In 2001 Jeffrey Lewis emerged from New York’s antifolk scene with a debut album packed with brilliant vignettes of modern city life. Here was a fully-formed singer-songwriter with a unique style and an inimitable authorial voice. His incisive lyrics (sometimes touching, often hilarious) and tightly wound tunes were complemented by a croaking vocal delivery and non-existent production values which merely added to the work’s overall charm. Now back with a third album, ‘City and Eastern Songs’, Fused met up with him before his recent gig at Birmingham’s Jug of Ale.
Alongside his musical output, Jeffrey Lewis runs a prolific sideline writing and illustrating comic books, a passion since childhood. Throughout our conversation he multitasks, colouring in the covers of some of reprinted (read photocopied) old comic books he intends to sell tonight. “Now that my newer comics I’ve been doing have colour covers I feel bad that this one just has a black and white cover, so I’ve been trying to colour in all the covers,” he explains. I wonder whether he automatically knows what form a work will take when he first thinks of the idea. “Hard to say,” he responds. “Some things I can’t quite tell. Something will come to me that I’ll just write down in the back of my sketchbook and then I sort of end up with a whole collection of little ideas jotted down and sometimes I’ll just go and look at them when I’m working on whatever I’m working on and see if anything makes sense to use. Generally I guess I can tell from the start what’s gonna be what.” The two side of his artistic output have been combined to great effect with a series of what he calls ‘low budget documentaries’ – essentially comic strips drawn on large pads which he holds aloft (often while standing on a table) and narrates in a song-speech with the rest of his band keeping time. He’s been working on a history of the communism for a while: “I’m almost done with part three, the Russian Revolution and I’ve got notes taken for China, Vietnam and Cuba. I just have all these different projects that are just kind of in various states of being completed so I just slowly work through it.”
One of Jeff’s earlier low budget documentaries focused on his label, Rough Trade, and I ask him if his relationship with the label has been successful. “Depends on how you consider success,” he replies. “Probably from the standpoint of any other band on the label, I can’t imagine very many people have sold less albums than we have. But from my standpoint it’s certainly a huge step up from where I was just selling cassettes at my shows before Rough Trade contacted me, whenever that was, four years ago. I mean this is more success than I ever thought I’d have, just being able to sell a few thousand records and go on tour and be interviewed like this. What more can I ask for?”
It seems that Jeffrey Lewis isn’t asking for anything more: he shuns the usual forms of promotion, setting up interviews through personal emails rather than the usual PR companies and always seeming to play smaller venues than he could fill (there are often groups of disappointed stragglers outside unable to get a ticket, at his London gigs at least). His classic single, ‘Back When I Was Four’ chronicles his life to the age of 128 and predicts cult status with rediscovery at the age of 63 after a life tinged with bittersweet failures. It may be that Jeffrey Lewis only really craves critical appreciation and the limited recognition of those few who are in the know.
Certainly the value that Jeffrey Lewis places on his work is not measured by record sales, but by creative achievement. He ponders “this notion of whether what I’m doing is important enough to ask for people’s time, ask for my own time to do it even.” One of his new songs, ‘Will Oldham Williamsburg Horror’, tucks this existential quandary into a riotous narrative concerning an encounter with the titular alternative country luminary on the New York subway. As Jeff explains, it’s about “that whole idea of whether what you spend your time doing when you’re this sort of thing, is a valid way to spend your life.”
Artistic validity is a key ingredient to the acts who inspired him too; they are not those who’ve achieved huge mainstream success, but those whose work he admires. He cites Donovan as a major influence: “He’s usually written off as a second rate Dylan, but he’s really totally different from Dylan and his stuff is really important to me, I’ve got tonnes of his albums.” He also brings up troubled New York legend Daniel Johnson: “a big influence in as far as, like, keeping things simple. Just realising that things could be simple and straightforward.” Most intriguingly he also talks about an uncle of his who has become an influence on his work. “He’s a rapper in Brooklyn, probably the only sixty-year-old Jewish Communist rapper in Brooklyn or maybe even the globe. He’s really an incredible lyricist and everything he does is just moving and direct and powerful. Political but not, it’s just so well done because it really explains these situations and these problems and explains solutions to them. I always sort of hold myself up to that standard in a certain way, that everything shouldn’t just be meaningless, you should really have some kind of point to it all.”
It’s a standard that Jeffrey Lewis has consistently lived up to. His belief that it is “important to have a purpose to what you’re doing, rather than just writing and performing for their own sake; that there should be some kind of sense of responsibility to it” has more than paid off for his gradually developing legion of fans.
Mark Ward