Jeffrey Lewis - The EVEN MORE Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis

The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis was recorded in just four days in Nashville, by Roger Moutenot (long-time producer of Yo La Tengo, and the previous Jeffrey Lewis album Bad Wiring), and features the Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage touring band of Brent Cole on drums, Mem Pahl on bass and Mallory Feuer on violin and keyboard. Jeffrey’s style of “anti-singing” continues to reach for the humanity behind the artifice, mirroring the nudity of the album cover. 

One snowy February day in 1963, Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo were photographed in New York City for the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan LP, around the corner from Dylan’s 4th Street apartment. 60 years later, lifelong 4th St resident Jeffrey Lewis had the idea to try to take the same chilly photo but with no pants on, to prove himself “even more” freewheelin’ than Bob! This plan was foiled by global warming, as New York City winters no longer offer snowy street photo ops, but at least Jeffrey tried.

Since his debut album in 2001 (The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane) Jeffrey Lewis has consistently staked out a claim on the optimistically pessimistic, or pessimistically optimistic. Here Lewis’s ship-in-a-bottle lyric constructions may pass right by most listeners’ ears without them realizing quite why these songs tickle the soul so uniquely, but these two minutes and nineteen seconds might have more rhymes than most songwriters’ whole albums. There’s rapid-fire syllabic craftiness in the double “…Old now/ told how…” to the triple “…too grown-up to fume/ …thrown the phone across the room” to the five-rhymes-for-the-price-of-one: “first see your glowing promise as an actor or a painter / then be honest you’re a hack who knows their glow is getting fainter.”  It’s not just the form of a song, it’s the content that wins hearts and minds, but Jeffrey usually nails both; even when recorded at the kitchen sink.