Earlier this Spring I was introduced to Jeffrey Lewis and his “low-budget films.” Upon watching him perform the “History of Communism” with a giant illustrated comic book and sing “W.W.P.R.D.” (translating to: What Would Pussy Riot Do) – I knew I needed to learn more. As self-proclaimed in his bio, Lewis leads a double life as a comic book writer/artist and musician – and lucky for us those two lives intersect often. Lewis has been around the folk music scene since 1997 and has toured with the likes of Devendra Banhart, The Mountain Goats, The Cribs, Dr. Dog, and Kimya Dawson – just to name a few. Previously Lewis has been featured on the History Channel, the New York Times, the Guardian, NPR – and now, Allston Pudding got their turn to pick his brain while he’s on the road with Quasi.
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Jeeyoon Kim: How would you define antifolk?
Jeffrey Lewis: Anybody who was playing music at the Sidewalk Cafe in New York City in the 1990s or 2000s was automatically labeled “antifolk” no matter what kind of music you played, so the term doesn’t really mean anything other than that. But it also makes sense for me, more than for some other people, because it describes a certain attitude towards writing and recording and performing that the term “singer-songwriter” would not describe.
How do you identify with antifolk, if you do?
JL: I had never heard of antifolk before I started playing at Sidewalk in 1998, but I already would not have thought of myself as a “singer-songwriter,” I was more into music as a raw expression in words and sound, not so much the delicate craft of piecing words and melodies together. So I’m glad there’s a term that already existed that seems to be some sort of description of that, a description of songwriting that falls outside of the normal image. So that’s what “antifolk” means to me, if it means anything. I don’t mind it, because no matter what you play there will be people who come up with a genre tag for it, you can’t escape that, so at least antifolk is a more unique and mysterious tag than “indie rock” or “alt country” or “post punk” or whatever. If people want to call me antifolk I won’t fight it.
What musicians inspired you when you first started writing?
JL: Daniel Johnston was a big inspiration, he gave me the idea that you could just give yourself permission to make songs and make recordings and make albums without any need to correspond to other people’s standards of what a “real” or “professional” singer-songwriter was, or what a “real” album was. Just heart and mind, simple and powerful, nothing else matters – that was a big lesson that got me started. For learning guitar, most of my style comes from Donovan, the first few Donovan records, and also from Pearls Before Swine, the 60s Pearls Before Swine albums. Those were mostly the albums I was listening to in 1996-1998 when I was learning how to play guitar, just trying to finger pick those simple chords, those records were like instruction manuals for me. Then my inspiration to mix in a distortion pedal to my quiet acoustic finger-picking, the idea of switching between acoustic guitar and loud distorted guitar, that all came from the band Prewar Yardsale, and their guitarist Mike Rechner. When I saw him play I knew I had to get the exact same guitar pickup for my acoustic, and the exact same distortion pedal, that’s the sound that I really wanted to copy. Prewar Yardsale never got very well known but they were a huge influence on me, I still listen to the old bootleg recordings I made of them in the late 90s.
Who are you listening to now?
JL: Lots of “private press” records, which are albums that various strange, desperate people with no record label deals made in the 60s and 70s, before punk made it cool to make your own records. Obviously 95% of all the home-made records ever made are totally boring and mediocre, but there are some very special gems out there among these rare home-made albums, and I’m always excited when somebody recommends one to me. So right now I’m listening to some private press records that i recently got from my friend James (Wooden Wand) from Natalie (Weyes Blood) – they hooked me up with some private press albums I had never heard before, and some of it is great stuff, like The Red Rippers, and Leland, and a whole other big pile of material, I haven’t had a chance to hear all of it or digest it. My favorite private press records of all time are Dandelions, Virgin Insanity, The New Creation, Virgil Caine, and a few other really wonderful ones. Some of them have been reissued on CD, other ones you can only find through word-of-mouth or from blogs.
You seem to do a lot of collaborations, my two favorites being Eminem’s “Brain Damage” with Laura Marling and “The River” with Diane Cluck. What were those experiences like? What is the story behind you and Laura covering Eminem?
JL: I forget how the Laura Marling thing happened, it was at the house of Tjinder from Cornershop, he has a little recording studio in his basement in London. I was recording some songs, and I was also trying to do some recordings with various folk musicians in London so that I could post some new content every week on the Guardian website, I was doing a sort of “news” thing for them at the time, around 2008 or 2009. Laura Marling wasn’t very well known yet, or least not as much as she is now, I just invited her over and suggested that we record a cover song together, I always liked that Eminem song. I re-wrote it quite a bit, and turned it into something I thought would be cool to sing as a duo. We went over the vocals a couple times in the kitchen then walked into the studio booth and did the recording that ended up on YouTube, we had no thought at the time that it would become a YouTube clip.
The Diane Cluck thing was rather magical really, the way “The River” song was written – at that time we were writing some songs together up in Maine, I had this two-chord guitar part that I liked, and we decided to each sit separately and write lyrics for the guitar part without talking to each other about what the lyrics should be. And when we both sang our lyrics on top of the music it turned out we had both written about a river, just a total coincidence, I guess the chords sort of suggested that kind of feeling to both of us. Later we recorded this stuff with Spencer Chakedis, and self-released the recordings; he used to have a little recording studio in his place in Brooklyn, I’ve done a lot of stuff with him over the years, he plays on my recent album with Peter Stampfel too.
If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?
JL: It would be cool to work with a great producer, like Brian Eno or Rick Rubin or Dr. Dre, one of those people who can bring a lot of different ideas to an artistic collaboration.
Earlier this year I saw you open for He’s My Brother She’s My Sister, when did you start using the big comic books during your live show?
JL: It was originally just one of many gimmicks and fun things I was always trying to throw into my shows, from when I first started playing shows in 1998. I’d always try to do different stuff at each show, like recite all of the dialogue from Evil Dead 2, my favorite movie, or I had a Korean friend that I’d perform with and we’d write these sort of punk rock songs in Korean, another time I’d have tape players positioned all around the room playing recordings from our previous gigs that year so it was like a multi-dimensional representation of time – well that was the idea, it ended up just sounding like noise. Anyway, there were a lot of ideas going into the shows for the first few years, many of which were failures but that’s how experiments go. One of the more successful ideas was doing illustrated songs, I started doing that around 2000 I guess, and that idea has stuck and expanded into a sort of integral part of what my band does. The first ones that I did were pretty crude but I kept developing the idea and now I’ve gotten a lot better at it, making illustrated songs. I have something like 35 of those now.
What can we expect from your show with Quasi? How did this tour pairing come about?
JL: I had done some shows with Quasi back around 2006 or so, or maybe it was later, like 2007, I don’t remember. Joanna who used to play bass in Quasi is married to Gary Jarman who plays bass in the Cribs, a band I’ve done a lot of shows with, so I guess I initially knew Joanna through Gary, and knew Quasi through Joanna. Joanna and Janet Weiss, the drummer in Quasi, were also the bassist and drummer for Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks when I toured with them in 2008, so it’s been sort of a circle of connecting situations. It’s really cool of Quasi to take me on this US tour, currently they are back to their duo form, Sam and Janet, and they’ve been generous enough to let my band use their drums and amps on this tour so we don’t have to carry our own. For my own set as Jeffrey Lewis & The Rain, it’ll be my usual mix of lo-fi folk, sci-fi punk, and low-budget films!
Catch Jeffrey Lewis opening for Quasi at Great Scott this Wednesday, October 16th!