Cover photo credit: Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts, live in Bristol UK, June 2019, by Duncan Cruickshank
Author: Dylan Berman
Last Spring I was lucky enough to speak to one of my favorite artists Jeffrey Lewis. It all started with me messaging him on Instagram, so it goes to show that things aren’t always as out-of-reach as they seem. I love Jeffrey Lewis for his work’s radical vulnerability and humility, his uniquely expressive vocals, incredible storytelling, gentle, plucky guitar, and endless creativity. Lewis views himself primarily as a comic artist, and both mediums of his art can be found here.
Dylan: In the New York Times, you have a great comic about your song “Anxiety Attack,” which is a great song, and it explores reactions to the song, and the way people resonated with the song online. In the comic, you say the song has a life of its own, more than other songs of yours. What is it like to have your work out there for people to engage with in a way that you can’t control? What is it like seeing people react to your art in ways you don’t expect?
Jeffrey: Well I guess…let me think about this. Maybe I haven’t experienced as much of that as certain other artists who have had their work adopted on Tiktok or things of that nature, but I guess the closest thing that I’ve really experienced, at this point, because that “Anxiety Attack” comic was a number of years ago, but the last few years and especially right at the moment, I feel like that drawing that I did of the vinyl heart, what I call the ‘Vinyltine,’ it’s like a record vinyl in a heart shape with a little poem in the center, that I originally posted way back in 2012, and that piece of art just seems to be continually bootlegged.
People are constantly sending me notifications that they’ve seen it in various places. I’ve had to do legal stuff and have a lawyer send cease and desist letters and try and open these different legal cases. Most recently, this pretty big pop star person, Sabrina Carpenter, has used that art in her merchandise, and I’m trying to do this court thing about figuring that out. I don’t know why these people think it’s okay to just take some illustration they found on the internet and just start putting their own name and products on it, but it is cool in a certain way. It’s flattering that something that I made has kind of just been taken up by other people. I think that has to be a good thing overall, that somebody is resonating with some stuff that I made.
The first image is the original artwork by Jeffrey Lewis, the second is Sabrina Carpenter’s merch. I would agree with Jeffrey Lewis that it’s hard to deny the similarity.
I’ve just made so much stuff over the years that it’s always hard to predict what will [resonate]. When it comes to music that really is the case, seeing stream counts nowadays on Spotify and stuff like that, which I think was not even the case when I did that “Anxiety Attack” comic thing for the New York Times. It’s like nowadays I can really see which songs are getting streamed the most, which ones are kinda being added to people’s playlists, and it’s not necessarily the songs that I would’ve thought. That’s pretty interesting, just seeing once something is out there, what it means to other people is kind of out of my control, but at least it means something, so that’s good.
You talked about Spotify streams. People talk a lot about how Spotify and the proliferation of streaming services aren’t good for artists, they don’t make money off of the streams the way people did when everybody bought physical media, or people bought stuff on Bandcamp. How do you feel about the fact that everything is on Spotify now, or Apple Music, as an artist?
It’s very hard to know a direct comparison as to how much my career might have been different in terms of selling albums versus the money I make from streaming. Am I making more money now or less money now than if this wasn’t the current model of the music industry? There kind of isn’t any way to really quantify that I think, but I do feel like it’s had a very good effect on my ability to be heard by more people. I think I’m having more people come to my concerts who probably have only been aware of my stuff because of hearing it on streaming, and the fact that the streaming algorithm does have this thing where it’s constantly recommending music to people that it thinks are gonna like that kind of music.
If it already knows in the algorithm, oh these people listen to a lot of The Mountain Goats, and Daniel Johnston, and whatever it is, Johnathan Richman, Lou Reed, and therefore our algorithmic statistics show that they seem to also like it when a Jeffrey Lewis song pops up on their Discover Weekly or whatever, so the algorithms are continually sending my songs to people that are statistically likely to appreciate my stuff. That’s something that record labels were never really able to do back in the old days of regular record label promotion and radio and stuff, so I think it’s had an interesting effect on my ability to reach more people, or reach some different people, and I have had an increase in attendance at my gigs. I mean the pandemic doesn’t count, but the last five years, six years, I’ve really seen an uptick in concert attendance, in the US anyway, and I feel like the streaming thing must have some effect on that.
This is a jump to a totally different thing, but I was listening to your song “Don’t Let The Record Label Take You Out To Lunch,” and in that song, you said, “It takes a big heart to make great great art.” As someone who would at least like to think they want to make meaningful art somehow, do you have any advice for being genuine, for making something from the heart that isn’t just cynical or gimmicky?
Well everybody needs to find their own path towards an art that feels powerful and worthwhile to them, but then on the other hand, the stuff about stuff taking on a life of its own, you don’t really know which stuff is going to resonate with more people. I would like to think that stuff that resonates with me, the songs of mine that I think are the most powerful would be the ones that other people also feel the same about, but that’s not always the case.
I personally find it very useful to just play at open mics a lot. I try to go once a week to an open mic here in New York City, different open mics, and try out new songs, because I kinda feel like my own perspective on my own work is not maybe the most definitive one, and the songs that I think are the best are not necessarily the ones that other people think are the best. I mean sometimes it lines up, some of the songs that I feel really strongly about are the ones that stand out to other people, but that’s not always the case.
In terms of feeling weird about gimmicks, just because I incorporate my art into my performances, and I have these different kinds of songs, some stuff is kind of funny, some stuff is more sort of tragic, or some stuff is historical, and you’re sort of hoping to engage the audience so I feel like there is this danger of slipping into doing stuff that’s more attention-grabbing than necessarily artistically satisfying. Especially at the time when I made that song, that’s a pretty early song in my life as a performer and a touring musician, and I was juggling and struggling with those various questions.
