An Interview with Jeffrey Lewis, August 2023

you’ve been in the music scene for quite some time, what are some of

the biggest changes you’ve noticed throughout the years? How have

crowds, record labels, the internet, your own work, YOU, etc. changed

since you started?

Yeah, the current culture of streaming is very different from the ways of music

listening and interaction that it was previously, and I’m sure it’ll keep changing.

It all has positive and negative aspects, and my brain keeps shifting, my skills

keep shifting, the world keeps shifting, but the creative challenge of the next

blank page remains.

You and your brother have been in numerous bands together and played

together as a duo act countless times. How did that come to be? What is it like

sharing a personal creative journey like a band with a sibling?

Jack and I always shared a bedroom, growing up in small NYC apartments,

and when I started making up songs when I was about 22, and he was about

17 starting to play bass and make up some of his own songs, it was just

natural for us to develop the musical project together. And all the adventures

of touring together, lots of adventures, lots of squabbles, sibling stuff. It did get

difficult to keep the creative dynamic in the right balance, it was a hard

balance between his way of thinking about things and my way, when the

alchemy was right then it was really great and exciting, but there were a lot of

disagreements about how things should go, especially as we got into different

directions of what music we were into. We started out both being equally

enthralled with Daniel Johnston, the Violent Femmes, Camper Van

Beethoven, Yo La Tengo, Lou Reed and other stuff, but over time Jack was

getting more into sort of indie synth pop stuff like the Unicorns or other stuff I

wasn’t very interested in and I was getting more into 60s garage and 70s

songwriter stuff that Jack wasn’t very interested in, and it got harder to agree

on how things should go. But I still often rely on Jack to give me some musical

ideas, if I have a new song, the way he plays bass and the way he thinks

about songs is so idiosyncratic and well-attuned to a fundamental way that I

think about these things, if we play some music together he will instantly come

up with some ideas that seem right to me. So then I’ll go back to my own

current band and tell them “this is how this new song should go,” based on

some of the stuff Jack came up with.

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 Being under Rough Trade Records, you’re pretty established in Europe. Tell me your experience with that! How does your audience differ from your crowd in america?

I got a good head-start in UK/Europe with the 2001 Rough Trade release and

distribution, at that time Rough Trade had no American offices at all and they

were partnered with Sanctuary Records who had a strong presence in

Europe, in Germany in particular, it seemed to me. But when Rough Trade

broke off from Sanctuary, around 2008, that was the end of that stuff, I was

back to being very DIY in Europe, in the sense that I was no longer getting

invited on to radio shows and “official” music business things like that, but I

never stopped doing all the work to book tours and continue to play in all

those countries. Meanwhile, I had been operating totally DIY in the USA on a

very underground level, which has taken many years to build up to being a bit

more established, just booking my own USA tours over and over, but, you

know, it’s like I never would see my albums in record stores, not like in the UK

where I would be considered a bit more “official,” like, I’d be reviewed in

magazines and invited to play festivals. So I’ve seen a number of different

angles of how the infrastructures of the music business can give you a

different level of opportunity, but I’ve never stopped doing all the DIY stuff

also. The American audiences are a bit more “underground” because it’s

probably mostly word of mouth, rather than reading an album review in a

magazine or hearing a song on the BBC, while in the UK I’ve had some more

of that kind of “official” exposure. But none of that matters if I’m not able to

create some art or music that feels like I’m really striking at something that

feels exciting or important to me, that art of the transformative creative

experience, everything follows on from that, audiences and listeners will

happen wherever I am and whatever circumstances I’m in, as long as the

artistic flame is maintained.

If you could give one piece of advice to newer musicians/bands trying to get

out there, what would it be / Do you have any advice for artists struggling with

motivation & mindset?

