Lewi's Carols

It’s 11.10 am in Los Angeles, and Jenny Lewis has been awake for precisely two hours and thirty four minutes. “I wake every morning at 8.36,” says Lewis, in the breathy whisper that has set a thousand fanboy hearts aflutter. “Even if I’m in a completely dark room, I open my eyes and look at the clock and it’s 8.36. It totally sucks.”

Lewis, of the copper hair, big almond eyes and thrift store-princess chic, is recently returned from the Democratic Party convention in Denver, where she performed at an Obama fundraiser alongside Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and actress-turned-country rock moppet Zooey Deschanel (Lewis jokingly describes her as “the good witch to my wicked witch”).
“I wanted to go and see Obama speak at the Invescofield Stadium but there was a five-hour security line. You had like 85,000 people trying to get in there.”
Surely Lewis could have parlayed her indie maven status – copperfastened since her band Rilo Kiley scored a top ten hit last year – into an invite? She smiles: “Believe me, it’s not like I didn’t try. But the sheer number of people who wanted to see him speak was phenomenal. So we did our show and watched him on TV. I was happy to be there and support him.”
Was she swept away by Obama?
“Oh, of course. After all, he’s speaking perfect sense. It’s time for a change. We need a changing of the guard. Eight years is long enough – we’ve done enough damage to the perception of the United States elsewhere. We need a new face. I just hope people get out there to vote and are brave enough to make this change.”
When not cheerleading for the Hopemonger – Lewis also headlined a fundraiser for the candidate at Brooklyn’s McCarren Pool Park – the 32-year-old has been prepping her new solo album, the follow up to 2006’s Rabbit Fur Coat. Less overtly country-tinged and extravagantly maudlin than its predecessor, Acid Tongue is a rough and tumble travelogue that draws on Lewis’ childhood in the LA exurbs, early dalliances with drugs and her ‘year of madness’ promoting Rilo Kiley’s major label smash, Under The Blacklight.
“But it’s not as if it’s all autobiographical,” she stresses. “There are songs there about going to prison and about killing people. I hope you believe me when I tell you I’ve never been to jail and I’ve never killed anyone!”
Some of the material, she says, was inspired by the “post-traumatic stress” of turning 30. “We were touring Blacklight and I was having a difficult time in my life. I felt creatively empty. I knew I had to go to the studio and make another record. I needed to do it in a totally natural way, surrounded by my friends.”
“Friends” included not only Deschanel, Gibbard and singer M. Ward but also Lewis’ boyfriend, puppyish UK songwriter Jonathan Rice, and Elvis Costello lending his horndog rumble to a frisky duet called ‘Carpetbaggers’.
“I guess we go back a bit, which is a funny thing to say about Elvis Costello,” Lewis laughs. “A friend of mine passed on a copy of Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous album to him and he dug it. Last year, I sent a YouTube video of me and Jonathan singing ‘Carpetbaggers’ while a sock-puppet mimed the chords. That was his only reference for the song before he came into the studio.”
Lewis recorded Acid Tongue over three weekends at her apartment in Silver Lake, LA’s pre-eminent yupster hangout. For the sessions she instituted a “no computer” role. Collaborators were instructed to leave their iPhone, BlackBerries and fancy laptops at the door.
“We did it straight to tape. No fancy technology was allowed in the room. No BlackBerries, no eBay purchases, no MySpace or Twitter. Just some beat up instruments and a bunch of friends.”
She needed to cut herself off from the outside world, she says, after the relentless promotional drive that accompanied Blacklight. Going out to bat for the album meant raking over the embers of her relationship with the band’s guitarist, Blake Sennett. The couple had split years previously, but keen to pitch Rilo Kiley as a hipster Fleetwood Mac, their label had played up their “doomed” romance. Frankly, it got a little old.
“I don’t censor my lyrics when I’m writing them but sometimes in retrospect, I wish I had,” she sighs. “You write something and then, six months later, you have all these journalists asking you about it.”
Though a picture of apple-pie wholesomeness, Lewis isn’t afraid to get potty-mouthed when it comes to lyrics. She believes this is a reflection of her somewhat gritty upbringing. She was born in Las Vegas, where her parents were part of a vaudeville troupe (“it featured harmonica players and a little person and it got them an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show and a meeting with the Queen of England”). When the act finished so did the marriage – her mother moved the family to the San Fernando valley, the sprawling Los Vegas suburb that also happens to be capital of the US porn industry.
“I grew up surrounded by seedy eccentrics,” Lewis notes. “I think that’s why my songs are the way they are – they’re influenced by characters I met at a very young age. On Under The Blacklight especially I think I was writing about my childhood to an extent. Not that I was exposed to anything too hardcore. I didn’t realise the porn industry was there until I was older. Growing up, as far as I was concerned, I lived next door to a second-hand car dealership. Of course there was also a sex shop across the road but that didn’t strike me as weird until I walked past it every day on the way to junior high.”
Lewis stumbled into rock and roll in her 20s, after a decade plus career as a child actress.
“Acting doesn’t really appeal to me any more,” she admits. “I guess I’m a bit of a control freak. I need to be in command of what I’m doing.”
Still, though she may have finished with cinema, it seems cinema isn’t finished with her. Widely heralded as one of the worst movies ever made, the 1988 teen drama The Wizard – in which Lewis plays tweeny girlfriend to a video game geek – has lived in a ghastly afterlife as a cult favourite (it’s huge among the LA stoner demographic).
“I haven’t seen that movie in a long time,” she laughs. “Though I do remember uttering the memorable line, ‘He touched my breasts.’ Wow – it’s like it was a completely different life.”

Acid Tongue gets a live outing in The Button Factory, Dublin on October 19.