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. Speaking of which:

 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.

 While the album cover might be a native New Yorker’s neighbourhood joke, it also serves to throw down the gauntlet to modern song-smiths, as if to point out that nobody in contemporary songwriting can quite fill Jeffrey’s shoes (barefoot or not). If you thought 2019’s Bad Wiring was an unimprovable high-watermark of the Jeffrey Lewis 20-year discography, prepare to be shook all over again. The range of moods, situations, wordplay and styles here is effortlessly breathtaking, and if you aren’t transported on ten different emotional rollercoasters by the ten songs on this album then you might just be a Chat GPT replicant-bot.

 Whimsically existential opener “Do What Comes Natural” has been a favourite in Jeffrey’s live sets for a few years, and rarely fails to make people rush the merch table asking “which album is that song on?!” Well, here it finally is. In classic Jeffrey Lewis style, the hypnotic folksy finger-picking, accompanied by a thrift-store Casio Sk-1 portamento riff, might trick a casual listener into letting down their guard, but by the time Jeffrey’s rhetorical booby-trap snaps shut the listener’s life just might have been changed forever.

 “Movie Date” follows, in which some sparse acoustic guitar sets the atmosphere to a universally recognizable relationship situation: “Does Bill Murray’s day repeat forever? Does Humphrey Bogart ever find the gold? / Will Annie Hall and Woody stay together? I learn all these things myself while you’re out cold.”  The year’s sweetest love-song lullaby, and a domestically pitch-perfect tragicomic sketch all in one.

 The dark-hued country garage of “DCB & ARS” is the result of a suggestion made to Jeffrey from the late David (Silver Jews) Berman (Berman’s email to Jeffrey which prompted this song is included in the album’s insert). Berman had been quoted saying “Jeffrey is the best pure songwriter I know of,” but we’ll never know what Berman would have thought of how Jeffrey fulfilled this particular crime-romance song assignment, apparently based on the semi-fantasized friendship between Berman and the writer Amy Rose Spiegel. Amazingly, a few years previously, the real-life Amy Rose had attended one of the comic book drawing nights that Jeffrey hosts, but this coincidence wasn’t realized till later. Mallory Feuer’s minor-key violin and Mem Pahl’s spaghetti-western backing harmonies darken the texture.

 A squall of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage amp feedback kicks down the door to the full band stomper “Sometimes Life Hits You,” which comes across like AC/DC snorting too much Dostoevsky. A live killer on the band’s post-pandemic tours, this one has had whole audiences spontaneously screaming along to the “Fuck, That Hurt!” choruses despite having never heard the song before. This would be the obvious choice for a lead-off radio single if it wasn’t so long and curse-filled.

 The suicidal alphawave-machine of “Tylenol PM” marries some of Jeffrey’s best laugh-to-keep-from-crying lyrics with some of Jeffrey’s best bluesy finger-pickings. Still turning down all commercial ad-money that gets offered his way, this song’s name-dropping of corporate sleep-aid products does not go unnoticed by its author, as addressed in the coup de grâce: “Sweet blue Tylenol PM / I hate endorsing brands like them / But see / depression and debasement / has got me / doing product placement.”

 The click of a voice-memo recorder begins the lo-fi solo acoustic “Just Fun.” 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.

 Back in the Nashville recording studio, “Relaxation” kicks out some serious bad-acid folk-rock exposure therapy, like if your Nuggets records were melted by so much burning self-doubt they spilled down the shelf onto your Slick Rick CDs. Eventually the word games fall aside for a climactic guitar-pedal workout, with bassist Mem Pahl’s jazz-punk phrasings balancing Jeffrey’s slicing slide guitar, as the band launches off into interstellar underdrive.

 “Inger” is a young woman’s coming-of-age novel in miniature, set against a randomized acoustic guitar loop and twisting bass melodies. Has any artist recorded a more moving biography in all of modern rock, indie or otherwise? 

 The live “100 Good Things,” from a hand-held recording device in the back of a UK rock dive, has Jeffrey on guitar and Mallory on violin trying valiantly to apply the power of positive thinking. And maybe even succeeding? Among a charming inventory of not-so-bad stuff, including friends, outer space, ice cream, and of course records, Jeffrey admits that “…my perspective needs a radical twist / I know there’s reasons I should exist / My life is good, I just have to insist / ‘Cuz there’s so many good things on my list / And there’s probably more that I’ve missed!”

 “The Endless Unknown” finishes the set, sounding like the cast-off child of Daniel Johnston and Magic & Loss era Lou Reed (an album that producer Roger Moutenot also worked on). After an album’s worth of trying to wrestle life’s ineffabilities into beautiful straightjackets of song and language, Lewis finally folds: “Stupid, stupid brain, and all its dumb smart thoughts; / the broken heart in the sky can chew to bits infinite astronauts,” while meanwhile “the hand still holds one card that’s unshown / which is all that’s unknown.” 

 Jeffrey Lewis may forever be “a complete unknown” to the world at large, but those who know, know. And after hearing this all-killer no-filler album, they will know it EVEN MORE.