Interview: Jeffery Lewis
We were lucky enough to get an interview with NY folk-rocker and comic book artist 'Jeffrey Lewis' in the Brudenel Social Club, prior to his gig with new band 'The Bundles' featuring Kimya Dawson, Anders Griffen and his brother Jack Lewis last Saturday
The gig itself was a bouncy teenage riot full of self proclaimed rock-academics, hipsters and everything in between, and the show has helped reinstate my faith in fuzzy guitars and simple melodies; with Jeffrey moving away from his quirky acoustic story telling to a full-on 3 piece guitar driven lo-fi punk band, in the mold of 'Beat Happening' or 'Young Marble Giants'. Unfortunately due to the Volcanic Ash Kimya Dawson was unable to be there, but jeff managed to sing (and remember!) Kimya's lyrics and the three of them powered through the new bundles record, before demi-closing with new-fan favorite sing-a-log 'A Common Chorus'. They finally closed with 'Springtime', an earlier song of his Rough Trade debut 'The Last Time I did Acid I went Insane' - which prompted the mixed-bag of a crowd to break into a frenzy. And this is what the man had to say..
Us: You’ve collaborated with Kimya Dawson in the past, how did this collaboration come about?
Jeffrey: This goes back to 2001 - Kimya was visiting me for about a week, she was sleeping on my floor and over the week we made up some songs, and recorded them. We’ve been on tour together a few times over the years, and some times additional songs will get made up on tour. We only had basic demos and home recordings of the stuff, some songs didn’t get recorded at all and we always had in the back of our minds that it would be nice to get proper recordings of the stuff and last year it turned out there were a couple of days available to record at K records Studio and Olympia Washington, so we got together with my brother jack and our drummer Aunders and just kinda put the whole thing together
Us: The lyric “I just want to sing with my friends’ comes to mind...
Jeffrey: That was a line from Kimyas lyric – she was friends with this choir of kids in Olympia, so we brought this whole choir of teenagers in to sing that part, so there’s like 40 or 50 kids in the studio singing ‘i just wanna sing with my friends’ –because that’s kind of the ethos of the Olympia free choir; they all get together and sing, y’know its like 50 people in a room just singing indie rock songs together, or any kinda material –it just sounds amazing a room full of people singing, or vocalizing.
Us: First love music or comics?
Jeffrey: Aaaah, well defiantly comic books, I’ve been doing them all my life. Music is wonderful for being able to travel, and its so much more social than comic books because your not just sitting alone in a room. But the other aspect of making comics is that, your only doing them when you sitting alone making them, any time involved in comics is the creative time actually making it. Whereas in music there’s all these hours in the car, setting up a show, doing interviews (laughs) 20 hours out of the day where you not actually sat there with a pen and paper in your hand making something new! Even in the performance aspect of music you’re not bringing anything new into the world. Whereas making comics I’m creating something every time I’m working on it, when its done I have something I can keep it in print forever and that’s one thing that’s something that’s really special to me about making comics
Us: We love the documentary videos, are you still doing them?
Jeffrey: Well, I’ve been doing some… I guess around the time I was wring those pieces it was around was 2005, and I wrote a history of K Records and a history of Rough Trade Records and I felt like I was doing all these histories of musical things -and it dawned on me that I could do histories of anything, so I lately have been doing more general historical topics; The Fall of the Roman Empire, Communism in China and Russia. Its funny when you have an idea to do something, you don’t even realize how big an idea you had, like the idea of doing histories of record
Labels, then I thought hey I could do histories of anything.
Us: Is a part of you trying to perhaps educate people?
Jeffrey: Yeah and myself, its not as though I know everything about these topic before I start researching them, its kind of like giving myself a school project, assigning myself a book report. Its like ‘today i would like to learn about this’, and then when I’m done learning I’ll present it to the class, I learned a lot from doing it.
Us: If you could be any comic book character, who would you be?
Jeffrey: Aaah I guess someone with lots of powers, -I guess they’ve all got there issues, no pun intended (laugs), yeah, somebody who can fly or punch people, there’s enough of those to go around!
Us: ‘But even you must want to quit if you hear a record by Bob Dylan or Neil Young or whatever, you must start thinking ‘People like me, but I wont be that good ever’’
Is that a part of the song, or is that how you felt at the time?
Jeffery: You have to imagine if only I could be as good as smog then I wouldn’t feel insecure, but I’m sure if you were Leonard Cohen you would think ‘if only I was as good as TS Elliot’. I think everybody’s artistically insecure because there’s always a bigger fish. There’s always people who are worse and better than you, know matter where you are in the spectrum.
Us: Rough Trade’s relaxed approach and DIY ethos seems to go hand in hand with the sound and appearance of your music, how did this partnership come about?
