Recordings
Lewis’ ‘On the Line’ features lush songs and chilling lyrics
Like Jenny Lewis’ three previous solo albums, “On the Line” (Warner) embraces a different era of music-making. It evokes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and the lush studio production of Laurel Canyon folk-rock and Fleetwood Mac “Rumours”-style commercialism.
The singer-songwriter surrounds herself with musicians steeped in that aesthetic, including drummer Jim Keltner and keyboardist Benmont Tench (plus some guy named Ringo Starr). The production, by Ryan Adams (recently at the center of multiple allegations of sexual abuse, revealed long after his work on the album was completed) and Beck, indulges the gloss and gleam, which can’t entirely camouflage the emotional bruises below the surface.
Loneliness, heartache and regret are mixed with more than a pinch of decadence in these songs. The boozy, druggy indulgences match the haziness of the best songs, the self-medication of a generation of Los Angeles kids raised on broken families and bittersweet relationships. Lewis knows that story because she lived it, a child actor who became the family breadwinner while coping with a drug-addict mother and an absent father.
Music became her lifeline, and her blend of literate melancholy and sun-kissed classic rock/folk/pop draws on her California predecessors, some of whom showed up in her late mother’s record collection — Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Crosby Stills & Nash. She’s not often thought of as an influence in her own right, but that’s just dead wrong. A new legion of justly celebrated singers and songwriters — Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price, Maren Morris, Johanna and Klara Soderberg of First Aid Kit, Courtney Marie Andrews — sound like kindred spirits.
Like those artists, Lewis places a premium on melody and emotional transparency. That’s been true to varying degrees with her band Rilo Kiley and especially with her solo recordings, beginning with the brilliant “Rabbit Fur Coat” in 2006.
“On the Line” works best when those seemingly contradictory impulses converge. “Heads Will Roll” pulls sharply focused images out of the haze: “took a little trip up north in a borrowed convertible red Porsche with a narcoleptic poet from Duluth.” “Wasted Youth” is another one of those live-and-learn songs that are a Lewis specialty. At the pivot point of 43, she can only move forward by interrogating herself about the past and the lessons learned.
By the time Lewis rolls into the final verse of “Hollywood Lawn,” she sounds exhausted, wistful. “Keep dreaming, keep dreaming, all right?” It’s a question more than a wish, as the narrator aims to reverse her slow-motion unraveling, echoed in the acid-dream “Do Si Do.”
Los Angeles wouldn’t be what it is without a little glitter, the half-smile through the breakdown. It’s telling that the tender mourning of “Little White Dove,” about the death of Lewis’ mother, drifts past in a tepid funk arrangement, as if to erase the grit, the unvarnished vulnerability. But it can’t, not entirely. “Petty crimes are the family jewels,” Lewis sings, a pretty voice telling a chilling story.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
