Jenny Lewis is choosing joy with Joy’All

Jenny Lewis spent the pandemic going by way of an enormous non secular transformation. In addition to her 20-plus years practising yoga, she started meditating, listening to Ram Dass and dealing with a coach 5 days every week. She strived to deprioritize being a “workaholic” and embrace the opposite sides of herself that make her a well-rounded human. She requested herself: “Who are you if you can’t do your job? Are you a good person? Can you take care of yourself? Can you do stuff around the house? Who are you?” Lewis needed to change into a greater model of herself. So whereas she was caught in Los Angeles — the place she had been working from for 5 years following a breakup — that’s what she did. “I was totally alone in this space that I’ve shared with my ex for many years, so I just took the opportunity to do some serious spring cleaning internally, as well as the house itself, and made it my place again,” the 47-year-old singer-songwriter explains over Zoom from the ground of her music room in Los Angeles. 

To information her, she discovered motivation in her personal previous within the type of a traditional Rilo Kiley track. “I think about ‘A Better Son/Daughter’ [and the line] ‘You’ll be a real good listener, you’ll be honest, you’ll be brave,’” she says, reciting the lyrics like poetry. “That song, I think, for the pandemic, was a mantra for me in a way. In coming out of it, it’s like, ‘I can’t wait to take you out to dinner, and you can buy the rib-eye if you want,’ and ‘I’m going to work on being a good listener to my friends,’ and all those important things that were uttered in that song so many years ago.”

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It was Lewis’ personal heart-opening that helped inform the title of her fifth solo album, Joy’All (due June 9). “It’s like joy and love for all, no matter what, even if the person is shitty,” she explains. “We have to accept that some people are fucking nightmares, but we have to have love for them as well.”

[Photo by Bobbi Rich]

Lewis supposed to make a follow-up to her 2019 document, On The Line, in some unspecified time in the future, however she didn’t have concrete timing in thoughts. However, she had a handful of songs able to go pre-pandemic, together with two of the album’s cuts, “Psychos” and “Giddy Up,” which she performed on her livestream jam periods. The remainder of the album got here in time, because of a songwriting workshop with her buddy and collaborator Beck. Soon, Lewis landed on a recording location after visiting her mates Lucius whereas they have been making an LP with Dave Cobb at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio. She simply knew she needed to document there, too. In the method, she additionally signed to a brand new document label, Blue Note/Capitol Records. 

On Joy’All, Lewis cites Frank Ocean, Tracy Chapman and Edie Brickell & New Bohemians as influences. “I had been listening to ‘DHL,’ this Frank Ocean song, and exclusively hip-hop radio in Nashville the whole time I was there — 101.1 The Beat,” she remembers. Those influences occur to be fairly the departure from her 2021 standalone single “Puppy and a Truck,” a candy ditty about the great thing about driving in her Chevy Colorado pick-up and hanging out with her cute cockapoo Bobby Rhubarb (a “thank you” present from the musician Serengeti, who she collaborated with throughout the pandemic). Fans and critics speculated Lewis’ subsequent album is perhaps her “yacht-rock era.” But that analysis was a lot too untimely. The songs from that interval, she says, have been simply songs.

Instead, Joy’All is extra a fusion of psych-country, folk-pop, R&B and humor — one thing Lewis usually injects into her lyrics. The artist, who is no stranger to singing about intercourse in all its varieties, dials in on the comedy of uncomfortable moments on “Psychos.” “I’m not a psycho, I’m just trying to get laid,” she causes on the observe. “Those are my favorite lyrics where it’s really real but also really funny,” she explains. “Giddy Up” additionally broaches the subject of getting laid (“It’s a little mantra: ‘Giddy up, get on my pony and ride.’ Let’s fucking cut the crap here, and let’s do it”), however it additionally shrouds a message about cognitive dissonance and the “danger zone of dating.” 

There are extra severe moments on the document as properly — even when the phrase “joy” is embedded within the lyrics. “Balcony,” in response to Lewis, is “the most pandemic-themed song on the record.” It was initially about getting by way of COVID-19, however it turned a tribute to a buddy who died by suicide throughout lockdown.

But Lewis additionally manages to show extra melancholy moments into buoyant ones. While she initially reduce “Apples and Oranges” for On The Line, she reimagined it in a special key — with a newfound perspective. “The bridge sums up the whole thing where I say, ‘Now that my heart is so fucking open, it’s not about you,’” Lewis notes. “That was a new part that I put with this old poem that I had written after Johnathan [Rice] and I broke up.”

While Joy’All isn’t even near being Lewis’ first rodeo in music, it occurs to be the primary album she’s launched since a moderately vital life occasion — opening for Harry Styles on his large Love on Tour. The two-and-a-half-month gig allowed Lewis, who has had a faithful fanbase for 25 years, the chance to introduce her music to a brand new cohort of boa-wearing followers. Both Lewis’ and Styles’ affinity for sequin jumpsuits and folks rock made them a stable pairing — it simply took some live performance attendees a minute to catch on. Initially, some Styles followers have been perplexed by Lewis opening for the pop star — possible the results of a generational hole between the Gen X-ers and millennials who adopted her from Rilo Kiley by way of her solo profession and Gen Z-ers and Gen Alpha who had maybe been too younger to develop up with her music. It wasn’t precisely stunning that she was a stranger to a few of them.

“Well, I didn’t expect them to know who the hell I was,” she laughs. “I think in this country, there’s a place in the press for independent artists, and although I’ve been on a major label for a while, it’s still pretty niche what I’m doing.” But it wasn’t lengthy till Styles followers bought on board, although it wasn’t Rilo Kiley songs or her solo albums they have been most acquainted with: “I feel like the song that people knew the most was [one] I had written for a Disney movie, Bolt, called ‘Barking at the Moon.’ That was the most requested song.”

[Photo by Bobbi Rich]

The Styles tour was monumental for Lewis, however it was additionally unorthodox. Because it was on the peak of the pandemic, Lewis and Styles by no means actually hung out collectively on the highway. “There was no mingling, no hanging out. In a way, it almost felt like a DIY tour, even though it was the biggest tour happening in America. There was no press. There were no people backstage. There were no parties. It was just the bands and the crowd,” she remembers. 

Still, for Lewis, the expertise “was magic.” They’ve since stored in contact — Lewis even enlisted him to decorate up as a pet in her music video for “Puppy and a Truck,” which was launched in March. “I gave him an outline like, ‘The puppy is throughout the video and does all these amazing things, like rips on a skateboard, drives the tour bus, hangs out with me on the beach, and the big reveal is the puppy is actually you.’ So he directed himself in that portion, filmed it on his phone and then sent it to me. It was just perfect,” she says adoringly.

Lewis has continued to hold that sense of “magic” with her as she enters this album period. But as she does so, she’ll even be paying homage to her previous by becoming a member of Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and producer Jimmy Tamborello for the Postal Service’s Give Up twentieth anniversary tour. Lewis, like all of us, is nostalgic, too, however she acknowledges how difficult it may be to recreate the sentiment of that point. It’s how she feels about Rilo Kiley, as an example. “It’s like, ‘We miss Rilo Kiley.’ It’s like, ‘Well, it’ll never be like it was.’ We have to accept that artists move forward, and never say never, but it may not happen,” she says, referring to a reunion of the band.

For now, she’s leaning into the theme of Joy’All — acceptance — the concept of being content material with the place she’s arrived in life, the optimism she has for this higher model of herself and this singular second in her profession. “I feel unapologetic about my work. I’m creatively untethered, and I am responsible for my artistic output… and it feels really amazing,” she beams. Lewis is trying ahead and choosing joy.