Album Review: Jeffrey Lewis, The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis

In February 1963, CBS staff photographer Don Hunstein snapped Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo walking just off 4th St. in the West Village, New York City. The photograph became the front cover of the iconic album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Sixty years later, Lewis replicated the photograph with old friend Chrissy Howland, sans snow (turns out it rarely snows in NYC anymore) and sans clothes (!) for the sleeve of his new record, The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis.

As its title suggests, this record contains much puckish brilliance from Lewis, a lifelong 4th St resident. Opener ‘Do What Comes Natural’ is a superb slacker anthem – its sincere protagonist reciting a long list of stuff he wouldn’t bother to do, if he took the advice of being oneself.

‘Movie Date’ is a delightful lullaby about the universal, tragicomic trope of the dozing, TV-watching partner. Country garage romp ‘DCB & ARS’, meanwhile, is a marvellous fantasy about the friendship between the late great David Berman of Silver Jews and writer Amy Rose Spiegel, which contains some walloping wordplay.

If Jeffrey ever makes it to these shores, it will be a delight to hear people hollering out “Ow, fuck that hurt!”, the wonderfully addictive chorus of ‘Sometimes Life Hits You’.

The album wraps with the glorious ‘The Endless Unknown’, which the press release describes as “sounding like the cast-off child of Daniel Johnston and Magic & Loss-era Lou Reed” – a description I can’t better.

• Out now