Artist of the Week: Jeffrey Lewis

Photo by Allison Wonderland

Hometown: New York City
Album: 'Em Are I
For Fans Of: The Moldy Peaches, The Fugs, Daniel Johnston

Jeffrey Lewis' catalog of witty, studious anti-folk includes the songs “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror,” “The History of Punk on the Lower East Side” and a series called “The History of Communism,” but his first love wasn't music or history—it was comics. As a child, he treasured them; as a student at the State University of New York at Purchase, he wrote his senior thesis on Alan Moore's Watchmen; after college, he illustrated a series of travel journals and, more recently, released the seventh edition of his comic series Fuff. But these days, in an inversion of the aspiring-artist-slogging-away-at-Starbucks norm, it's music that pays his bills. 

“Ridiculous as it sounds, all I ever wanted to do was my comic books,” he says. "It's just that, financially, there's so little money in comics compared to music... It's definitely sort of weird that, to me, music is kind of my day job and comics are my art that I'm hoping is gonna take off.”

From the sparse acoustics of Lewis' earliest tunes (which he recorded on cassette tapes and packaged with his comic books) to the full-band shenanigans of his new album, 'Em Are I (his fifth for Rough Trade, out now), his wryly contemplative, big-hearted lyrics (“Going bald is the most manly thing that I'm ever gonna do / I tell the earth, 'Thanks for the hair, thanks for the skin, thanks for the bone / Though I now slowly give it back, I still appreciate the loan,'” he sings on the new LP) have been the primary culprit in diverting his attention from comic art.

In 1997, he was living and drawing on the Lower East Side of New York City, where he was born and raised—and where, unbeknownst to him, New York's anti-folk scene was in the midst of a simmering revival. By accident, Lewis stumbled into an open mic night at Sidewalk Cafe, the club that launched artists like Beck, Regina Spektor and The Moldy Peaches, which happened to be right around the corner from his parents' apartment. “I didn't know anybody there," he says. "It was just a free place to go see music and play music on Monday nights. I would just go any time I had nothing else to do.” Soon after, he started doing art for Anti-Matters, the scene's fanzine—but his music caught on, too. He didn't get as big as some of his friends (you probably won't be hearing his music in a cruise line commercial anytime soon), but for the last ten years he's kept busy playing in the U.S. and Europe, making albums and drawing—when he can, at least.

Lewis used to block off a few months each year to devote to comics full-time, but lately music has taken precedence. Last summer, he and his band (his brother Jack, drummer Dave Beauchamp and a rotating cast of friends currently known as The Junkyard) were invited to open a string of shows for Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. “That was just, you know—I couldn't really turn that down,” Lewis says, still a bit flummoxed. “It was too much of dream come true.” And this summer, the band will tour the East Coast in June and play some European festivals in July to support 'Em Are I.

The album itself was delayed a bit, too, recorded in scattershot sessions over two years at a friend's home studio in New York City. Featuring a smorgasbord of guest appearances from friends (including Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis and fellow anti-folkers Herman Dune), 'Em Are I is Lewis and his band's most richly musical work to date, tossing electric guitar squeals and banjo clucks in with cleverly optimistic lyrics about the joys of Greyhound bus travel and the strange romance of decomposition. (The cover art and liner note illustrations—which, page by page, peel away the layers of a girl's skull—are Lewis' handiwork, of course.)

If the album catches on like it should, it may challenge Lewis' ability to get any comics work done in the near future. He'd certainly prefer more time for it, but he's not taking his good fortunes for granted. “I might be lamenting it if, next year, the music stuff all falls apart,” he says. “I could be like, 'Oh well, I have the whole rest of my life to sit around doing comics when everybody decides they don't care about me anymore. I should have been playing shows all the time while people were excited about it.'”

Listen to "To Be Objectified" from 'Em Are I: