Jenny Lewis Keeps Finding the Magic

Nov 08, 2023

In her new album, "Joy’All," Lewis grapples with aging and life cycles. "Having survived this moment, I felt like it was important to project something joyful," she said.

Jenny Lewis at home in Los Angeles. Her new album, "Joy’All," is out June 9. Credit...Ariel Fisher for The New York Times

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By Melena Ryzik

Melena Ryzik reported this story from Los Angeles, where she spent an afternoon with Jenny Lewis, and her dog, Bobby Rhubarb, at their home

Jenny Lewis didn't mean to wind up with the marimba.

But for the last year, a vintage percussion instrument has occupied pride of place in the singer-songwriter's forest green home studio. She inherited it from her godfather, Jerry Cohen, a music editor for TV and movies and an amateur musician, who died suddenly last spring. He was a surrogate dad to her, the kind who surreptitiously bought Hanukkah presents when money was tight in her household, and introduced her to jazz records when she was 10. She was the only person in the room with him when he passed away.

"He was my mentor and my best friend and the most Jewish of all people in my life," she said. "Jerry would want me to get lessons on the marimba."

Lewis, the 47-year-old indie artist whose country-rock troubadour style and evocative lyricism has earned her comparisons to songwriting greats from Nashville's Music Row to Laurel Canyon, has suffered a lot of loss lately. Her mother's death, in 2017, was the backdrop for her last album, "On the Line," in 2019. Now, after losing Cohen and another mentor, the album designer and her "rock ’n’ roll dad" Gary Burden, there is "Joy’All," an album out June 9 that grapples with aging, life cycles and romantic (im)possibility and yet somehow feels vivacious.

"My 40s are kicking my ass," she sings on the third track over peppy acoustic guitars, "and handing them to me in a margarita glass." The song is called "Puppy and a Truck," her latest — and perhaps most lasting — prescription for happiness; she scored them both. "Having survived this moment, I felt like it was important to project something joyful," she said.

The dog, Bobby Rhubarb, a shiny black cockapoo, greeted me with a waist-high leap when I visited Lewis recently at her home at the end of a wildflower-lined canyon road in the San Fernando Valley. The house is called Mint Chip — there's an ice cream cone etched in stained glass by the garage — and Lewis acquired it after promising to maintain the whimsical touches that the Disney animator who built it in the 1950s installed. It attracts the fantastical too: during the pandemic, Lewis said, she discovered a baby squirrel had been sneaking in and hiding acorns under her pillow.

There is more than a little magic to her life. It's in the way Lewis amplifies the space around her (she decked out that truck, a Chevy Colorado, with ersatz Gucci seat covers) and even the way she made it out of a career as a child actor to succeed in another artistic universe.

"She's a unicorn," said Soleil Moon Frye, her fellow child star ("Punky Brewster") and a friend for decades. Even as a preteen, Lewis had musical skills, said Moon Frye, who documented their Hollywood crew's adolescence in home movies, released as the 2021 documentary "Kid 90." "We would memorize these hip-hop songs — she was always so good at rapping."

Though she's pegged as a country-tinged folk rock songwriter, Lewis's keystone is still hip-hop, reggae, soul and funk — "finding the story in rap-style verses and picking up an acoustic guitar, and kind of marrying the two worlds," she said. A printout of the Wikipedia entry for "3 Feet High and Rising," the landmark album by De La Soul, rested on the music stand in her studio; she was paging through it to understand all the samples they had used.

Her references for "Joy’All" included Tracy Chapman, whose conversational delivery she admires, Portishead and Frank Ocean. About half of the tracks for the LP were created over two years in Los Angeles. The rest she made in Nashville, where she has also had a home since 2017. It's her fifth studio album as a solo artist — she started out in popular indie bands, Rilo Kiley and the Postal Service — and her first release on Blue Note Records, the storied jazz label. (After her own tour, she’ll be joining the Postal Service on the road this fall.)

Dave Cobb, the Nashville producer (Brandi Carlile, John Prine, Chris Stapleton) who worked on the album, was awe-struck by her ease and perennial good moods. "If you don't like Jenny Lewis, you don't like people," he said. Their sessions, tracking instruments like pedal steel and Mellotron, along with birdsong from Lewis's Nashville backyard, flowed easily. "To say she led is absolute, because we all played to her," he said, adding: "Everything she writes about is true. She literally showed up every day with the puppy and her truck."

She has the openness of someone who has spent a lifetime cheerfully talking about herself, and the staggeringly eccentric stories of a showbiz veteran. Sitting on the midnight blue couch in her minimalist living room, Lewis, in a sweatshirt, sunset-hued corduroys and a single gold hoop earring inscribed with her last name, touched on being Jewish; the spiritual guru Ram Dass; the female Elvis impersonator who was her childhood babysitter; the time her mother convinced Lucille Ball to have a sitcom wrap party in their ramshackle house ("Lucy walks in, and she goes, ‘What a dump!’"); and the swap meet in Atlanta where she buys knockoff Gucci socks by the armful. "I would never buy a real Gucci sock — that's so silly," she said.

Telling stories about Cohen, she cried. When she was a child, he took her to his job on the Universal Studios lot and let her draw and animate her own movies using giant old film machines. Being with him when he died "was probably like the most important moment of my whole life," she said.

Lewis's parents, itinerant lounge musicians, split when she was a toddler. Her acting career in the ’80s changed the family's fortunes, for a time, but her mother's drug addiction and instability outpaced her sitcom earnings. She was estranged from her parents for decades, then reconciled with each late in their lives. Her father's bass harmonica sits on a stand on her mantel.

"On my dad's deathbed, he basically was like, ‘learn musical theory,’" she said. "So there has been this pressure, from my people, to do better and learn more."

Jess Wolfe, one half of the duo Lucius, befriended Lewis and sings backup on "Joy’All." "I really understand the need for trying to lift yourself up through your art and hoping that it can do the same for other people — she did that, in her cool, effortless Jenny Lewis kind of way," Wolfe said.

"She's always had to figure it out and take care of herself," she added. "She is incredibly resourceful and incredibly clever about how to do something, effectively, efficiently and affordably. Truly, I’m always blown away by her in that sense — I will always feel creative when I’m around her."

At age 40, after Lewis separated from her longtime partner, the musician Johnathan Rice, she moved to New York for the first time, realizing a teenage ambition. She lived in her pal Annie Clark's (St. Vincent) apartment for two years, starting the side project NAF there with some friends. Then came Nashville, where she learned how to two-step at a honky-tonk across from the Ryman Auditorium.

In a rehearsal at a space covered in red velvet in Nashville last week, which she shared over a video call, Lewis directed her all-female backing band (she seeks out women for the stage and, for this outing, even has a female tour manager — a relative rarity in the industry, and a first for her). "You guys just pedal on that, and let me do my thing," she said, as they prepared to sing "Acid Tongue," the title track off her 2008 solo debut. "Let's get those ‘oohs,’" she instructed. The harmonies rolled in. "Well done," she told them. "It's just feeling confident."

Back in L.A., Lewis had confided that aging as an unfiltered, undoctored music star isn't easy. "I see myself and I don't always love it," she said. "But I’m trying to embrace being a woman in her 40s, and all that has to offer."

She is contentedly single now, though trying out a dating app, and itching to write about it — even, she admitted, enjoying that more.

"My life is outrageous," she said, although her songwriting is not straight autobiography. "But if I’m being honest, I’m in every single line."

Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She covered Oscar season for five years, and has also been a national correspondent in San Francisco and the mid-Atlantic states. @melenar

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