Jeffrey Lewis interview: The full transcript

It was a good crowd for my band for a NYC gig, about 250 people, we could probably have a stronger draw here at home in NYC if we didn’t play so often. If I treated NYC like any other city that I play once a year when I pass through on a tour I could probably have more like 300 people at at the gig, but when I’m playing NYC about once a month I feel lucky if I can pull about 60 ticket buyers at a normal show. It makes sense, how many times do you need to see the same artist over and over, especially considering I’ve been playing NYC gigs multiple times a year (or sometime multiple times a month) since 1998! When you look at it that way I’m amazed anybody still comes at all! The art-show itself was fantastic actually, makes me want to do this sort of thing more, but it’s hard to put together, it’s out of my range of experience, me trying to figure out how to frame and hang pieces of art, I’m laughably bad at all of that, I didn’t go to art school, I don’t do gallery shows, I just like to draw, so I was very much in over my head. At least now that the art is up, the show will stay there on display for three months. I think it looks really great, it’s about 1,000 drawings, posters, comics, a whole lot to look at, covering every inch of the walls from floor to ceiling!

Tell me about Manhatten. I’m really pleased it seems to be getting a decent promotional push from Rough Trade. I’ve heard Outta Town before but I love the title track. Like the lazy guitar insinuating itself around what I think are your most Lou Reedy vocals ever. Is that fair and does it signify a slight change of tack. Do you feel your music is evolving?

I wasn’t specifically trying to sound like Lou, but I guess anybody from New York who is sort of talk-singing ends up sounding a little bit similar? You could say that David Johanssen’s vocals in the New York Dolls sound a lot like the vocals on the David Peel & The Lower East Side LPs that preceded the Dolls, but that’s probably less a matter of direct influence than just the fact that two screaming New Yorkers with trashy voices sound similar. That being said, I’d definitely consider Lou Reed to be one of my absolute top artistic idols, I have every album he ever made, and I organize Lou Reed tribute nights every year on his birthday. I have a big picture of Lou on the wall in my apartment, he has a sort of ambiguous expression, it can look like he’s slightly grimacing or slightly grinning, depending how you glimpse him out of the corner of your eye. I like to think he gives me the little smile when I’m writing something good, and he’s giving me the disapproving grimace when I’m not. I think my songwriting evolved a lot last year because of a couple factors, one is that I spent the previous year working on my “Sonnet Youth” series of sonnet zines, and that accidentally gave me a much stronger sense of meter, and a stronger confidence in the idea that if you just sit and think long enough you can find a way to say anything within any chosen rhythm and rhyme scheme. This is almost an opposite lesson from a Lou Reed influence though, because it’s too academic - the lesson from Lou is to stick to saying things you care about, and nothing else matters as much as that, you don’t have to be smart. Being smashed in the face with an artist’s heart is a lot better than smashed in the face with their brain. The other thing that made me better last year is that it was the only year for a long while during which I actually had a solid band here. In 2013 I had four different band line-ups, in 2015 I’ve had four different band line-ups already, and the year’s not even over; but in 2014 I started the year with Heather and Caitlin and I ended the year with Heather and Caitlin, and that kind of stability allowed a huge amount of progress. I wrote a lot of good songs, did a lot of good recordings, played a lot of good shows. It becomes a lot more challenging when you can’t spend time thinking and writing because you need to spend your time auditioning drummers, or teaching a brand new bass player how to sing about 100 songs, that’s a lot of time and energy just to catch up to where you already were.

I think you are massively underrated as a lyricist (in fact you’re underrated full stop) but there’s a poetry and a humour to what you write which is almost unmatched. What comes first the music or lyrics and how do the words come to you?

