Jenny Lewis is choosing joy with Joy’All

Jenny Lewis appears in our 2023 summer issue, which you can buy here.

Jenny Lewis spent the pandemic going through a huge spiritual transformation. In addition to her 20-plus years practicing yoga, she began meditating, listening to Ram Dass and working with a trainer five days a week. She strived to deprioritize being a “workaholic” and embrace the other facets of herself that make her a well-rounded human. She asked herself: “Who are you if you can’t do your job? Are you a good person? Can you take care of yourself? Can you do stuff around the house? Who are you?” Lewis wanted to become a better version of herself. So while she was stuck in Los Angeles — the place she had been running from for five years following a breakup — that’s what she did. “I was totally alone in this space that I’ve shared with my ex for many years, so I just took the opportunity to do some serious spring cleaning internally, as well as the house itself, and made it my place again,” the 47-year-old singer-songwriter explains over Zoom from the floor of her music room in Los Angeles. 

To guide her, she found motivation in her own past in the form of a classic Rilo Kiley song. “I think about ‘A Better Son/Daughter’ [and the line] ‘You’ll be a real good listener, you’ll be honest, you’ll be brave,’” she says, reciting the lyrics like poetry. “That song, I think, for the pandemic, was a mantra for me in a way. In coming out of it, it’s like, ‘I can’t wait to take you out to dinner, and you can buy the rib-eye if you want,’ and ‘I’m going to work on being a good listener to my friends,’ and all those important things that were uttered in that song so many years ago.”

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It was Lewis’ own heart-opening that helped inform the title of her fifth solo album, Joy’All (due June 9). “It’s like joy and love for all, no matter what, even if the person is shitty,” she explains. “We have to accept that some people are fucking nightmares, but we have to have love for them as well.”

[Photo by Bobbi Rich]

Lewis intended to make a follow-up to her 2019 record, On The Line, at some point, but she didn’t have concrete timing in mind. However, she had a handful of songs ready to go pre-pandemic, including two of the album’s cuts, “Psychos” and “Giddy Up,” which she played on her livestream jam sessions. The rest of the album came in time, thanks to a songwriting workshop with her friend and collaborator Beck. Soon, Lewis landed on a recording location after visiting her friends Lucius while they were making an LP with Dave Cobb at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio. She just knew she had to record there, too. In the process, she also signed to a new record label, Blue Note/Capitol Records. 

On Joy’All, Lewis cites Frank Ocean, Tracy Chapman and Edie Brickell & New Bohemians as influences. “I had been listening to ‘DHL,’ this Frank Ocean song, and exclusively hip-hop radio in Nashville the whole time I was there — 101.1 The Beat,” she recalls. Those influences happen to be quite the departure from her 2021 standalone single “Puppy and a Truck,” a sweet ditty about the beauty of driving in her Chevy Colorado pick-up and hanging out with her adorable cockapoo Bobby Rhubarb (a “thank you” gift from the musician Serengeti, who she collaborated with during the pandemic). Fans and critics speculated Lewis’ next album might be her “yacht-rock era.” But that evaluation was much too premature. The songs from that period, she says, were just songs.

Instead, Joy’All is more a fusion of psych-country, folk-pop, R&B and humor — something Lewis often injects into her lyrics. The artist, who is no stranger to singing about sex in all its forms, dials in on the comedy of uncomfortable moments on “Psychos.” “I’m not a psycho, I’m just trying to get laid,” she reasons on the track. “Those are my favorite lyrics where it’s really real but also really funny,” she explains. “Giddy Up” also broaches the topic of getting laid (“It’s a little mantra: ‘Giddy up, get on my pony and ride.’ Let’s fucking cut the crap here, and let’s do it”), but it also shrouds a message about cognitive dissonance and the “danger zone of dating.” 

There are more serious moments on the record as well — even if the word “joy” is embedded in the lyrics. “Balcony,” according to Lewis, is “the most pandemic-themed song on the record.” It was initially about getting through COVID-19, but it became a tribute to a friend who died by suicide during lockdown.

But Lewis also manages to turn more melancholy moments into buoyant ones. While she originally cut “Apples and Oranges” for On The Line, she reimagined it in a different key — with a newfound perspective. “The bridge sums up the whole thing where I say, ‘Now that my heart is so fucking open, it’s not about you,’” Lewis notes. “That was a new part that I put with this old poem that I had written after Johnathan [Rice] and I broke up.”

While Joy’All isn’t even close to being Lewis’ first rodeo in music, it happens to be the first album she’s released since a rather significant life event — opening for Harry Styles on his massive Love on Tour. The two-and-a-half-month gig allowed Lewis, who has had a devoted fanbase for 25 years, the opportunity to introduce her music to a new cohort of boa-wearing fans. Both Lewis’ and Styles’ affinity for sequin jumpsuits and folk rock made them a solid pairing — it just took some concert attendees a minute to catch on. Initially, some Styles fans were perplexed by Lewis opening for the pop star — likely the result of a generational gap between the Gen X-ers and millennials who followed her from Rilo Kiley through her solo career and Gen Z-ers and Gen Alpha who had perhaps been too young to grow up with her music. It wasn’t exactly surprising that she was a stranger to some of them.

“Well, I didn’t expect them to know who the hell I was,” she laughs. “I think in this country, there’s a place in the press for independent artists, and although I’ve been on a major label for a while, it’s still pretty niche what I’m doing.” But it wasn’t long until Styles fans got on board, though it wasn’t Rilo Kiley songs or her solo albums they were most familiar with: “I feel like the song that people knew the most was [one] I had written for a Disney movie, Bolt, called ‘Barking at the Moon.’ That was the most requested song.”

[Photo by Bobbi Rich]

The Styles tour was monumental for Lewis, but it was also unorthodox. Because it was at the height of the pandemic, Lewis and Styles never really spent time together on the road. “There was no mingling, no hanging out. In a way, it almost felt like a DIY tour, even though it was the biggest tour happening in America. There was no press. There were no people backstage. There were no parties. It was just the bands and the crowd,” she recalls. 

Still, for Lewis, the experience “was magic.” They’ve since kept in touch — Lewis even enlisted him to dress up as a puppy in her music video for “Puppy and a Truck,” which was released in March. “I gave him an outline like, ‘The puppy is throughout the video and does all these amazing things, like rips on a skateboard, drives the tour bus, hangs out with me on the beach, and the big reveal is the puppy is actually you.’ So he directed himself in that portion, filmed it on his phone and then sent it to me. It was just perfect,” she says adoringly.

Lewis has continued to carry that sense of “magic” with her as she enters this album era. But as she does so, she’ll also be paying homage to her past by joining Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and producer Jimmy Tamborello for the Postal Service’s Give Up 20th anniversary tour. Lewis, like all of us, is nostalgic, too, but she acknowledges how challenging it can be to recreate the sentiment of that time. It’s how she feels about Rilo Kiley, for instance. “It’s like, ‘We miss Rilo Kiley.’ It’s like, ‘Well, it’ll never be like it was.’ We have to accept that artists move forward, and never say never, but it may not happen,” she says, referring to a reunion of the band.

For now, she’s leaning into the theme of Joy’All — acceptance — the idea of being content with where she’s arrived in life, the optimism she has for this better version of herself and this singular moment in her career. “I feel unapologetic about my work. I’m creatively untethered, and I am responsible for my artistic output… and it feels really amazing,” she beams. Lewis is looking forward and choosing joy.

Source: altpress.com