Jenny Lewis has been a storyteller her whole life.
From child actor to indie rock icon as the frontwoman of her band Rilo Kiley, to beloved journeywoman solo artist, she’s lived dozens of lives. Each existence is united by the singular warmth of her voice and songwriting, which weave together sardonic wit and melancholy while never easily being pigeonholed as either.
But to lay out those facts is also to vastly understate her influence. With Rilo Kiley’s now-classic albums The Execution of All Things (2002), More Adventurous (2004), and her solo debut Rabbit Fur Coat (2006), Jenny was a key figure in bridging the gap between the storytelling of classic country music and emo-tinged 2000s indie. With Under the Blacklight (2007), Rilo Kiley embraced polished pop production long before it was considered acceptable for bands with indie cred to do so. They paved the way for artists like HAIM, Kacey Musgraves, MUNA, Harry Styles (who she’s opened for), and even Taylor Swift’s Red era (‘Portions for Foxes’ was on Taylor Swift’s iPod in 2008!).
On her latest album, Joy’All, she’s still telling stories that try to make some sense of the human experience. The only difference is, now that she’s 47, she “may be a little less emo now than I was in my twenties.”
Our interview felt like the perfect opportunity to unite all those disparate strands of Jenny Lewis and Rilo Kiley, past and present. We talked about how her perspective has shifted over time, the memoir and screenplay about her life she’s been working on, and the sexism of 2000s indie rock: “My release day has been ruined by Pitchfork more times than not!”
Essence of Life
Before I spoke to Jenny over Zoom on a Nashville afternoon, I’d been told she won’t be on video. But once on the call, to my surprise, there she is: the Jenny Lewis, looking and sounding exactly as she always has, with that signature twang — in a pink cap and khaki shirt that funnily enough, looks like it could have come from her 1989 film Troop Beverly Hills.
In early 2020, Jenny was coming off a tour with The National, and looking forward to an unlikely stint as the primary opening act for Harry Styles’ North American tour. Of course, plans changed. “The songs I’d been working on felt like they had nothing to offer the universe in that moment,” she recalls. “What do you write about when the whole world has stopped?”
A series of Zoom and email songwriting sessions, hosted by Beck, ultimately produced four of the ten tracks on Joy’All, including its first single ‘Puppy and a Truck’, where she lays out a simple vision of zen: “If you feel like giving up… shut up!/Get a puppy and a truck.” Joy’All is Jenny’s most stripped-down solo record — with rich, gentle soft-rock instrumentation, largely cut live in Nashville with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell).
Much of the album is inspired by the absurdity of dating in her 40s, to which Jenny says, “It was fun in my 20s as well, and my 30s. The subject never gets old. You know, it’s pretty rich stuff. And if I told you the actual stories, you just wouldn’t believe it… I mean, it’s incredible what it’s like out there dating.” She suggests, with a laugh, a potential Tinder bio: “I’m not a psycho/I’m just trying to get laid.”
Joy’all is basically me writing all your tinder bios 4 U
— jenny lewis (@jennylewis) May 11, 2023
Sometimes, the album is as simple as the peppy title track — a quirky little portmanteau she defined on Twitter as: “1. Joy to all 2. A feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” It takes some attentive listening to reach the melancholy underneath, but it’s there. The album was almost named after its closing ballad ‘Chain of Tears’, which opens with the lyrics “How do you say goodbye forever?/Sincerely seeking advice” — which would have radically reframed how we hear the work.
But that theme of cognitive dissonance” is what Jenny is going for. On the album’s best song, the dramatic ‘Essence of Life’, she contradicts herself, singing “the essence of life is suffering,” then in a later verse, “the essence of life is ecstasy.” She elaborates, “I think you can’t have one without the other. The conundrum of being a human being is that you have to experience both. And really, through the suffering, do you then get to experience more joy in recognising the little things. You know when you come out of being sick, [and] you’re like — I’ll never do that again! — it really shifts your perspective.
“I’m not really telling anyone to be joyful, or to even be happy. Because I don’t know about the pursuit of happiness — I think that’s different than the pursuit of joy.”
“The record in itself is messy. It feels light, but it’s very serious subject matter. But I think through this lens, these rose-coloured glasses, it’s easier to get the medicine down.” Ultimately, she says, “I’m not really telling anyone to be joyful, or to even be happy. Because I don’t know about the pursuit of happiness — I think that’s different than the pursuit of joy.”
That’s How I Choose to Remember It
Naturally, her perspective has shifted over the years. “I think we’re all pretty emo in our 20s, if we play music or not. Which is also beautiful and open and wonderful,” she says. “I’ve become a little more economical in my songwriting, in that I want to say something that has weight, but with less syllables, and I want to be able to really sing it. Some of those Rilo Kiley songs are really long prose.”
And yet, even two decades or so later, Rilo Kiley’s discography hasn’t lost any of its relevance. On Twitter, Jenny occasionally retweets the Rilo Kiley bot, which posts random lyrics by the band every hour — many of which are still powerful, even totally out of context.
She laughs, “It’s so funny, ’cause if there’s a Blake [Sennett, Rilo Kiley co-writer] lyric in there, that will come up occasionally, I’m like — I didn’t write this! But all those other lines are just a part of the fabric of my being. These sentiments are still a part of me, and it’s the same-ish story that it was back then. I’m still chasing the same themes, but with different words.”