My perspective is that the most important thing is to do it, rather than stopping

yourself because it’s not being done at a high enough level. I mean, I write a

lot of songs that are not very inspiring to me, and I play a lot of gigs that are

not very proud moments, and I have to deal with a lot of humiliation and

constantly humbling experiences. Fail, fail, fail, it’s like I had so little

self-esteem in the first place that all these failures, the artistic and professional

failures, just seemed like a normal thing, it hasn’t stopped me from putting one

foot in front of the other and continuing on. Write another song, start booking

another tour, play another show, do another project, just keep going, and

some of it will work out pretty good, even if some of it also doesn’t.

You’ve toured with countless bands all across the world, what does that

process look like? (a band has reached out to you or vice versa for a tour and

you/they agree. Then what?)

Those support tour situations are such a gift, it’s always very exciting to have

that opportunity. Usually it’s just something like getting an unexpected email

message, somebody asking me if me or my band might be available to do a

support gig or support tour, at a certain time, in a certain area. Usually for very

small money, but I always feel pretty confident I can make it work, I can be

very resourceful about doing things on the cheap. Sleeping at people’s

houses and traveling in a small car and making and selling my own

merchandise and things like that. The opportunity to play in front of big

audiences is too exciting to pass up, and it’s one of my favorite things, to play

for a whole room of people who have never heard me before, I love surprising

people.

What are some of your personal highlights of playing/working in the

New York anti-folk scene in the 90’s?

I started playing the open mic nights in 1998, and then I started getting offered

little gigs, that was all my introduction to playing shows and making up song

and starting to do tape recordings and meeting other songwriters and

performers. It was totally inspirational and influential on me to be exposed to

all these different people who were doing things in different ways, and then

there was also the element of keeping the standards high, somebody like

Grey Revel or Dufus or Kimya Dawson or Phoebe Kreutz would do some

incredible little gig, or release an album that greatly impressed me, or would

write a new song that was so powerful, it forced you to keep yourself to a

constantly high artistic standard, you had this feeling of not wanting to let

down the team or something.

When writing (whether it be songs or comics) is it a singular

session/stream of consciousness or do they form themselves over

time? What have been some of your biggest influences when

song/comic writing?

Some songs or ideas come out quickly into a finished form, but in the past ten

years I’ve gotten much more into the idea of editing and improving things,

which I think has resulted in some of my best songs, things like “Sad

Screaming Old Man” or “Exactly What Nobody Wanted” or “Back to

Manhattan” or “LPs,” or some of the stuff on my new album that hasn’t come

out yet, they are approached a bit more like novels, they get a lot of writing

process and careful attention from me, to make sure I’m saying what I want to

say, in the way that I want to say it. In my earlier years it was more like total

luck, just letting songs fall out of me and randomly hoping they were good

ones, almost no writing or revision. Comic books always take more work, a lot

of process and steps. My influences in songwriting haven’t changed a lot

since the early years, it’s what you’d expect mostly, Daniel Johnston, Lou

Reed, Donovan, the Fall, Pearls Before Swine, Jonathan Richman, Yo La

Tengo, Bob Dylan, 60s garage rock and psychedelic stuff. My comic book

influences are still the usual list of greats, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Joe

Matt, Joe Sacco, Rick Veitch, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Hernandez Bros,

Gabrielle Bell, Crumb, Kirby, Michael Kupperman. Actually I would say that

some comic book stuff like Joe Matt has had a big influence on my

songwriting.

What does your community look like then vs now? From playing with

friends at small open mics in New York and Austin to world tours and

sold out shows, how do the people surrounding you differ from then and now?

It’s a lot of the same people, or if there have been new folks in my social orbit

then it’s been similarly inspiring folks. I still try to go to an open mic once a

week in NYC, I try to write a new song once a week to try out at an open mic.

