Extreme Listening Mode!

People demand much from their musical heroes. This certainly seems to be the case with Jeffrey Lewis. For it seems that the critically acclaimed albums, the superb live shows and the awesomely witty and touching lyrics have obviously created the belief among promoters of tonight’s sell-out show at King Tut’s in Glasgow that he can transubstantiate. ‘I think I’m supposed to soundcheck, do the interviews and eat pretty much simultaneously’ he says, as we note that the difficulty this poses him is that these events take place in three different buildings.

From debut album ‘The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane’ to his current (wonderful) effort ‘Em Are I’ he has trodden a very different path from anyone else out there. His new album takes in folk, country, rock, pop, blues and pretty much everything in between, creating downhome yet oddly inspirational tales about mortality, love and modern life. ‘I write a lot of different kinds of songs’ he agrees, ‘I never really have a song that I try to write, I more just take what I can get. If it happens to be a garage rock song about time machines, I’ll take that, if it happens to be something that happened to me that day, fine. I don’t tend to filter anything out. If something comes along and just happens to turn into a song, great.’

With that in mind I ask him, do songs become confessional? ‘Confessional? I find the term is weird.’ He thinks about it for a second or two. ‘I do sometimes have material that is getting into territory where I feel I have to do it. You have the perverse urge to do the thing that you shouldn’t do and that’s when I know I’m onto something, when I feel that. It’s that edge between something you probably shouldn’t do and something you know is worthwhile to do. I like going there and feeling like I have gone too far. I like that element of things whether in the songs or in the comics’.

His artwork is a major part of his show, dazzling multi-coloured comic book stories on subjects like ‘The History of Communism’. But it’s a lot more work for an already touring, prolific songwriter. And when you make art and music so much a part of your life, what do you do to relax? ‘I feel I can never really relax because I feel that there is always something I should be doing. There’s no such thing as time when I shouldn’t be being creative.’ When is that at it’s worst? ‘Travelling, sitting in a car for days on end, weeks on end, I pretty much can’t do anything.’ What do you do to kill time? ‘I’ve discovered audio books in the last couple of years, so we are at least educating ourselves. Feels like we are filling our minds with something worthwhile’.

For someone who has made so many stylistic jumps, from solo performer to band and back again, the songwriting process fascinates. When asked whether he knows a song is for him solo or would be better in a band context at its creation, he replies ‘Sometimes I write something and know it would definitely work better as a band thing. Sometimes I write things I’d like to play on my own but my brother is in the band and he will play on it and it’ll kinda develop into something that sounds cool. It can be frustrating live when I’m playing a song on my own and the band will start playing. We try to keep it loose to a certain degree’. Does that bring any benefits? ‘That’s how you discover some interesting things. It’s also good to play things for a while too. This new album has songs on it that we have been playing for four years in some cases. They’ve changed quite a bit over the years. I’m really glad I didn’t put them out when I wrote them because they’ve gotten so much better as the arrangement changes.’

A recurring theme in Lewis’s work is, well, death. But not always in the sense of ever-creeping shuffling off this mortal coil. On his classic ‘Back When I Was 4′ and new album stand-out ‘Whistle Past the Graveyard’ there’s a sense that living forever wouldn’t be all that much fun anyway and you might as well just enjoy what you have when you are here. If that sounds maudlin, it really isn’t, as it’s expressed with such joyfulness that what comes across is the excitement and the myriad possibilities of life, rather than the finality of death. But still, yeah, death. It’s a pretty heavy subject.

‘Somebody pointed out that the new album has a lot of stuff about death, which wasn’t really intended. They were just the ones which made a good, flowing album out of all the songs we’d recorded. Now the album is a solid thing, it’s like telling someone about a dream you had and not realising what it’s about until you have put it out there. There are a lot of these morose ramblings.’ He smiles as he says it.

So what do you listen to? ‘I listen to a lot of 60′s garage rock and psychedelic stuff. Every time I think I’ve discovered it all I find more, like an endless realm. Particularly the Pebbles series. Ebay was a revelation for me. These records I’d been looking for for ten years, suddenly I could just find them right here in my living room! It was like an alcoholic discovering a thing in the corner of his room that dispenses beer.’ ELM’s Ebay rule is never do it drunk. Does he have any? ‘I never spend more than $15 on a record, because otherwise it’s cheating. You want the old, beat up copy that slipped through the cracks. Sure, you can get any record you want if you want to spend a thousand bucks, but where’s the fun in that?’

‘There’s something about that rarity that’s special. Also, there is something special about the 60′s, these utopian ideals and bizarre, off the wall ideas done with total conviction and pure belief unfettered by boundaries.’ I remark that this comes across in his music too, a lack of cynicism (though not realism.) ‘I always felt, because we aren’t this flashy surface, that I didn’t have this great voice or am that photogenic, that if there isn’t anything to say than there isn’t much to it. And if that’s serious, or silly or preposterous, so long as it’s close to my heart it’s okay. I never felt I could rely on anything else. But I never lose that focus that it has to be something underneath’.

Possibly his most famous song is ‘Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror’ in which he, well, tells us about a dream in which he is raped by Will Oldham. It’s funnier than it sounds, trust me. Did Will ever get in touch? ‘No, but we have this strange sideways relationship’ he smiles ‘I got a couple of pretty good New York shows he didn’t want to do. The guy called me up and said ‘we asked Will Oldham and he didn’t want to do it so he said we should contact you’. I wondered if this was his way of getting back to me or his way of being nice to me!’ Probably being nice, I venture. ‘Yeah, I’ve met him, but I didn’t say ‘I’m the guy who wrote that song” he says laconically ‘so I don’t know if he knows that was me’.

We let him go, off to the soundcheck where later he’ll perform a blistering show to possibly the biggest crowd Tut’s have ever seen. Before he goes, he leaves us with the line that sums him up for our money. ‘I’m never sure if my stuff is optimistic or negative, but I think I try to find the optimistic, the thing that makes it bearable or not that bad. I think that comes through my stuff accidentally. If 90% of stuff is doom or gloom, I usually find that 10% way to look at it’.

And with that he’s off. Accidentally inspirational he may be, but inspirational he is nevertheless.

All photographs Copyright © 2009 Chris Osborne

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