New York ‘anti-folkie’ and cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis is ‘the best lyricist working in the US today’, according to Jarvis Cocker. He talks to Andrew Purcell in the East Village council flat where he grew up
A FEW YEARS ago, Jeffrey Lewis wrote a song called Sal’s Pizza Has Sold Out to the Yuppie Scum, in which he complained about the rising cost of a takeaway in the East Village. New York’s “anti-folk” scene had by then grown too big for squat parties and moved to the Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A, and although Lewis was the main draw at open-mic nights there (alongside The Moldy Peaches), the extra 50 cents for a cheese slice was more than he could take.
Until he signed to Rough Trade in 2001, Lewis was virtually unknown outside New York. Before that, he made mix-tapes and played live sets, which were advertised in the comics he drew, stapled by hand and then sold in Washington Square. His first two albums for the label – The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insaneand It's the Ones Who've Cracked That the Light Shines Through– established him as one of the US's funniest, most sincere songwriters. Last year's album of Crass covers – anarcho-punk given a pastoral setting – won universal praise, and Jarvis Cocker has called him "the best lyricist working in the US today".
Lewis doesn’t live in the East Village any more, but he still has the keys to the council flat where he grew up. It’s in a concrete tower-block, untouched by the tide of stainless-steel kitchens and renovated hardwood floors that has swept across the neighbourhood, and this is where we meet to talk. His father is, he says, “a general hustler type” who goes to Mexico for three months every winter and brings back trinkets to sell. On this rainy afternoon, his mother is either teaching English or at a union meeting. There are ancient strands of spaghetti stuck to the wall above the cooker, and, in the bathroom, there are pictures of Jack Kerouac, Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and activist poet Joe Hill. (Lewis rarely writes political lyrics, but the inspiration for his illustrated four-part history of communism is plain to see – he used to sing this live, flipping through his crayon drawings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao until the pad fell to bits.)
The back bedroom looks as if Lewis and his brother, Jack, moved out last week, not several years ago. In the corner, there are boxes full of copies of his comic, Fuff, issues one to seven.
Lewis’s new album, ’Em Are I, is his slickest yet. His technique is better, the arrangements more intricate, the recording quality improved beyond recognition.
“I never thought there was an album someone could put on and listen to without explaining to their friends: ‘We’re listening to this because he’s good live,’ ” he says. “I wanted to make an album that I wouldn’t have to make excuses about.”
As ever, his songs unpack his insecurities, hopes and failings with bracing candour, to the sound of jaunty banjo, mandolin and finger-picked guitar. He analyses the break-up of a relationship, takes sleeping pills to quiet the voices in his head, and tells himself: “Everyone you meet is not better than you.”
Lewis’s most recent comic strip, published in the New York Times in lieu of an occasional column he writes about songs and the creative process, showed him with a fist-sized hole blown in his chest and his eyes sewn shut, grief-stricken at the end of a long-term relationship. One of the most upbeat numbers on his new album, Broken Broken Broken Heart, tells the same story, with added handclaps. Last summer he performed it most nights while on tour – the ex-girlfriend in question was on keyboards.
“If there’s some place where it feels a little uncomfortable to go in a song, that’s where I have to go, where the powerful emotions are,” he says now. “Maybe it’s not even healthy, but it’s a way of stepping outside something. Turning it into something creative means that, at the very worst, you got a song out of it.”
THERE’S SOMETHING reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut in the way Lewis writes, lacing his bleakest work with a streak of optimism, maintaining faith in the redemptive power of creativity.
“I feel like a lot of my songs are trying to find the quirk, find the perspective, that makes it not so bad,” he says. “Even if they’re describing the darker side of things, most of them have some kind of twist, some kind of message to myself.”
Vonnegut often said he was “whistling past the graveyard”, meaning life was cruel. On ’Em Are I, Lewis takes this saying and turns it into a meditation on eternity and a literal defence mechanism. Ever the horror fan, Lewis whistles because he’s scared that corpses want to eat his brain.
When New York gets too much for him, he jumps on the midnight bus to Maine, where he has a shack in the woods. He once spent summers there drawing comics, free from distractions. But now his musical career has taken off, his visits have become sporadic.
He is as neurotic about success as he is about rejection. He says he sometimes feels he is becoming gentrified himself, like his old neighbourhood, and both gaining and losing something in the process. Recently, he went into a friend’s studio and recorded songs the way he used to – “one take, solo acoustic, roll the tape and you get what you get”. It felt good.
Lewis still sleeps on the sofa when he tours. Unsurprisingly, he is someone who sees the bright side of the recession. The planned high-rises that would have blocked his view of the Chrysler building have been put on hold. Pizza is cheaper too. “There are all these $1 slices in the neighbourhood now. That’s been the best part of the faltering economy.”
’Em Are I is on Rough Trade. Jeffrey Lewis will perform at Crane Lane, Cork, tomorrow; Crawdaddy, Dublin, on Wed; and Black Box, Belfast, on Thur
