concerning catfights, drugs and other unmotherly things. It’s a rough song, and it’s difficult to play live, but she had found the springboard for what would become her solo debut, released of course on Oberst’s Team Love imprint. She began writing more songs that just weren’t feeling right for the band — songs about her parents’ divorce, panic attacks and religion, or rather its absence in her life. Musically, her songs began sounding like the “white soul” she grew up on, with “ooh ahh” backups from L.A. alt-crooners Watson Twins and guests like Oberst, producer M. Ward and Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard. The resulting album, Rabbit Fur Coat, is probably her most personal album to date.
Jenny Lewis’s parents met at the musicians union in Los Angeles, when her mother replied to a “singer wanted” post on a bulletin board. This eventually lead to a lounge act in Vegas, where her mom sang and played bass while her father played harmonica classics set to a drum machine, gracing the lounges of casinos like the Sahara and Sands. From the few photos she’s seen of their act, Lewis says lovingly that her mom was “a babe in a long dress.” When Lewis was still a baby, her father left the family and by age three, they left Sin City for the San Fernando Valley. Lewis hadn’t really missed her dad, since he was never there to raise her in the first place. After the divorce, her mother gave up singing professionally, something that’s always struck Lewis as tragic since she’s the one who taught her how to sing. But the divorce had killed that part of her mom.
On “The Charging Sky,” Lewis sings, tongue in cheek, about her parents reuniting after 25 years. It reeks with the naive dream all children of divorced parents harbor. In reality, her relationship with her dad is still non-existent. “I haven’t really come upon that moment where I want to necessarily find the ghost, or invite him over to dinner,” she says, just as frankly as she sings her lyrics. “There’s time for that. There have been some interesting things that have happened over the years, but for the most part we have yet to get into it.”
By age 10, Lewis was starring in TV movies which eventually led to roles in feature films like Troop Beverly Hills (the film her female fans love most… and the ones she’s most indifferent to), The Wizard, Foxfire and Pleasantville, among others. For the most part, she’s separating Jenny Lewis, the former child star, mentioned in almost every article about Rilo Kiley (yes, including this one) from Jenny Lewis the 30-year-old professional musician. Because of this, acting is on hold. Rather than play the daughter of a determined divorced woman, as in Troop, she’d rather express the thoughts of a flesh-and-blood daughter of a divorced, single parent. On the Dusty Springfield-inspired “Happy,” little glimpses of the past begin poking through: “My mother never warned me about my own self-destructive appetite or the pitfalls of control.”
“Some of us aren’t given great examples of how to have relationships and be happy and change and get better,” she says. “And I think that line is a little bit about that — the kind of intangible, destructive elements.”
Despite these tendencies, Lewis has been in a relationship off and on for about a year. When she does tackle a relationship song on Rabbit Fur Coat, as with “Melt Your Heart,” it’s from a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t perspective. Between her parents’ broken marriage, her well-chronicled breakup with Rilo’s Blake Sennett and trying to maintain her current relationship while constantly on the road, Lewis has had to make many private decisions in public. When she talks about her love life, she pauses to explain it to herself first.
After she has properly calculated her words, she says, “I’m starting to figure out what feels good in the long run — like what isn’t just about the moment, but what kind of sustains itself. That’s more important to me now than it was 10 years ago. But still, I have no clue. I’m like a baby in the world. I have no example of a good relationship growing up, and I truly am clueless, and I’m just trying to blindly feel my way through.”
The other relationship Lewis questions throughout Rabbit Fur Coat is hers with God. She jokingly calls herself a “terrible Jew,” and, growing up, her mother never took her to temple. The album contains songs such as “Born Secular” and lyrics such as “What if God’s not there? But his name is on your dollar bill that just became cab fare.” To her, this religious questioning recalls Bob Dylan’s New Morning, the album before he plunged headfirst into religious music. She has no intentions of making the same trip anytime soon, though. It’s just in the part of her life where she’s questioning the cosmos.
In the middle of explaining, she trails off. A man with long dark hair strides through the lobby. Lewis follows him with her eyes, making sure the doorman has fully closed the big glass doors before speaking. It’s difficult to tell if she’s enamored with him or deathly afraid. Even when she does speak, she keeps looking back to make sure he won’t be walking back the way he came.
“I love that guy,” she says in a whisper, looking back once more. “I’ve met him so many times, but he makes me so nervous.” The man is indie filmmaker Vincent Gallo. The same man who once placed a hex on Sennett to ensure he didn’t divulge the location of the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. It was all in good fun of course, but Sennett took it seriously, because as Lewis puts it, “A hex from Vincent Gallo? You don’t want that. He’s a true Hollywood character; people are so fucking politically correct that their personalities evaporate. And it’s so nice to know that that guy struts around and films scenes with starlets so he can get blowjobs.”
Aside from writing heart-wrenching songs like the title cut, a song so personal she can barely put together a sentence to describe it, Lewis had a hard time writing most of Rabbit Fur Coat simply because it was a solo record. With Rilo Kiley, she’s able to bounce her songs off Sennett, and when she does perform the more difficult ones live, her band’s got her back. While she shared her songs with a best friend, she took the process as an opportunity to showcase her independence from the Lewis/Sennett songwriting credit. She even has more on the line since his second side album with The Elected is coming out the exact same day as hers — friendly competition indeed.
“I think he likes it,” says Lewis about the music she’s played him, then pausing to think. “Pretty sure he likes it.” She pauses again, sounding more humble. “Which is a relief, because I really want to impress him. With Rilo Kiley, I think the perception is it’s my band because I’m the lead singer and I’m the only girl in the band, but it’s really Blake first and me second… so I ultimately want to make him proud.”
She leans back into the couch again, more relaxed. In the end, she wants to make herself proud, too. Like almost every other post-Beatles musician, her goal is to become the best songwriter possible. In fact, she obsesses over it. Actual relationships are secondary to the songs she writes about relationships, even if someone thinks she smells like a pencil.
“I met this little dog the other day. He was this big,” she says, gesturing with her hands. “A little miniature dachshund. His name was Romeo. I can’t stop thinking about him. He broke my heart; he was so small. But it’s just the little living things that keep it exciting. And I think, for me, I’m lucky to be able to play music. It’s a good life.”