It sort of comes together but in general I think that good words trump everything else. If you listen to a song with a great drummer but stupid lyrics, it’s not a great song. If you listen to a song with a terrible drummer but great lyrics, it’s a great song. Ditto for the guitar parts, the singing, the kind of amplifier the keyboard player used, who really cares about any of that stuff? If it’s a good song it’s a good song, and everything else is basically as irrelevant as a haircut. Still, there’s such a thing as a really great band making really great sounds. There’s great instrumental music. I guess there’s such a thing as great music with bad words. But I guess good words are the only element that can guarantee that something is a good song. If you have a great keyboard player, or a great singer, the overall song still might be great or might not be great. But if you have a great lyricist, the overall song will be great no matter what. That’s how it seems to me.

Anti-folk is such a bizarre category isn’t it. I think we struggle over here to get a grip on what it means. Are you happy to be its figurehead. Aren’t you just a lo-fi hero? We can get that!

No matter what you do in music you’ll get called something - you’re part of the “cool bop” jazz movement, or post-punk, or no-wave, or free-jazz, or the electro-funk scene, or grunge, or emo, etc., etc., so as an artist you have basically zero control over that, you just do what you do and then somebody else calls it something. I’m very lucky that people call me “antifolk” because at least nobody knows what it means, so you can’t hear that description and walk away thinking you already know what the band is about. If somebody said “we’re going to go see a swing band tonight” or “we’re going to see a punk band tonight” you wouldn’t have to go to the show with them, you could stay home and be basically sure of what it was you were missing, but if they said “we’re going to go see the Jeffrey Lewis band tonight, you know, he’s the king of antifolk”, or whatever, if you stayed home you’d still be like “I really don’t know what the hell kind of show I’m missing out on…” So I guess that’s a good thing. Even if it was just an accident of random historical timing. If I started five years earlier they might have called me indie-rock, and if I started five years later they might have called me freak-folk, or something. Both of those titles immediately make my music sound more boring, even if you’ve never heard any of my stuff, because you already know what both those titles mean. But in some ways, longevity itself breaks you out of any title-box. If the Fall had only lasted for three albums maybe you could comfortably just call them a post-punk band and be done with it, and if the Grateful Dead had only lasted till 1969 maybe you could comfortably call them a San Francisco acid-rock band and be done with it.

I saw a video (33 seconds?) on your Facebook site in which someone had filmed you crashing in a house after a gig. You were sleeping at the end of a bed in a space a dog would have complained about! I know its part of what you do but there must be times you want to book into Trump Tower or the Four Seasons?

We get a foot in both worlds over the course of every touring year, there are some plush situations and some tough situations and a whole lot in between. And often you can’t predict which will be which - you could get booked into some hotel and then find out that check-out time is 10am and you REALLY need to sleep in because you’ve got a big drive ahead and the gig the previous night went till 3am and you don’t want to be falling asleep behind the wheel, so you would have been better off staying at someone’s house. By the same token you could end up at some weird-seeming person’s house and find out that it’s a really great place, where you discover some incredible books on their shelves and you can sleep in as late as you want and they have a wonderful friendly dog, or a fireplace, or they cook you some sort of cool weird local dish for breakfast. There’s really no division like “staying at a hotel is the best-case scenario, staying at someone’s house is the worst-case scenario,” there’s just a whole lot of variation, and the variation keeps the whole touring experience more interesting anyway. The good times are good, and the bad times are at least story-worthy. I think if we just stayed at comfortable hotels every night the entire project could become very boring.

Following on from that, the Jeffrey Lewis that we know and love is a cult hero “not a mainstream show” but do you wish sometimes you were playing the O2 in London! The more you sing those wonderful songs of failure, forlorn love and side street vignettes the more they become self fulfilling? People want you as their secret. I guess that’s just bullshit because to do anything else wouldn’t be you. There I answered my own question so you don’t have to.