I feel like I’ve definitely developed a balance that I feel more comfortable with over the years and I think of it sort of in terms of a one-two punch, like a boxer, where on one hand there’s stuff that’s maybe very entertaining in a certain grabby way, where somebody walks into the room and goes ‘woah what’s going on here,’ and then there’s other stuff that has more of a depth that maybe isn’t as attention-getting but if somebody is already tuned in to what you’re doing maybe they’ll get more out of it. I try to just make sure to keep a balance, and that also just keeps me entertained and engaged in my own work, when I feel like it’s neither too overly serious all the time, or too fun and silly all the time. So yeah, just trying to keep that balance and most of the time, I feel like I’ve found a spot that I’m comfortable with, but at the time that that song was written, that was all kind of new stuff that was very much a source of a lot of anxiety for me.
In that song, and on “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror,” you discuss the idea of fame as an artist, or achieving attention, and on “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror,” hopefully I’m not mischaracterizing, you present the struggles and the thoughts of a starving artist, wondering if they’re gonna make it, or if it’s worth it. In “Don’t Let the Record Label Take You Out To Lunch,” you’re kind of warning against the idea of selling out, the idea that fame is too appealing, that you have to be careful about chasing fame. How do you view fame or commercial success contrasting with authenticity, or artistic merit? Do you think those things come into conflict?
When you look at people that are big stars, or people that exist in much more successful levels of the music industry than I do, I don’t know how much they feel like they’ve compromised their personality. I get the sense that it’s more a matter of finding a way to make your personality into a kind of iconic or larger-than-life symbol in a certain way. I don’t know, I think that the questions and struggles that I was going through at that time, that was essentially my mid-late twenties, when I’d been making a living with my music for a couple years at that point, although it was a various tenuous living. I had stepped off the diving board of regular jobs and was just sort of in this realm of do or die, can I actually survive off this music and art stuff, and struggling to find a place, trying to feel like there was some stability in my life and questioning those choices.
I think that’s a common thing for people in their late twenties anyway because in our culture there’s such a sense that you have to really know what you’re doing with your life by age thirty and there’s this deadline looming, and there’s this disaster that’s going to happen if you don’t know what you’re doing by that age, you’re supposed to have gotten established in some kind of career or something, so I kind of felt like that looming deadline was really stressing me out, and after I turned thirty, that didn’t bother me.
I felt like, ‘Oh I no longer have this deadline, okay I’m just old, and whatever.’ I’m not a kid anymore and this is just what I’m doing with my life, and that stress wasn’t as much. A lot of the material that I was writing in that era, when I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I feel like there was all this anxiety about that stuff, so I think that comes out in a lot of those songs from that time.
In your album of Crass covers you have a cover of “Punk Is Dead.” I recently went to a punk show in Seattle, and I couldn’t help thinking of that song, and your cover of that song, because it sort of felt like everyone there was pretty wealthy or well off, and maybe playing dress up, not to gatekeep. Do you think that punk is dead in 2024?
Well, I don’t know if my opinion is the most definitive, but I feel like there’s always a possibility of someone making a very bold and moving and lifeshaking statement artistically, that boldly upends people’s perspectives, and at a certain time maybe that was the way that punk operated in the context of the culture at that time, and then maybe it was other forms at other times, but it’s always kind of like in the context of whatever else has been going on in culture, so the music that we think of as punk identified music, is one manifestation of that. I don’t know, I don’t want to use a lot of big academic words, but I just feel like you cannot predict what somebody’s going to come up with next that’s just going to be so great and so moving, and just change your perspectives on things. I mean for me that was Daniel Johnston, and I feel like the way people talk about first hearing punk in the late seventies, if they heard the Sex Pistols and it just changed the way they thought about music and changed the way they thought about everything, and made them want to make music like that, that was the way that Daniel Johnston’s work affected me, and it just changed the way I thought about everything and made me want to make music like that and get involved in songs. You could say that that’s a very different sonic approach than something you would think of as punk, in terms of the Crass style of the Sex Pistols style of punk, but it had a very transformative effect on me. But you couldn’t predict that. In the sixties, if you were listening to Bob Dylan, you never could’ve predicted that there would be, say, a Jimmy Hendrix, and then if you’re listening to Hendrix you couldn’t have predicted that there would be a Sex Pistols, and then if you’re listening to the Sex Pistols you couldn’t have predicted that there would’ve been a Daniel Johnston, and so on and so forth. Greatness just takes unexpected forms, so I don’t doubt that humans are just going to keep coming up with something great and awesome, but you can’t just rely on the styles that other people have come up with. There’s got to be something bold about it, so in that sense, when Crass says punk is dead, I guess they were saying that the style that had taken on that meaning, the context of it had shifted, so that it no longer had that meaning, and you couldn’t just do those same moves and have that same impact. Far be it from me to put words in Crass’s mouth, and of course when they wrote the song “Punk Is Dead ” it was so much in that punk era itself, it’s not like it was years later. They basically wrote that at the pinnacle of punk popularity, so it was a very provocative thing to say at that time, but no, I still feel like I have hope that there’s always going to be something interesting and crazy that somebody comes up with that really shakes and changes the way you look at things.
To shift, David Berman, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, said in one of his songs: “Punk rock died when the first kid said, punks not dead.” I actually own your poster that includes all of the drawn references to a bunch of different David Berman songs, and I’m a huge fan of Silver Jews, Purple Mountains. Can you talk about what you love about David Berman and about that music?
It’s just great writing, it’s great sounds… Silver Jews is just a very very cool band with a lot to offer in terms of just great listening that really takes you somewhere. There’s not that many bands I can compare it to.