Jeffrey: I think it’s quite odd that I’m on rough trade in this day and age, because its seems as though there’s very few acts on Rough Trade now that I feel could have been in the earlier batch -and everything else seems so much more mature, I suppose. I don’t actually have a contract with Rough trade that makes them committed to putting out my albums. essentially I’ll put an album together and ask them if they want to put it out and they keep saying yeas, I can imagine that one day they will say no. Why they keep saying yes I don’t know? I can’t imagine I sell as many records compared to Duffy. (‘maybe you do they just don’t tell you!’ shouts Jack, Jeffrey’s brother and bassist) I guess they like to keep me around for some reason, and that’s good for me.
Us: You liken yourself to the earlier batch of Rough Trade artists, who are you thinking in particular?
Jeffrey: Well… they put out Television Personalities, Jonathan Richmond, Campervan Beethoven, The Fall, and lots of other bands that would be in the same general section of the record store, as my record. You would have another section with, well whats on rough trade rosta now?
Us: Johnny Flinn, Maccachu, Jarvis Cocker, Babyshambles…
Jeffrey: Yeah, The Libertines, The Strokes, but even that is quite a bit less messy than the older 80s stuff they were outing out
Jack (shouts across the room): What’s the messiest band rough trade have put out?
Jeffrey: What the new Rough Trade or the old Rough Trade?
Jack : The new rough trade.
Jeffery: Well it would have to be us, I guess. I don’t think there’s an album worse than ours.
US: In the song ‘don’t let the record label take you out to lunch’, are you referring to your own experiences?
Jeffrey: Yeah I was amazed at the way the industry worked, it seemed like the first time we went on tour there was a van there, a driver, drum kits, amplifiers, hotel rooms, a tour manager…, well that’s very nice, I wasn’t expecting that. Then at the end of the tour you get a bill for the van, tour manager, and this and hat, oh so basically you were selling this stuff but you didn’t ask if we wanted to buy it, as though it was a free gift. You could say do you want to rent this van for 3 hundred pounds a day, and then I could think about it and say yes or no. I prefer to operate on my own. I had to really fight there was a strange battle, they didn’t want to book shows, why don’t you just set up the shows. Ill take care of everything else, I’ll get myself there, we’ll figure out where to sleep, and they would say ‘Well we don’t want to be responsible unless we can guarantee that you’ll be there on time an you’ll be well rested’. I think that maybe necessary for some artists but we know how to drive and we can stay at peoples house, especially in the early days when we were making very little money at the shows. We needed that money to pay the rent, more than we need to pay for a tour manager to say ‘you need to be on stage at 7’, I know I need to be on stage at 7, why do I need to pay someone $200 to tell me that. So they wouldn’t book shows so I said I guess I’ll do that to So, starting in 2007 I just started doing everything myself. Rough trade pushed the albums out and that’s it. We’ve just done just emailing people and organizing things our selves.
Us: Opinions on the term ‘anti-folk’?
Jeffrey: Well I’m not opposed to it, I think if it means anything it means the music I make. I never heard it when I started making music. Now that I make the music I make and people call it anti-folk I don’t hear anything else, which I think, deserves the description. It’s like anti-folk is Jeffrey Lewis, this person and this person, and I hear all their music and I think what, well I don’t understand, if that is what anti-folk is than I don’t fit into it, then if what I make is antifolk… I wouldn’t have come up with the name myself! I would have said we were an indie rock band or whatever, we just wanted to be a band like the Violent Fems, or The Modern Lovers or The Velvet Underground. People say that were an anti-folk band, so I guess that’s what we are. But its funny to think of it as a whole movement because I think I’m the only person doing it, there are a few others..
Us: The moldy peaches, perhaps?
Jeffrey: Yeah
Us: I think its fair to say that your sound combine elements of Punk and more acoustic-based music’, how well do you think the term Punk can be applied to music on acoustic guitars?
Jeffrey: Well I think that there’s something that’s similar about folk music, punk music, and comic books, in fact, they all sort of go together in a way that Opera and Film and Ballet and TV do, all those things require a certain of amount of production, -architectures to keep something that grand in place. Folk and punk and comic books are all forms of entertainment that are easily accessed, at least attempted and they attract the same kinds of people, whether that’s good or bad I don’t know. Its just as easy to start a folk thing as it is to start a punk band as it is to draw a comic strip on a piece of paper, the same cant be said for y’know television. Well that’s my own preferences an maybe its easier for someone else to, y’know put on an opera.
Unfortunately Kimya Dawson, ex Moldy Peach, was unable to get to the concert due to the volcanic ash, so there was some pre gig tension causing Jeffrey to be called away from the interview early, but the threesome gave a great show, even without Kimya.
Download: The Bundles – A Common Chorus
Download : The Bundles - Pirates Declare War
cheers dude... he didn't exactly make it hard for us!
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