Quality time to fresher notes

Fans of well-wrought pop have been following Jenny Lewis's quest for the unexpected since she founded Rilo Kiley with Blake Sennett, a former child actor like herself, in 1998.

That band was part of a shift in indie music away from heavy, primal rock towards a more eclectic, self-consciously literate sound.

For Lewis, however, Rilo Kiley isn't enough. All the members of that on-again, off-again band have side projects; her solo efforts have found the biggest audience.

Rabbit Fur Coat, the 2006 album she made with the vocal duo the Watson Twins, was a critical favourite and one of Billboard's Top 10 Independent Albums of 2006.

Rilo Kiley's fourth album, last year's Under the Blacklight, wasn't as well-loved as that release; since then, fans have pondered whether Lewis might leave the band for good.

“We'll see what kind of songs I'll write and that's going to guide me,'' she said recently at her home in Los Angeles.

“We don't hang out as much as we used to but it's been that way for a couple of years, Jason [Boesel, Rilo's drummer] played on my record and Pierre [de Reeder, bassist] and I did the album art together. So we're involved in each others' lives. We're family, really. And even if we don't make another record, we'll still be a family.''

Scattered or shattered kinship is a dominant theme in Lewis's songs, especially on Rabbit Fur Coat, which was partially a meditation on the broken marriage of her parents.

Family in a different way

Acid Tongue, Lewis's new solo album, forms family in a different way. There are special appearances by her sister, Leslie Lewis, and her father, Eddie Gordon, a harmonica virtuoso who spent much of Lewis's childhood touring in a group called the Harmonicats. “The act was very schticky,'' Lewis said, smiling.

Lewis had never played music with her father but the sessions for Acid Tongue provided the right atmosphere. This was due to her other family, the circle of musicians she has been cultivating for the past ten years.

“I knew I was surrounded by my friends and that they would treat him with respect, and he'd feel comfortable,'' she said.
Acid Tongue has an all-star roster — Elvis Costello, Zooey Deschanel, M. Ward, A Perfect Circle bassist Paz Lenchantin and Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes all participated — but these better-known names represent just a fraction of Lewis's crew. Other key players include Johnathan Rice, Lewis's companion and musical collaborator who co-wrote several of the new album's songs; producers Farmer Dave Scher and Jason Lader; and singer-songwriters Benji Hughes and Jonathan Wilson.

Acid Tongue abounds with genre experiments that take dangerous turns. Black Sand is a Teen Angel-style car-crash ballad, which substitutes misogynistic murder for the dead man's curves of the early 1960s. Fernando is a rockabilly romp that celebrates Mexican vacationing as a route to oblivion.

The gospel-flavoured Jack Killed Mom is about matricide. And in the title track, Lewis presents herself as a female adventurer whose ultimate prize is exhaustion.

“Everything tends to be a response to the thing that I've written before,'' Lewis said of her songwriting process. “It is even as simple as, ‘OK, I've written a ballad, now I want to push myself to write something that's uptempo.' ... I am always doing this back-and-forth to keep myself interested.''

This drive to try new approaches is a quality Lewis shares with Costello, her one-time admirer and now occasional collaborator. The alternative rock statesman proves a spirited duet partner on Carpetbaggers, a Rice composition on Acid Tongue. The session inspired Costello to make his 35th album, Momofuku, upon which Lewis and her possé appear.

“On the day we finished my record, he booked the studio for about a week and finished what would become Momofuku,'' Lewis said. “ ... He's so cool. He's a chiller, that's what we'd say in Southern California.''

Chill is a state Lewis favours these days. She kept the sessions for Acid Tongue as open as possible, inviting her friends to drop by and join in on the analogue equipment at a Los Angeles studio near where she grew up.

Each song was left more or less intact after recording — no fixing on Pro Tools.

This approach was a typical switch for the songwriter, away from the slicker Under the Blacklight and towards that more grass-roots feel.

She is still proud of Blacklight, though it divided Rilo Kiley fans. Some questioned the band's motivations in making a more commercial album. At the time, Lewis favoured wearing very short skirts or hotpants on stage; one music journalist, Kate Richardson, created a flow chart of Rilo Kiley's decline as it correlated to the rise in Lewis's hemlines.

“Part of her appeal is that she at least used to write these really good, sad, bitter songs that were kind of sharp,'' said Richardson. “She had a lot of emotion behind her. But she's also really hot. As she started owning the sexual part of her image more, I thought that was fine, good for her. But it coincidentally went along with a change in their sound.''

Back-and-forth

Lewis took it in stride. “That's what you get with a record like Under the Blacklight,'' she said. “I was wearing hot pants and singing about sexuality. Not everyone understood that we were poking fun.''

Lewis said she might be ready for a new persona. “It doesn't really have to do with that response,'' she said. “It's just my own back-and-forth with what I do. So I want to wear hot pants and then I want to wear cargo pants.''

She laughed. “Now, that would be really flattering.'' Some things, perhaps, are best left undiscovered.