I mean Berman wasn’t just a really cool writer with really interesting thoughts and lyrics, but just the sonic approach of that band through all the albums is just so cool and weird. Some people say that it got a little too normal at a certain point when he sorta started making things sound a little more clean and professional, but I think all of those recordings are just great and so interesting.
The Purple Mountains album is also really great, it’s just very hard to listen to because it’s just so depressing and dark, and it’s a very emotionally difficult listen. I think the Silver Jews and David Berman’s work, it really stands up. It’s the kind of thing that I would want to hear, it’s just great. I don’t know how many people are operating at that level. I don’t hear that much stuff in the indie rock world that is just that good most of the time. I do wish…it’s weird that he never was into playing live or touring, because it’s possible that that would have had a different impact on his sense of…I don’t know. It’s weird that he killed himself right before the Purple Mountains tour was supposed to happen because maybe it would’ve shifted his perspective if he could’ve just played those songs live on stage in front of people. I know that he was supposedly very uncomfortable with playing live, maybe the pressures of the tour were part of what made him feel so desperate…I don’t know.
The feeling of playing live in front of people, it sort of completes a certain circuit for me in my perspective of making music, where you kind of feel like a sense of how people are connecting to it and how worthwhile the whole project is, in a way you that don’t necessarily get just from making the recordings. It’s interesting that the Silver Jews stuff is very specifically removed from that because of how uncomfortable Berman was with playing live. That just wasn’t part of the equation for him really.
I think Purple Mountains, especially in the context of his death, is actually one of the saddest albums of all time, but very good.
Yeah, it’s very hard to listen to I think. You’ve just gotta be in the right frame of mind or something.
In songs like…I guess to shift again..“The Chelsea Hotel O*** S** Song,” or “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane,” they’re storytelling songs, you describe very specific experiences, which seem to cause some people to make assumptions about your personal life, which you kind of talk about on “No LSD Tonight,” where you say ‘people keep offering me acid because I have this song about it.’ Can you talk about how you view working with real-life experience in a creative medium, and also the vulnerability of having everyone hear maybe a personal story or something that really happened?
“The Chelsea Hotel Song” and “The Last Time I Did Acid” were a couple of the earliest songs I ever wrote when I was sort of trying to figure out this idea of expressing myself by making songs. I just kind of felt like what I had to offer in the realm of songs was how much can I just go towards what my real emotions are, what is it that is actually important to me, rather than thinking about what other people think a song ought to be. What are the things in me that really drive my emotional reactions and do I dare to voice that in a song?
I kind of just felt like I sorta had nothing to lose at that time. I felt like such a social outcast and felt like if I kind of just humiliated myself by putting all of these things in song form…I was like ‘I just don’t care.’ I just felt socially at the end of my rope in a way that allowed me to just not care about how I sounded, or how embarrassing some of these admissions would be.
I try to stick to that still in the sense of, if I’m writing a song and I’m really trying to find, well where are my strongest emotions? What do I feel powerfully about? I guess it’s usually stuff that is not really comfortable in a regular social context, otherwise, it wouldn’t be in that place of like, ‘Ehh I don’t really know if I can talk about this.’
I don’t know, it’s not even necessarily that it has to be anything transgressive or socially unacceptable, it’s just kind of interesting when you realize sometimes that some of the things you feel are important to you are not really present in a lot of the culture that you see. I feel like that drives me to a certain extent, although I try to not lean into, I don’t know, the autobiographical element both in my comic books and in my songs. I don’t want to just have everything be some kind of diary thing. There is an aspect of that, but then there’s a lot of other kinds of songs that I want to make and other kinds of comics that I want to make, so I try to do all of that different stuff.
I was very inspired in my early song-making times, when I was making songs like that, [by] “Peep Show,” the comic book by Joe Matt in the nineties, he actually just died very recently, but he hadn’t made comics in a number of years, he had really slowed down in his comic making, but the way that he was able to just kind of viciously present himself in a very unappealing way in his comics, the “Peep Show” comic, was so…I just loved that comic so much, it was so funny and just messed up, and I think that really gave me the courage to follow this kind of sense of, y’know, it’s okay that I’m not the good guy in the story, or that you can get a lot of artistic juice out of kind of being okay with humiliating yourself. I feel like a lot of my early songs were just as inspired by those kinds of comic books as they were by any kind of music that I was hearing.
You’re an artist of multiple mediums, comic books, and visual art as well as music. How would you compare and contrast those two different types of creation, and what is it like working on both at the same time or just together in general?
It’s hard to really balance my time, in a way. I’m sort of constantly feeling like I should be doing more comic work or whatever, but that’s just very time-consuming and it’s very anti-social. It just requires staying alone at home at a desk. I do feel like I’m always complaining like ‘Ehh I could’ve spent the last twenty years making more comics instead of doing all this song stuff,’ but it’s been interesting having this life in music that I didn’t anticipate, and maybe that actually has been more important than just making the kinds of comics that I could’ve made, but maybe I would’ve advanced more in my comic making if I had done more comics and less music.
It does give me, I think, a certain unique place in the culture that I think has benefitted me, because I like to think of [my songs] as like, these are the songs of a comic book maker, rather than the songs of a musician, and I think that gives me an artistic voice in the music world that is coming from a different place than a lot of the songs that I hear from musicians because I’m not really attached to music in the same way. I don’t identify myself as being a musician, I feel like I’m a comic book artist, so maybe I’m just not as precious about trying to present myself in a competent musical and vocal way, cause I just don’t care that much, as much as I do about making my comics. I think that balance has been good for me. I think it puts me in an interesting spot culturally that I can benefit from.