You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me
Maybe you're right— rilo kiley bot (@rilokiley_bot) June 16, 2023
It’s not to understate the reach of her four equally vital solo records, but Rilo Kiley inspired a singular kind of fanatical devotion in the 2000s, especially amongst their female audience. While her solo work is a touch more philosophical, Rilo Kiley’s music contained the sometimes volatile chemistry of four headstrong band members. ‘With Arms Outstretched’and ‘A Better Son/Daughter’ are practically indie-emo-gospel hymns, while they have countless perfect pop songs too — ‘Portions for Foxes’, ‘Silver Lining’, ‘Let Me Back In’.
The band were obsessed over in now long-lost LiveJournal posts, and inspired so many lyric tattoos that the sheer number of them became an in-joke amongst indie rock fans. To that, Jenny laughs affectionately — “I hope everyone’s satisfied with their choice.”
But from 1998 to until their break-up in 2010, even as they gained prominence and signed to Warner, Rilo Kiley were never fully written into the indie rock canon by the music press and blogs of the day. Records like The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous were every bit as brave, heartfelt, and melodic as their peers like Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie — but Rilo Kiley were often outright dismissed, given tempered praise, or simply never granted the hype that outlets often gave indie underdogs-turned-heroes of the day.
Jenny is surprisingly willing to recount some old gripes with a sense of humour: “Pitchfork recently has started re-scoring albums that they dragged back in the day. I think [Rilo Kiley’s debut album] Take Offs and Landings got a four point something, which I read the day that that came out, and I was devastated. My release day has been ruined by Pitchfork more times than not! Although I’ve stopped reading for a couple of releases now.”
There were times when that underlying sexism became explicit, too. “Being a woman or femme in a male dominated world in the aughts, it was interesting how they wrote about me versus my male counterparts. It was very different. Even now, in my interviews, people will ask me about other female singer songwriters, like what do you think about Lana Del Rey? What do you think about Taylor Swift? But I don’t hear them asking Jason Isbell the same question about Sturgill Simpson.”
“There’s been a lot of commentary about my clothes. When Under the Blacklight came out, that was pretty mixed. Some people really didn’t like it. And there was a whole thing about how the quality of the music declined as my shorts got shorter.”
Jenny’s referring to a popular Idolator post from 2007 that linked the band’s pop turn into the aesthetics of her fashion, implying that they were selling out in both ways. To complicate things, the piece was written by a woman, and not intended to be serious — but it still shows a clear double standard.
“That would not fly now… It wasn’t that long ago! I had to just persevere despite, of course, it hurting my feelings. But I was expressing myself in an empowered way, where I had dressed in jeans and a t-shirt for the whole beginning of the band. And then suddenly, I felt emboldened by the music and the poetry that I felt comfortable wearing shorts on stage, which was a big deal for me.
“So I think you just have to power through it. And in being as authentic as you can be, you just weather it, and you can’t pay too much attention to it, you know?”
The Voyager
Rilo Kiley may never quite have been granted icon status, though Jenny herself has — almost as soon as she became a full-time solo artist with 2014’s The Voyager. But the long tail of the band’s influence is undeniable: in the broader mainstream visibility of heartfelt singer-songwriter pop, in the way she was embraced by Harry Styles’ fanbase on tour, and in the way younger writers have not so much re-evaluated Rilo Kiley’s work, but simply pointed out what was already there.
rilo kiley's p4k scores (minus rkives) are… shameful…so here's one attempt to rectify thathttps://t.co/ixEDYrTuLz
— Quinn Moreland (@quinnmoreland) October 1, 2020
Jenny is too humble to “assume that I have influenced anyone unless they say it, or have a tattoo of my lyrics on their body,” which gets a laugh. But she’s also honest enough to acknowledge that she’s kicked down doors. “Part of being a pioneer… And I don’t often refer to myself as that, but I think my band, we did some things that hadn’t been done before. People don’t always get it. It’s hard to gauge in the moment how things are gonna age. We don’t know if we’re going to love this record or hate it in five years. Only time will tell.”
Lately, she’s been more reflective than usual. “People started asking me to write a memoir, which is so weird — that I’m old enough to do that. I actually put that aside, and I started writing a screenplay, just because the form is shorter. It’s like, 120 pages.”
That screenplay could remain a writing exercise, or become a potentially fascinating biopic — but she’s thought it through. “I would want to direct it because I’m just a creative control freak. There’s just no way I could give it up — unless it was someone like Paul Thomas Anderson.”
Who would play her? “Maybe Natasha Lyonne? That seems pretty good. But I’m obsessed with Sarah Paulson. She would have to be in there somewhere, just because she’s my fave.”
Of the memoir, she says, “it’s still my voice that comes through in it. I think the difference will be that it has to be true, all of it.” But in songwriting, she explains, “you can stretch out a little bit. People assume… there’s a line in ‘She’s Not Me’ where I say, ‘When I told you I cheated/And you punched through the drywall/You were all that I needed!’ That’s not a true story… But it feels like a true story, ’cause of the way that I’m singing it. That gives it the edge, gives it the arc. But if you’re writing a memoir, I think it has to be pretty accurate.”
In classic Jenny Lewis fashion, she’s looking back, in the moment, and forward all at once. “I’m almost done with the screenplay. And then once I do that, I’ll be able to really sit down and start with the memoir.
“’Cause when it’s your whole life, where do you begin?”
Jenny Lewis’ new album Joy’All is out now. Want to hear more from Jenny Lewis? Read our 2019 interview with her here.
Kristen S. Hé is an artist and award-winning journalist. She tweets at @kristenisshe.
Infinite Pop is a Music Junkee column about the past, present, and transcendent possibilities of pop music.