We were in the groove and then the world shut down.” What came next was a familiar breakthrough of mourning, as the canceled tour and subsequent quarantine forced Lewis to slow down and process grief she’d turned off while on the road: In 2017, she reunited with her estranged, ailing mother after 20 years (who passed away before On the Line came out) and saw her longtime relationship with Johnathan Rice come to an end. “Usually you tour something for two years, a year-and-a-half. “ had blue balls, to put it frankly, by the time we were cooking,” Lewis says, laughing. The album arrived to instant-and earned-critical acclaim and was her best work yet, but its cycle was cut short by COVID a year later. She chronicled everything from arguing about Elliot Smith and grenadine with a narcoleptic poet from Duluth to drinking Beaujolais wine and reminiscing about the past while kids play on a slip ‘n’ slide nearby.
It was there that Lewis embellished her own storytelling prowess to the utmost degree. On the Line felt like a real achievement in so many ways. Everything from The Execution of All Things in 2002 to On the Line in 2019 has found a niche in our hearts. At the same time, she’s also been unveiling cornerstone records. Belvedere and Growing Pains, fronting the incomparable alt-rock band Rilo Kiley or opening for Harry Styles on his Love On Tour dates in 2021, she’s continuously putting herself in the eyes of the zeitgeist. Whether it’s taking roles in classic sitcoms like The Golden Girls, Mr. Given how close to the spotlight she’s always been, and the gravitational magnitude of the music she makes, it’s easy to forget that Lewis is a rockstar immune to generational separation.
From her Los Angeles homestead, she tells me I look like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries-and I (and my ego) take her word for it, given that she spent a lot of time with him while filming Don’s Plum in the mid-nineties. It was a pretty last minute affair on a Friday afternoon, but to be on a call of any kind with her is an immeasurable rapture that 15-year-old me would be in shambles about (25-year-old me is, too, to be honest). Last month, I spent some time with Lewis via Zoom. Flash forward 19 years or so, and Lewis is again examining how she might begin pulling love through the barricades of grief-this time on Joy’All, her fifth solo album in 17 years and a kaleidoscopic pivot of the grandest proportions. There’s a simplicity and benevolence in wanting to be desired by another body here on Earth when I went through any of my many heartbreaks, there “More Adventurous” was to soften the ache. “And if I get banished from the kingdom up above / I’d sacrifice money and heaven, all for love / Let me be loved, let me be loved,” Jenny Lewis sang in the second verse of “More Adventurous,” and those lines have stuck with me. The title track, which has taken many shapes in my soul over the last 10 years, is one of immense and unshakable perfection its chaotic and doleful architecture has lent itself to my sorrow over and over again. Next year, I’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous-an album that, in no short terms, saved my life once upon a time ago.
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