I feel like in a lot of your songs like “Life,” “Slogans,” or “If Life Exists,” there’s this unique sort of blend of optimism and pessimism. I mean that’s pushing them into a dichotomy I guess, but it feels like they undermine a lot of things people might use to find meaning in life, like god, or grand stories about the way things are, but at the same time it feels like they’re very powerfully optimistic. At least when I listen to those songs, I don’t come away feeling sad, they make me feel better about life.
So I feel like there’s this contrast in a lot of your work, and on the song “Seattle” you say “If I see a half full half empty cup it’s half full of nothingness.” How would you describe yourself and your work in terms of optimism or pessimism, or that sort of contrast or juxtaposition?
You’re very accurate with that because I think that forms a lot of the perspective that I’m sort of trying to struggle out and unspool, and trying to figure out what I think about things in a lot of these songs. That kind of thing where it’s like a weird combination of comedy and tragedy that I feel like is at the heart of the human experience, where it’s just very hard to put into words that combination, but when there’s something that expresses that combination, that feels powerful to me, and that’s kind of what I gravitate towards.
A lot of that I think came out of that “Last Time I Did Acid” actual experience in my life, where at age sixteen I had this very scary and powerful experience of the meaninglessness of everything. That just impacted me so much that I feel like I can’t even imagine who I would have ended up being or what kind of life I would have had without that acid trip, and the realization, this kind of really long lingering realization, of the meaninglessness of everything.
Would I have felt that way anyway as a grownup without that acid trip? Was that just something that I’d always carried in me but I’d never really deeply thought about until that one particular evening’s experience? I really don’t know, but that sense of having to put meaning back together, or having to figure out what does a person do when they’re deeply aware of the meaningless of everything and the arbitrariness of everything, how do you just bother getting out of bed? How do you bother doing anything?
I really struggled with that, especially in those younger years. I still struggle with it, but it finds its way into the songs quite a lot over the years. That sense of having to reconstruct meaning, having to convince myself in some way of tricking my mind into seeing things from a perspective that makes it okay, even though I’m submerged in the tragedy and meaninglessness and emotional pain of whatever it is, there’s also this idea that I can kind of wrestle my mind into a certain shape if I just think about it in the right way. I can come up with some reason to convince myself that there’s a reason to feel okay and there’s a reason to go on, which in a certain way maybe other people kind of just take for granted, I don’t know, but I have thought that that fuels my song making quite often over all of these years.
It’s like I need to put all this extra effort just into feeling okay enough to go on in a way that maybe other people haven’t thought about, and I kind of end up in the same place. It’s like ‘Oh, okay, I’ve gotten out of bed and I’ve laughed at some funny stuff and I’ve had a decent day, and I’ve made some art, and I’m going on to the next day.’ For somebody else that may not feel like such an achievement, but I feel like from my perspective that requires more effort philosophically, so maybe I’m giving myself more credit for just these meager achievements of just continuing on. I’m struggling just to get to the regular point of step one that most people seem to me maybe they’re at naturally. They’re trying to get from step one to step two, but for me, I’m like ‘How do I even get to step one?’
Maybe I’m holding onto that perspective longer than I ought to be as a grown-up person. Maybe that’s something I could have left behind in my teenage years or early twenties or something. I have grown up quite a lot since those times. I feel like I’m in a much better philosophical and emotional place than I was back then, but that sense of ‘what do you do with a life in a world that is meaningless,’ I don’t think that that has gone away so that still fuels a lot of the songs.
I think it’s very powerful, that blend, or sort of coming from that perspective, because I think that a lot of art that tries to be positive, not always, but sometimes it can feel phony or forced, and then it actually feels even more tragic, but I think finding positivity in that meaninglessness, it feels more genuine.
That’s one thing I also loved so much about Daniel Johnston’s stuff, was like, it was so funny. He would be coming from this perspective of being desperately lonely, but he would still be making jokes in these songs, and finding ways to laugh. That just really moves me so much. It’s a lot of times very funny music, but you always get this sense that that is a real triumph, that he had to fight to find that perspective and that joy, so that really inspired me as an artistic voice and as an aesthetic. I really relate to that very strongly in the Daniel Johnston stuff. There is a lot of joy, there is a lot of humor, but it was a triumph. That sort of comedy and tragedy combination, I feel like that’s a stronger depiction of my experience of life on earth than a lot of what more mainstream culture seems to present or something.
You wrote your senior literary thesis on “Watchmen,” which is an amazing graphic novel. What do you love about “Watchmen”, and also did you watch or enjoy the recent HBO Watchmen series?
Here, I’ll show you. I sort of did this experimental publication of my senior thesis, which I’ve put in this book form, but I haven’t really mass-produced this. I made a few copies of this just kind of as a test project. I re-edited it and I reformatted it a bit, but I still haven’t properly put this out. I don’t know if there’s even much of an audience for this sort of thing, especially nowadays. I mean “Watchmen” is pretty old now. When I first did my senior thesis that was in the late nineties and Watchmen was really only about ten years old then, now it’s like twenty years later, and even Alan Moore himself has really not wanted to talk about “Watchmen,” he’s really tried to distance himself from it. There’s been the “Watchmen” movie, there’s been the “Watchmen” sort of sequel comic books done by other artists, and there’s been that “Watchmen” HBO show, which I did see the first episode. My brother told me that I should watch it. I don’t have any of these streaming things, but I was at my brother’s place and he was like ‘You should watch this, you would enjoy it.’ I did enjoy the first episode, I thought it was interesting. I haven’t watched the whole series but I would watch it, I’m kinda curious about it. I do think that what Alan Moore did with that series is just so amazing. It’s so thick with ideas, and the witty way that the story unfolds, and the various layers of meaning, and the different panels, and the way that…it’s just…I gotta stop myself from going on and on about it because I wrote a whole book about it, so I’ve got a lot to say about it.
