Offbeat and quirky, Jeffrey Lewis knows how to bring his unique voice to life.
The album cover for New York native Jeffrey Lewis’s “The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis” is certainly one to raise eyebrows, but it’s actually more than just a naked couple walking down the street. In fact, it’s a take on the famous artwork for Bob Dylan’s second studio album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”; you see, while Suze Rotolo and Dylan are fully clothed on their cover as they walk close to Dylan’s 4th Street, New York apartment, Lewis and his female counterpart bare all as they walk the same road, in an effort not to shock so much as to make a point that, like the album title says, Lewis is “even more freewheelin’” than Dylan himself.
The light acoustic intro to ‘Do What Comes Natural’ certainly has echoes of Dylan, but once Lewis’s conversational vocals kick in, it’s less Dylan and more Daniel Johnston. “And even if I did something, it’s never just one thing / I’d have to do something else after the first something ends,” he states, showcasing an uncanny ability to voice things that while simple, feel revelationary. The whimsical ‘Movie Date’ is deceptively deep as it charts the loss of excitement in a relationship by a couple’s film watching habits: “It used to be we’d rarely get through movies / Cuz loving passions swept away our patience / Epics or shorts, we still couldn’t get through these / We’d miss the ends whatever their durations / Till with more time spent at work and less for kisses.”
Written at the suggestion of Lewis’s friend, the late David Berman – who sadly never got to see the song come to fruition – ‘DCB & ARS’ is a dark, country toned song that’s both a tale of crime and romance, with an added sprinkling of dark humour, based on the “semi-fantasized” friendship between Berman and writer Amy Rose Spiegel. “Cuz there’s a girl I met named Amy Rose, and I never said but I guess she knows / That I just wanna be her friend and do something illegal with Amy Rose Spiegel,” Lewis relays before he goes on to fantasize about the kind of crimes the pair might commit: “We’d go Bonnie & Clyde style, and we’d go crashing and burn style / Or at least I could be her lookout if she needs to jump a turnstile / We could rob banks hand in hand, then skip the Mexican border.”
The rockiest of all the tracks, ‘Sometimes Life Hits You’ is easy to imagine is a full band crowd pleaser with its heavy bassline and the infinitely chantable “ow, fuck this hurts!” in the chorus. ‘Tylenol PM’ sees Lewis confessing a reliance on certain drugs, but still, adding with classic gallows humour, “I hate endorsing brands like them / But degradation and debasement / Has got me doing product placement”. ‘Just Fun’ is a lyrically fast, lo-fi acoustic ramble that sees Lewis try to impart some useful wisdom with a characteristically sardonic edge to it, while ‘Relaxation’, with its epic guitar solo, takes on a psychedelic folk sound as he sings of his resistance to letting himself rest and become passive.
“A man from California’s land found life and love in Sweden / When his baby girl was born / Her heart was formed from both those regions / All the beauty of the north, and all the promise of the west,” begins the intriguing ‘Inger’, a coming-of-age biography of a woman condensed down into a neat song that’s under four minutes in length. A live recording made on a hand-held device, ‘100 Good Things’ may be low tech, but still Lewis’s list of all things good – like art, ice cream, friendship, world travel and space – is bright and charming. “Stupid, stupid brain, and all my stupid smarts,” he self flagellates on the final track, ‘The Endless Unknown’, giving in to feelings of disempowerment.
While their covers may share similarities, I don’t think “The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis” will be one for the history books in quite the same way as “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, but that’s not to say it’s a failure. It’s an offbeat, counterculture album that might not be for all, but for those who appreciate the genre, it’ll be another excellent addition to their collection.
