Jenny And Johnny interview
I was lucky enough to interview Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice for Hive Mag regarding their new duo Jenny And Johnny at the sadly closing Luminaire (one of London's best venues, due to close at the beginning of January). They were lovely to talk to and a hugely fun interview. You can read the results below.
Arriving in the UK just as the snow brought the country to a standstill, Jenny And Johnny (that’s Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley fame and her boyfriend singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice) brought a little California sunshine with them to the wintery skies with their fun, clever power-pop, as heard on their debut album together We’re Having Fun Now. We caught up with them at their last UK show at London’s Luminaire where they were in high spirits about their new project together.
Jenny, you’re from California, how have you been coping with the cold and all the snow?
Jenny: It’s been cold but it’s been nice. I was raised in the valley outside of Los Angeles which is quite warm, so yeah, I’m not accustomed to the snow but I bought a pair of ugly wellies and they’ve been my best friend. I think if you have proper footwear you can get through anything. It’s a lesson that’s taken me 20 years to learn.
Johnny: I am, both places I grew up were cold, sometimes snow.
Jenny: You know what they say, cold upbringing, warm hands.
Johnny: Do they say that?
Jenny: No. [laughs] But if keep saying that maybe it will catch on.
I pictured this album starting with you guys just spontaneously singing at home and harmonising with each other. Did it happen that way at all?
Johnny: Yeah, very much so.
Jenny: It was like an unplanned pregnancy this record. It was very much out of just the love of playing music, and jetlag. We had some Japanese jetlag and we were up until eight in the morning and we just started writing songs. He’d be working on something in the living room and I’d be in the kitchen doing the dishes writing my harmony.
Jenny, you seem to be someone who enjoys collaborating, from Rilo Kiley to the Watson Twins…
Jenny: I do, I really enjoy collaborating, particularly singing. You know singing with the Watson Twins that was really amazing and now to have a male counterpart to the female vocal you really get to kind of try different things. With the twins they were doing very specific background parts that were sort of in response to what I was singing. With Johnathan we sort of create a new voice as one, with the two voices together.
Do you guys write together or separately?
Johnny: It depends on the song. Some songs are lyrically all mine or all Jenny’s, or are musically all mine and then Jenny writes the lyrics. It kind of varies. Some songs are like, she writes one line and I write the next one.
Jenny: But there’s imput, I think, on all of the songs from both of us.
Johnny: Right. We’ve been writing songs together for many years but this particular batch of songs on this record are the most collaborative. It’s the most we’ve ever allowed one another into our own work.
I was reading an interview with Graham Nash and he said when he lived with Joni Mitchell he would walk out the room when she started writing, because it was such a personal process for her.
Johnny: That’s very much how we began.
Jenny: And how we will continue as well I think. It’s important to have autonomy when you’re a writer, you have to be able to say something yourself but for this it was intentionally collaborative.
Johnny: And it’s instinctual. Like, sometimes Jenny will be working on something and it just occurs to me instantly or over a little bit of time that she should take it to its conclusion just by herself and then there’s other instances where I like can’t control myself because I want to get my hands on the song so badly.
Jenny: Yeah and it’s cool when you’ve kind of run out of ideas. You know you’ve tapped your own personal resources for that moment or that year or that month and you can have a skeleton of a song and then bring it to someone and say “What do you hear? How should the arch of the story go in this song? What’s the twist at the end?” It’s fun to work in that way.
Do you sing each other’s lyrics?
Johnny: Yeah we do.
Jenny: We do but you can tell I think, well, our friends can tell who’s written what, just the tone of the lyrics.
Johnny: Big Wave, that’s very clear to me that that’s your lyric because of like there’s a kind of femininity to the lyric, in a cool way.
Jenny: Or a straight forwardness. Like your lyrics are often more poetic or ambiguous.
The record sounds like fun, power pop but the more I listened I realised the lyrics, especially on songs like Big Wave and Animal, were actually talking about much more weighty subjects than the music would at first suggest. Was that intentional?
Jenny: For sure, I think you can be more subversive in that way.
Johnny: Neither one of us are fans of fluff really.
Jenny: I mean, I’ve written a little bit, just a little bit of…
Johnny: Boys and fluff?
Jenny: [laughs] Boys and fluff but it’s always more fun when you’re singing and playing a concert and the lyric kind of dawns on you over and over again. You know, it makes it more exciting but it’s more palatable for the audience if it’s upbeat and poppy so you’re getting two things done at once. It’s kind of the sour candy approach.