Hopefully, I’ll just get my book out in some form. But yeah, what an incredible piece of work. I feel like everybody should experience what it’s like to read “Watchmen.” You really have to read it like three times or four or five or ten times before I feel like the incredibleness of it starts to really sink in because every time you read it you notice a hundred new things you never noticed before, and all of them are brilliant. You’re like ‘Oh my god I never realized that this part of it is a reference to this other part of it.” It is so thickly interwoven with cool ideas and it’s just dense with information in a way that, I don’t know anything else that’s like that really.
It really feels like today everyone wants to make like, ‘Oh what if superheroes were evil or dangerous actually,’ I guess inspired by “Watchmen,” but it doesn’t feel like anyone has done it as good as Watchmen since then.
Yeah, and just in terms of the form and the really clever ways that the story is being told, the density of information in the panels, and the ways that Alan Moore is constantly sort of tricking you. I feel like he’s so good at this sense of setting up pins and knocking them down, is how I always think of it. He just kind of ensnares you in these little narrative tricks that you don’t even realize he’s weaving around you and then he pulls the rug out from under you. That’s kind of his method, over and over again, panel by panel, page for page. It’s almost like a comedian telling jokes, a standup comedian setting you up for a punchline, but he’s got these narrative punchlines, these little ‘got ya!’ things over and over and over again. Some of them you realize and some of them you don’t, and it’s just…wow, this guy’s brain is just operating on such an incredible level and it’s just such a great project. So I think regardless of the content, I mean on one hand you’ve got the story, and then you’ve got the way that the story is told, and I think both of those things are really interesting. I feel like the way the story is told is just so exceptionally brilliant, but then the story itself was also very groundbreaking
So I think you’re in New York right now, and you grew up in New York, and a lot of very specific locations in New York are very present in your music, in songs like the East River. How do you feel like New York as a hometown has impacted you as an artist?
I guess I’m lucky to have New York City as my backdrop. It’s such a dramatic place and recognizable to people around the world as an iconic atmosphere and location. I give credit to my parents for having the guts to raise a kid in the city, especially at a time when most people probably would’ve thought that was too dangerous or not good to do. I always loved it, I always thought it was great growing up in New York, and I’m really glad it’s been able to form just part of the aesthetic and identity of what I do.
Although, y’know most of the culture of New York City is about people moving from other places, like all of the famous New York City rock n roll stuff is basically people who moved to the city, whether it’s Richard Hell, Patti Smith, or Sonic Youth. New York City is like a place to move to, to kind of create your identity, at least in terms of rock music. I think there’s a little bit of a contradiction there. There aren’t that many native New York rock bands, there are some, but it’s definitely not the norm, and I feel like just in general, New York City culture is composed of people who came from somewhere else and that’s kind of the way it ought to be. That’s part of the excitement of New York City, is it’s a place to move to. Even Bob Dylan, he came to New York City from somewhere else and created this identity for himself. My position as someone who grew up here is a bit abnormal, like that’s not really New York City culture, what I have to offer. New York City culture is of people who came here, and they’re experience of finding this as a place to reinvent themselves, or as a place of excitement and adventure and possibilities, and it’s not like, ‘Oh this is where your mom is.’
Except for hip hop really, which is more about sort of where you’re from and where you’re at rather than where you’ve moved to. It seems to me that the history of rap in New York City is not so much about people who moved here as much as people who grew up here, which is different than the history of rock or folk stuff in New York City.
I’m kind of an outlier in that sense, I’m not really part of the culture of New York City rock bands, I’ve never been, because those are mostly almost all people who moved here, and they share that with each other. They share that experience of moving here, and facing that excitement and that challenge, whereas they don’t relate to me in that way.
Those details that are in some of my songs, I don’t know how much that means to people outside of New York City. Sometimes it’s weird performing those songs if I’m in Europe or in other parts of the USA, like do they know what the heck I’m talking about? At the same time, New York City culture is very known, people watch Seinfeld everywhere, people listen to rap music everywhere that’s very specific about New York City stuff, so it is relatable enough to people in other places.
I’m sitting in Seattle right now, you have your song “Seattle”. What do you think of Seattle in general?
I’ve seen over the years, it seems like, a big shift. The first time I ever got to check out the West Coast, Seattle seemed like one of the great places to be, and San Francisco also seemed like a really great spot. Over the years it seems like everything has shifted where Portland and Los Angeles are where I know the most people, and I barely know anybody in Seattle and San Francisco anymore. Maybe that’s just because of rising prices, or changes because of the tech industry, or different opportunities that are available now in Los Angeles in Portland that didn’t exist back in the late nineties, early 2000s, I don’t know.
I used to have the sense, especially from a comic book perspective, because Seattle was the home of Fantagraphics, which is such an important company in the comic book world and a lot of those Fantagraphics artists were living in Seattle at those times. I mean that was what attracted me so much in the nineties and that led to me writing that song, was like, this is a land, it’s sort of the mecca for modern comic book artists, so I was like ‘man, maybe this is where I should live.’
That sense doesn’t strike me currently. I barely know anybody who lives there anymore, but it’s cool, I really like the atmosphere, it has a very specific feeling to it. The whole Pacific Northwest is very cool, in specific Olympia and Tacoma, and all these kinds of places I’ve had the opportunities to travel through on my tours and other travels. I really enjoy being out there and soaking up that atmosphere.
On your tours, you travel a lot and you’ve actually been to my hometown or my home county, Humboldt County, which is really cool because a lot of artists don’t stop there. I’m sure you travel a lot and go to a new place every day on tour, so I don’t know if you have anything to say about that specific location. Do you have thoughts on Humboldt as a place, just because it’s where I’m from and it’s cool you’ve been there?
