Tongues and Tales

“You know, I don’t have a day job, so I have to do something to feel
productive, or I’ll just feel like a big loser up on a hill,” says
Jenny Lewis. She’s being modest, of course—she’s now juggling
multiple careers with apparent ease. It’s safe to say Lewis won’t ever
have a day job again, but she isn’t resting on laurels yet. “I don’t
feel that I’ve ‘arrived,'” she insists, “and I don’t feel like I’ve
made a record yet on my own that I’m completely proud of. I feel like
I’m just on a path, and hopefully I’ll arrive at what it is that I do.
I experiment a lot, and I’ve always done that, even in Rilo Kiley. I
think I’ve always done whatever the fuck I want, from the beginning.
Certainly there has been a lot of hard work, but within the creative
aspect of making music, I’ve always kind of followed the moment.”

There’s a lot of moment-following on Lewis’s latest, Acid
Tongue, an alternately precise and ramshackle record that dips into
country, soul, and blues-rock with plenty of verve if little sense of
risk. More than anything, it feels like a series of pastiches; opener
“Black Sand” should by all rights be a show tune, while “The Next
Messiah” strings together three disparate song fragments into a medley.
“That’s the most exciting one to play on the road,” she says. “It feels
really different from when I toured for Rabbit Fur
Coat—there was nothing that gritty and up-tempo.

“I think second tours on any record are always more fun,” continues
Lewis, who did a brief tour on the heels of Acid Tongue‘s
release last year. “As a performer, I treat every night like it’s a
play, and I take certain cues that allow me to free up vocally. I
always want to be a little more spontaneous, but there’s just something
about the repetition that inspires me. It’s weird. It really allows me
to get to new places every night if I know where the set is going.”

Jenny Lewis is well within her third phase of her career as a
performer, although the lines have been a little blurry. Phase One was
child star—you probably wouldn’t have remembered the redheaded
girl from The Wizard or Troop Beverly Hills had it not
been for Phase Two: frontwoman of Rilo Kiley. In the late ’90s and
early ’00s, Lewis and fellow child star Blake Sennett released a series
of incisive, hook-laden albums, earning them devoted fans who responded
to the songs’ incredibly lucid lyrics and Lewis’s point-blank delivery.
Rilo Kiley captured many listeners’ frustrations of being unfulfilled
despite having youth, looks, smarts, and talent to spare.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where Lewis’s Phase Three began,
but I’d place it at her appearance on the Postal Service’s “We Will
Become Silhouettes,” even though Rilo Kiley delivered two further
albums since then. Her backing-vocal contributions on Give Up marked that moment where everybody heard Lewis’s voice; she
further established herself outside of Rilo Kiley with a 2006
collaboration with the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat, a solo
record in all but name. It exhibited a softening of Lewis’s sound,
being essentially a postmodern country record with a soothing,
nostalgic hue.

After this current tour, Lewis says her immediate future is a little
uncertain, as is the long-term prospect of Rilo Kiley. “It’s not off
the table, but we’re not necessarily sitting down to dinner together
right now with each other,” she explains. “But we are actually working
on a collection of B-sides and rarities, songs that have just been
sitting on our computers for the last 10 years, stuff that people
haven’t heard. I’ve been doing so much over the past couple years: I’ve
put out a record every year, and I’ve done at least two tours with each
record. So for the first time in a very long time, I don’t have
anything planned. I’ve got a handful of new songs I’m working on, and
I’ll probably throw a couple of those into the set, as well as some old
Rilo Kiley songs I’ve written over the years, just to see how they
sound in a different context… But shit, man, I don’t even know what
I’m going to do. It’s so easy to feel so exhausted by the whole process
of putting out records, and touring them relentlessly, that I think I
might benefit from a little breather.”