I'm not a psycho, I'm just tryna get laid
In praise of Jenny Lewis
I didn't come to Jenny Lewis via Rilo Kiley, I came to her through her debut (kind of) solo album, released under the name Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat. It was probably my most listened to album in 2006. Maybe 2007 too. I recently tried to watch and enjoy the TV adaptation of Daisy Jones and the Six, and while Daisy is modelled on Stevie Nicks, she also felt modelled on Jenny, a red head who everyone in the band comes to accept is the natural lead. The male singer, his strained charisma, edged out. The TV show didn’t work for me, but it made me think about how nearly every boy/girl band left me frustrated I had to hear the boy’s lead songs when I only really wanted to hear the girl’s. Slow Club. Rilo Kiley. Low. Fleetwood Mac. Jenny and Johnny, Jenny’s outfit with an ex.
Jenny is two years older than me. We’re basically at the same stage of life. In 2019, when I was flat hunting, planning to buy for the first time, I listened to her album On The Line non-stop. I drove around South London in endless loops and squiggles: Catford, Penge, Annerley, Sydenham, Peckham, East Dulwich, Streatham. When I listen to it now, I’m in my car, its hot and I’m anxious, wondering if it simply can’t work out, wondering if all the places in my budget will have the same desperate smell to them. Damp and paltry natural light.
On The Line is an album of two halves. It builds to a sequence of beautiful break-up songs but opens with a swaggering permissiveness. Jenny invites us: ‘a little bit of hooking up, is good for the soul’, to get wired on ‘Red Bull and Hennesey’, to lie on a ‘Hollywood Lawn’ and sip ‘back some Beaujolais’, turn up the radio until it rattles. She’s a woman letting herself give in to the impulses of pleasure, of drink and drugs and music. And then she takes a turn, just Jenny and the piano, drawing us into an intimacy. With her band swinging in behind her, she sings of a relationship failing, of coming to understand love’s limits, coming to see how she isn’t the muse her partner sold her to be, that her partner’s muse was his own precious self. She ends the song with her piano, alone.
There was something powerful for me in hearing Jenny sing on that album about sending nudes, in the song ‘Taffy’. During lockdown, in some of my most unhinged hours, deep into my counting of days since I last touched someone, into the 60s or 70s of, I remember googling the lyrics to it and recording myself singing alone to it. For whom I don’t know. Maybe to play back to myself to hear how fully I embodied the frustrated grief of that song. She sang, ‘Nudie pics, I do not regret it / I knew that you were gone / I did so freely and wanted you to see me / Off that throne you put me on.’ Her need to be a desirable subject, to be sexy in the aftermath of loss. It was a feeling I felt so dislocated from but also the fact Jenny and I were the same sort of age made me feel entitled to that desire. To show myself as others did not see me.
Jenny’s released a couple of songs from her new album Joy You’all recently. One is ‘Puppy and a Truck’. Contemporary music, written and recorded by a woman, that discloses in its first lyric that ‘my 40s are kicking my ass and handing it to me in a margarita glass’ feels subversive to me. Then when she comes in with a bridge singing ‘I don’t got no kids, I don’t got no kids’ and goes on to praise the pleasure and joy and love of having a puppy and a truck instead I feel positively euphoric. And then there’s what moved me to write this, her latest single, ‘Psycho’, where she sings ‘I’m not a psycho, I’m just tryna get laid’. A reclamation of the crazy, psychotic woman clinging to an unavailable man. I hope Jenny gets laid whenever she damn well pleases. Me too.