Well, it’s not very indie rock, that’s my impression of it. It’s always been a little more of a struggle to connect to an audience in some of those areas versus places like Chicago or New York City, or Austin or London. There are certain parts of the country where it just seems like what people are into is…maybe people are more into reggae, or they’re more into hardcore punk, or they’re more into jam bands or something. I feel like those Humboldt areas, I always feel a little bit like I’m kind of out of my element. The way Olympia, this is like a home, because of K Records, it’s like this has a history and a home and a reputation for sort of lofi indie music, and a lot of the people who’ve moved there, maybe people who go there for school or people who are just there for other reasons, they get drawn into that culture because that’s part of what it’s famous for.
That’s a very different thing than it seems to me in Humboldt, maybe it’s got more of a Grateful Dead culture or stuff like that, which I’m totally into too! I mean that was my first time on the West Coast was following the Grateful Dead on tour, and I’m very much attracted to a lot of that stuff musically. It’s definitely different than the kinds of music that I’m into making and it feels like those people are not necessarily… maybe they don’t listen to Daniel Johnston and Yo La Tengo and the Velvet Underground, so there isn’t as much of an audience for what I do maybe.
You talked about following the Grateful Dead, and you have your song “I Saw A Hippie Girl On 8th Avenue,” where you talk about realizing you don’t look like a hippie anymore. Is there a time you would say when you were a hippie, and could you talk about that time?
Definitely, I mean that was my cultural identification as a teenager when you start kind of getting into music. I didn’t end up as a goth, I didn’t end up as a metalhead, I didn’t end up as a punk, I was very much totally in the hippie camp of things, but because I wasn’t doing drugs I didn’t really fit in with those people either. After I really scared myself with acid around age sixteen and then even smoking pot just sort of felt very uncomfortable and frightening to me. I really enjoyed smoking pot when I was fifteen, but then after about a year, it turned into this very unpleasant experience. I kept on trying it for a while just because it had been so much fun earlier, but then I just realized ‘I guess I just can’t do this,’ I can’t take acid, I can’t smoke pot. I really stopped relating to a lot of my friends in that way and I just couldn’t participate in having fun with a lot of people in that realm. People would approach me because I might be wearing a Pink Floyd shirt and I was at a Grateful Dead show or something. Whatever it was I really looked like someone who would be smoking pot or taking acid and being a part of that element of the culture, but I just wasn’t at all, so maybe those people thought I was weird, but if people were punks, or indie rockers or whatever else, I was definitely very much a hippie. I had the long hair, I would be wearing sixties clothes and stuff.
The other thing is I loved sixties culture to a much greater extent than any of the other hippie-associated people I knew in my school. I was really dedicated to learning about sixties stuff. Partially the comic books, loving sixties comic books, and the weirdness of Jim Steranko, and the psychedelic Shield issues, and the psychedelic weirdness of Silver Surfer issues, of course all of the Jack Kirby stuff, Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange stuff. The psychedelia of it was just fascinating to me, I thought it was so incredible that things could be so far out and just bizarre and weird.
The psychedelic music, I don’t know why it just has this infinite attraction for me. There’s just something about the world that it promises, the world of experiences and visions and utopian things, I was just so hooked into that from first discovering sixties music. So I just always wanted to find more of those records, and weirder and weirder records, and nobody that I knew was into that stuff. People might have been into the Grateful Dead, of course there were people who were into the more well-known 60’s stuff, which I loved also. I mean Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, all of that stuff, but after I had devoured all of that stuff I was like ‘What about the weirder stuff, where are the other weird bands.’ I just wanted to know more about, y’know, who’s Country Joe and the Fish, who was The Great Society, and 13th Floor Elevators and Love and The Incredible String Band. I just wanted to know more and more. A lot of times I would kind of strike out and just buy records that were lame, and I was like ‘Oh maybe I’ve already found all the weird interesting psychedelic stuff,’ and then I’d find something else. I’d find Pearls Before Swine, or Can or…. To this day, there’s still more things that keep blowing my mind.
I don’t know why psychedelia itself is so attractive to me as an aesthetic completely separate from the drugs. The drug part of it, the actual experience of being on acid, was not what I wanted, I wanted the experience of the way those records made me feel, so I just continue to crave that.
I don’t know as much as you, but I have been thinking about the sixties lately because I read Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, which is very much about the collapse of the sixties into a more conservative seventies, and I also read a big book about Charles Manson and the sixties.
Which Manson book?
Oh yeah, someone was recommending that to me. I’ve read a few Manson books, I’m definitely fascinated by that also. Someone was recently recommending the CHAOS book.
Yeah, it’s a little conspiratorial, a little bit of a rabbit hole, but I mean it’s very well-researched, and honestly, maybe the CIA was involved. It’s interesting.
I’m so anti-conspiracy stuff, but sometimes it’s just interesting, or weird to read. I was reading the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, I think it’s called, about the Laurel Canyon Scene in the late sixties, and how supposedly there’s government involvement. I’m like, “Ehh”, I feel like once you start moving away from solid evidence, you can just believe anything, like aliens, CIA, or whatever. Once there isn’t enough solid evidence to support something and you’re willing to entertain these theories, it’s like ‘Well what am I basing this on.’ Someone is saying this, but I need a little more proof before I bother feeling like there’s something to it.
To talk about books a bit more, you have a recent song that sort of recaps the plot and themes of “The Great Gatsby.” What made you want to turn that book into a song, and do you have any other book recommendations?