I think quality reaches its own level - I’m not doing as well in the music business as, say, Kimya Dawson or Yo La Tengo, but in what possible way is that unfair? Kimya writes these incredible songs that make mine look like chicken-scratch, and Yo La Tengo can play a show with such devastating artistic range, I can’t imagine how they do it, it’s on a level that is clearly beyond me. Therefore they’re selling more tickets than I am, which makes perfect sense. I do think that what I do is sometimes hitting an artistic or emotional spot that I’m really personally proud of, but I don’t think my relatively small position in the music biz is any sort of tragedy, after all I’ve been making a living from this for almost 15 years now, which is whole lot better than a lot of artists in history who were much better than me could say for themselves. The only things I’d complain about are things like having to do SO much of the work myself, in terms of the tour-booking and the overall organizational stuff, and also the fact that what I can offer to the musicians in my band is a life that has not been quite appealing enough to have them prioritize it the way that I can prioritize it; every time a bass player moves away from NYC, or a drummer gets a day job and stops being able to tour, or somebody’s cat is sick so they don’t come play a gig with me or whatever, it’s not like I can financially say “but look what you’re giving up!” Because what are they giving up? A whole lot of hassle, just to barely make a living, all for the sake of having the honor of playing somebody else’s songs. So I suppose if I could offer better conditions and more money maybe that would engender more band-loyalty, which would get me off of this merry-go-round of constantly re-envisioning the band sound - but on the other hand, the need to constantly re-envision the band sound has ultimately lead to a lot of incredible creative output that could not have happened any other way. So each aspect is a challenge that has its own rewards. Anyway, as far as success stuff, I’m not as famous as Jonathan Richman or the Rolling Stones because I’m not as good as them, that’s about it. Or let me put it this way - I’m not as good as them as consistently as them. I do feel like when I’m at my best I’m able to reach a place that most other artists in the music world today don’t seem to care about reaching; I wish I could hit the mark more often, but I know it when I’ve got it, and sometimes I’ve got it, and at those times I feel so strongly about the quality of what I’ve done that I don’t think there’s anybody who’s ever done it better. One critic said about Lou Reed “he’s one of the few American artists capable of hitting a spiritual home run,” and that’s what I want too, to hit that home run, even if it’s just the unexpected result of a bunt. Sorry for all the baseball terminology! How about a gambling metaphor - I’m like a gambling addict at a slot machine, pulling the handle over and over, no matter what it costs me, because I know that the occasional pay-off when those rollers all fall into place and the jackpot hits, it’s a success that justifies all the failures and it’s enough of an emotional payoff that it keeps me hooked and trying for more, through an insane amount of near-misses and total failures.

Will you be performing any of your comic book narratives in Brighton or is it just rattle out the hits!

The last thing I want to do is rattle out the hits! They don’t even stand up as hits if they become hits, if you know what I mean; the element of surprise or accidental synchronicity, or the feeling of thinking in the moment, that’s a lot of power to just lightly disregard that in favor of the convenience of having a set-list. But I go both ways. I think that you train your audience to become the sort of audience that you want; if you train them to expect you to rattle out the hits then you build an audience who is disappointed if you don’t do that every time, and your career as an artist becomes a straightjacket. If you build an audience who want to be surprised rather than satisfied then maybe once in a while you can end up with everybody including the artist being both surprised and satisfied, those are the best times. You have to be willing to fail, though, otherwise the success isn’t exciting. At least that’s how it seems to me. It’s not theater where you know what you’re going to get and you just want it to be put across impressively, it’s more like sports where you root for your team, win or lose, but there are too many factors to be able to guarantee that every game is a thrilling, memorable experience. A “guarantee” in itself would eliminate the possibility of the experience.

Brighton’s a pretty quirky town. Do you have good memories of here. This time you’re dashing off so no time for a go on tin can alley on the pier?

I love Brighton! So many great shows there and great experiences and great people.

I saw you play in Brixton with Peter recently. It was a brilliant gig. Hey Hey should have knocked Beyonce off the top spot when it came out (ok I got carried away there) but are there any plans to work again with him.

I’m supposed to record a new album with Peter in January 2016 but we keep hitting snags because of timing and financing and stuff. Also he just busted his hip on this recent tour of Ireland and we don’t quite know what that will mean for recovery time or anything. Hopefully he just bounces back to his usual-unusual brilliance, but the guy’s almost near to pushing 80 and he’s had a lifetime of manically creative output, he certainly deserves to slow down a little if he wants to relax, I’m sure we’ll get it done in some form or other.