A lot of my old open mic friends have moved out of NYC over the years,

people I used to do a lot of gigs with, or tours with, people I would get a lot of

inspiration from, like Major Matt Mason, Dufus, Diane Cluck, Grey Revell,

Kimya Dawson, Whip, Turner Cody, Langhorne Slim, these people and many

others, have all moved away from New York so I don’t get to see or hear them

in my regular weekly life, their presence and creativity is not a constant weekly

inspiration as it had been for times in the past, but then there have been other

people that have entered my life’s orbit who have created a new level of

inspiration and a bit of friendly creative competition and pressure, like

Gabrielle Bell and Emily Frembgen and Phoebe Kreutz and David Heatley,

Tony Green, and others, for comic books or for songs, people I can hang out

with and be so impressed by the work they’re doing and the work ethic they

stick with. To keep working and striving, to try to get better. There’s never a

chance to relax and rest on your old works, there’s always somebody making

such great stuff, it makes me feel like a total slacker, makes me realize how

much I need to reapply myself and try harder, try better, stay focused.

You’ve made TONS of stuff! Your comics and songs are scattered all

across the internet and throughout the world, how do you store all of

your songs/comics? Do you keep an archive or love them & let them go

into the great unknown?

I have almost all my songs recorded and kept on my laptop, whenever I write

a new song I try to quickly immediately record it, just as a voice memo or

something like that, any way that I can hit one button to record myself just

playing and singing it through, like a performance at an open mic, here’s the

new song I just wrote. So I have a big pile of all of these recordings, and I’ve

started releasing them in annual “tape” compilations on my Bandcamp page,

so there’s my 2019 tape, my 2020 tape, one for each recent year, that I’ve

been putting on my Bandcamp page. A lot of times I’ll start out by writing the

lyrics in a notebook, but then I always have to type the lyrics into my laptop for

better preservation, and I try to type in the date it was written, so I keep track.

And then I keep them in digital folders on my laptop, organized by year. So in

my Text program I have a folder for 2014 Songs, and 2015 Songs, and 2016

Songs, and so on. And in each of these digital folders are all the lyric sheets

for all the songs I wrote in that year, some years I only wrote about a dozen

songs, other years might be two dozen or three dozen songs. But there’s only

a small fraction of that material that makes it into my live gigs and my official

albums that I record with my band. If I make up ten songs, there’s maybe only

one or two that I feel are interesting enough to put into public. For illustration

stuff, I do keep a fairly meticulous collection of all my sketchbooks, I always

use the same kind of sketchbook, so I keep them all on a certain shelf, in

order. The comic books are all drawn on larger individual sheets of 11x17

paper, I have all those large comic pages kept in giant padded envelopes,

divided into 5-year categories. So there’s a big envelope labeled 1995-2000,

and then 2000-2005, and 2005-2010, etc, and inside each one is a few dozen

of these big comic book pages. I wish it was more, but comic books take a lot

of time, and I don’t have time to do more than a couple dozen pages a year at

most, in most years, it seems. Then there’s the giant full-color illustrated

songs on giant pads of paper, the things I perform in my gigs, “The History of

Communism in Vietnam” and “The Creeping Brain” and all of those, I have

dozens of those, and they live in large envelopes also, like the comic pages,

or in big plastic shopping bags, and all in stacks in dressers and in closets,

like the big comic pages. Not very well organized though. I need to go through

and organize them by year.

Any big plans for the future? What does your creative future look like as

of now?

A couple months ago I finished my new comic book issue, Statics #2, but the

current process of printing and distributing requires it not to be released for a

while, maybe an 8 month gap between finishing the work and finally being

able to make it available to sell in public, that’s a frustrating gap for me, when I

finish a project I’m excited to show it to people immediately, all this waiting is

annoying. I should start on the next issue. I have a new album with my

current bandmates, we did the recordings in January 2023 but also it’s the

sort of thing where the process of figuring out how and where and why and

when to release it ends up delaying things by months or years, plus I need to

do all the album art and design and other things to think about, so it will all

take a little while. I’ve been pretty busy booking tour stuff as usual, back to the

pre-pandemic lifestyle where I’m usually either on a little 2 or 3 week tour or

I’m spending the months between tours working on booking and organizing

the future tours. I haven’t made a new illustrated song since 2021, so I should

get to work on making a new one soon. And trying to write new songs each

week, to have something new to play every time I go to the Monday open mic.

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