I’ve never actually been a big fan of that book. We read it in high school and I didn’t like it, and then I read it again later in life and I liked it a lot more definitely, but I can’t relate to this idea that it’s the greatest American novel and all this stuff. I just had this idea during the pandemic, y’know I always do these illustrated song things at my concerts, like “The History Of Communism” stuff and these other fantasy things like “The Creeping Brain,” where I’m singing the song and I’m showing the illustrations. It was just an idea I had during the pandemic, what if I just did a series of classic novels, where I would tell it in song form, with a little three-minute song, and I would illustrate it? That idea just amused me, I thought I could maybe do some entertaining stuff with that idea.
Because The Great Gatsby is supposed to be the greatest American novel for whatever reason, I figured that’d be the first one that I’d do, so I revisited The Great Gatsby again and really enjoyed it more, but still, I’m just kind of like ‘Ehhh,’ I mean really?? The greatest American novel?? I’m still not on board with that, but it was really fun to just feel like I really understood the story a lot more, and it was really enjoyable to make my song about it. I have a Tom Sawyer song and I started writing a “Lolita” one. I don’t know, I was just coming up with a list of other ones I could do that would be just very weird, so I don’t know, maybe I’ll make some more time to do more of those kinds of projects. I have so many projects to do there’s just never any time, and I don’t know if I’ll get to it or not.
Do you think the “Lolita” one will ever come out? Because that sounds like it’d be really good.
I liked that it was such a kind of outrageous provocative thing to do, and I started writing an outline for it and thinking of how exactly I would structure it in a song form. I don’t know, I have so many projects that may or may not ever get completed, like the “Watchmen” book thing I was showing you, it’s like, am I ever gonna properly publish that? There are many projects in that zone, where maybe I’ve done some work on it, but I don’t know if I’ll ever make any more progress.
You talked about managing a ton of products at once. What would you say in terms of advice to young people with songwriting aspirations or any sort of artistic aspirations?
I think the best advice I’ve ever seen is from Adam Green, Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches, and of his own great solo career. He has this list, I forget if it’s called ‘Advice for Artists’, or ‘Ten Tips for Artists’, or ‘Twelve Bits of Advice for Aspiring Artists’, or something like that. It’s just this great list he did at some point, maybe for a magazine, but it’s circulated on the internet. I think that all of the things he says in that list are better than what I could come up with to say in terms of just very short quick points of ways to dedicate yourself to what you’re doing and to believe in what you’re doing. I think Adam Green’s list for artists is an inspirational document that I recommend everybody check out.
You’ve talked about a ton of different artists that you’re a big fan of. Are there any contemporary artists or artists making music right now that you enjoy?
Not really. I feel very stuck in the 20th century. I’m very hard-pressed to feel as strongly about any 21st century music as I feel about sixties music for example, or even certain 80s or 90s indie bands. I don’t wanna name names in terms of modern bands that I don’t like, but it’s kind of most of them. Usually, I’ll go out to see friends’ bands play. If I go out to a show it’s usually just a friend’s band, or if I’m going out to see a band that I’m not friends with it’s always these nineties artists. I go out to see Ween, I’ll go out to see Steven Malkmus and the Jicks any chance I get, I go out to see Yo La Tengo every chance I get. I would go out to see, if any of the members of Sonic Youth are doing something. I’d like to see Kim Gordon, she’s doing a thing in New York soon, and it’s all just stuff like that. I mean of course when The Fall was still around and touring, if I had any chance to see The Fall I would definitely do that. Jonathan Richman, if Jonathan Richman comes through I always go to see him, but that’s all ancient stuff. None of that is stuff that has emerged within the last twenty years. Yeah, that’s just I guess my bias, or maybe everybody at a certain age gets stuck in the music they first encountered and it’s hard to get as excited again about later music.
People say you listen to the music you listened to as a teenager your whole life, which is maybe true. You said you didn’t want to name names, and now I’m asking you to, so you don’t have to answer, but are there any artists where you just don’t understand why people like them, you just don’t get it?
Oh god, I mean so many, like anybody really. I mean, when I listen to say, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I’m like, ‘this is some of the worst stuff I’ve ever heard, people actually like this??’ This is just the bottom of the barrel, like what the heck am I supposed to like about this?
Even that’s kinda old already, but in terms of modern stuff, I don’t know, I’ve only heard maybe three songs or something by Phoebe Bridgers, and it just sounds like the most amateurish…I feel like I hear better stuff than that at open mic nights, and I’m just like ‘What??’
This is just…It just sounds like somebody that just started writing songs, and I’m just like, this is wack. I don’t know, I’m so unimpressed compared to how impressed everybody else seems to be. Maybe I just haven’t heard the right songs.
Then there’s other stuff that I think is good, like Courtney Barnett I think is really good, I’ve definitely been impressed by Courtney Barnett’s stuff, but impressed to the level where I’m like, ‘Oh this is basically as good as I would want any music to be in order to justify me listening to it,’ but it’s like nobody else is even at that standard. It just seems like she really stands out above the pack to me as like ‘Oh this is actually good lyrics and good music.’ It’s not Daniel Johnston, or Yo La Tengo, or Sonic Youth, but at least it’s good.
I thought Saint Vincent was kind of interesting when she first was putting out records, not great, but like ‘okay, this is a little interesting, I can see at least she’s sort of trying,’ but by the time it was the second record or something, I’m just like, this is just not doing anything for me, there’s nothing interesting to me about these lyrics, this music. It’s like it’s trying too hard to be interesting without actually being good.
I don’t know, I don’t want to be dissing people, because maybe somebody was considering contacting me to open for them on a tour and then they hear that I’m insulting them.
Saint Vincent is working with David Byrne. Okay, but come on, listen to the Talking Heads, listen to the first five Talking Heads records. That is actually awesome, incredible, creative music, incredible lyrics, incredible music, endless ideas. I just don’t hear any of that in this modern stuff.
But people love it, who am I to say what people should love? People get a lot of stuff out of it, people are really moved by this music. Once in a while, there’s something I really didn’t want to like, and then I listen to it and I’m just like ‘I have to admit this is good.’
I feel that way, say, about Kurt Vile, or maybe I would say Sufjan Stevens also. Or The Fiery Furnaces also, I definitely felt that way about. When they first came out I was just like ‘This is terrible crap, how could anybody like this?’ Then after a few albums I start hearing stuff and I’m like ‘I hate to admit it, but that’s actually a really good song, I like this, I don’t want to admit that I like it, but okay, they’ve impressed me, this is cool.’
So there are artists like that, where I sort of grudgingly come around and I have to admit they’re doing something good. For the most part, I’m not gonna bother buying a ticket to see these people, I’m not excited.
Not to just devolve into quizzing you on artists that I like, but have you ever listened to Alex G?
What is the name?
Alex G.
No, I don’t know that stuff. But people tell me about stuff that I should check out. People are telling me I should check out, uhhh ‘Big Thief.’ I haven’t listened to Big Thief, but people are like ‘You might like it!’ ‘They’re great!’ and blah blah blah, so…
I do like Big Thief, and honestly, I’m here for the Phoebe Bridgers hate, even though, at least amongst people my age at a liberal arts college people love Phoebe Bridgers, but I agree.
Yeah, I don’t get it, what can I say?
This is more of a boring question you’ve probably answered before, but how and when did you get into making music and drawing comics?
Well, I’ve always been into drawing comics since I was little. My parents, we never had a television in the house, so comics were just a big part of my form of entertainment. I was always reading books and reading comics, and just the idea of drawing and making comics was just super fun and appealing to me from a super young age, just my whole life.
This whole thing of making songs didn’t become really part of my identity until getting into Daniel Johnson, and realizing this was a doorway to a kind of thing that I could do, and that I was really interested in finding that way of expressing myself. I really think it’s just 100% from Daniel Johnston that I learned about this idea of making a song. That was just from my early twenties, whereas comic making was just part of my life, that was just like since I was a little kid.
Arguably it’s annoying to try and push every artist ever into a genre, but people describe your music as ‘Antifolk .’ How do you feel about that label, and is there a genre you would categorize yourself as?
Well when I started out I figured I was indie rock. I thought of what I was doing as indie rock in the sense of Yo La Tengo, Sebadoh, Palace Brothers, Jonathan Richman, Daniel Johnston. But I started playing at the Sidewalk Cafe in New York, which had this open mic which is where I kind of started off playing music in New York, and started playing shows there. Everything associated with Sidewalk, the antifolk scene, it’s like Sidewalk, the home of anti-folk, and the Antifolk Festival , and all this stuff, so just from going to the open mic at that venue I got associated with the anti-folk scene, which is cool and it’s fun. It’s pretty interesting that there’s this weird word for it, and that nobody really knows what it means, and that I ended up being able to be categorized in that. I think it makes sense because I don’t really sound as indie rock as Dinosaur Jr, or Sonic Youth, so it makes sense to have some different word to differentiate, and it might as well be antifolk, so I don’t mind that.
You talked about how sometimes the art you make that resonates with people isn’t the same as the art that resonates with yourself or the things that you would expect. Are there any songs of yours you wish got more attention, or you feel like people don’t talk about them but you actually really like them?
Yeah definitely, all the time. There’s a lot of songs that I’m very proud of that aren’t anywhere near my most listened-to songs. A lot of the stuff on the Manhattan album, that was a record that I felt like I really put a lot into and felt very proud of that stuff. Songs like “Back to Manhattan” and, “Thunderstorm,” “Scowling Crackhead Ian,” a lot of that stuff, I think, is among the best things that I’ve ever made, but you certainly wouldn’t know that from looking at the streaming counts. Then also on the Bad Wiring record that I put out in 2019, I feel like overall maybe that’s the best record I’ve ever made, which I was very proud of, because it’s pretty rare that that deep into somebody’s career they actually make maybe their best record. Usually somebody’s first record is their best and then they get worse and worse or something. I feel like that record and some of the tracks on that that nobody seems to gravitate towards, as far as I can tell, like the last track on that record, “Not Supposed To Be Wise” I’m really proud of that recording and that song. “Till Question Marks Are Told” is another track on that record that I feel really good about that doesn’t seem to make a dent in terms of, if people put their lists of ‘here are the twenty best Jeffrey Lewis songs,’ those songs are never on those, and they certainly don’t get bumped in the algorithm, so yeah, that happens quite a lot.
Once in a while, I agree with the songs, like “Exactly What Nobody Wanted.” I really loved that song, I was very proud of writing that song, and that has become one of my more popular songs. That’s one where I feel like my feelings and other people’s feelings on it are lined up. You just never know.
I think that’s everything I had to ask. It’s really cool to get to talk to you, thank you so much for taking the time to meet.
Yeah, no problem! I hope it comes out and I hope it’s useful for whatever you’re gonna use it for.
Yeah thank you so much, have a great rest of your day
Later! You too.
Bye!
Bye.
Lewis’s latest releases include “The Dream Wheel,” an EP with his band Jeffrey Lewis and The Voltage, as well as a five-track solo EP titled “Ghosterbusters.” His last album release was “Asides and B-Sides (2014-2018),” released in 2023. As discussed in the interview, he released the album “Bad Wiring” in 2019, again as a project of his band. Lewis performed at Chop Suey in Seattle on October 14th, unfortunately for me a 21+ venue. I hope to see him live one day.
Dylan Berman I Volunteer KXSU Music & Arts Reporter