Johnny: And also in the particular time that we’ve living in not a lot of things get people’s full attention anymore. Things come and go so quickly and music comes and goes so quickly, Pitchfork reviews like six new albums every single day of the week now, so things have to be immediately classified, judged and put in a category and that’s where it is, so people don’t really take the time. I often think you can’t even tell if an album is a classic or not or great or good or bad for years sometimes, you come back to it and say, oh I understand what’s going on here. Just with repeated listens reveals there’s more to it.
The record reminds me a little of 90s bands like The Lemonheads. Were they an influence on you at all when you were making this album?
Jenny: Certainly we were listening to The Replacements and The Lemonheads a little bit. I don’t think we made a record that was specifically in any decade or time period. We knew we didn’t want it to be too retro but…
Johnny: I guess it’s kind of crazy because the 90s is retro now. You and I, that’s probably the decade we both pricked up our ears and both started to truly, truly understand listening to music. So yeah, definitely those bands were influential.
The Lemonheads had those boy/girl harmonies that Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield used to do…
Johnny: And also there’s kind of darkness to it.
Jenny: A darker subtext. And also they both had their separate musical outlets. You know they came together for that but then they went on to do their own things.
Talking of separate musical outlets is Jenny And Johnny what you want to do from now on or do you have other plans?
Johnny: We are inevitably going to go back to both of our solo projects, that’s something that Jenny mentioned earlier.
Jenny: Unless we change our names of course and then we’ll have to start new solo projects.
Johnny: Me, I plan of making more albums under my own name and I know Jenny does too. But we’ve both been in situations where we’ve been either contractually obligated to make a certain kind of music or personally obligated to make music with our bands or whatever. This, Jenny And Johnny, has been a safe place where we can do whatever we want and neither one of us should become prickly or offended if we want to move on and do something else. The songs that we write will point us where we want to go.
Jenny: And the sets. The live sets have been very free in that we’ve put in songs from our solo records so it feels like a very open forum and it’s great there are no rules or expectations. We’re only here because we want to be and we only made the record because we wanted to share it with our friends and then the world. I think it’s cool to go into something with low expectations.
But will there be more Jenny And Johnny to come?
Jenny: I don’t know. We’ll see, maybe. Hope so.
Johnny: We’ll hold a press conference. [Laughs]
Jenny, you been singing a great new song on this tour about how tough it is being the only girl on the road (One Of The Guys). At the moment you’ve been touring with La Sera and before that the Watson Twins. Does it help having girls on the road with you?
Jenny: Oh yeah. For so many years in my band Rilo Kiley there were no other women on the road and that was great because I felt like the only girl in the gang or something but I think the older I get I really appreciate having female energy around. It’s great to have some girls around and I love playing music with girls as well, singing with them I learn a lot about myself. You can only do that when there are girls in the band.
Have you ever thought about forming a girl band?
Jenny: I have thought about it, yeah, it’s just that I’m always looking around.
Johnny: She’s still building the perfect group.
Jenny: In my mind, yeah. But it’s great because I keep meeting girls all over the world and I’m just kind of waiting to put them all together.
Johnny: Like a black market body part market where you can assemble the perfect girl.
Now I’m picturing a girl band like the one in Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video.
Johnny: But Shania already kind of ripped that one.
Jenny: Did she?
Johnny: Yeah, for Man, I Feel Like A Woman.
Jenny: Oh I love that song.
That’s a real guilty pleasure.
Jenny: It really is. Not even guilty. Is that the one that goes “so you’re Brad Pitt”?
Johnny: No, that’s That Don’t Impress Me Much.
Jenny: [Sings, doing a very good Shania impression] “That don’t impress me much…”
You know when that was released in the US it had a country sound but in the UK it was released with a dance beat.
Johnny: Yeah, that’s Mutt Lange he makes that decision, he wants the record to be as successful as it can be in every hemisphere, in every part of the world, so he changes the production for whatever part of the world it’s going to be released in.
Jenny: So in like South America it’s got like a Latin track?
You could do that with your record.
Johnny: Yeah we could! We’re Having Fun Now with Senegalese percussion or a Euro dance beat for the doner kebab stands of the world.
You can thank me for giving you that brilliant idea.
Jenny: [Giggles] Thanks so much.
As it’s the end of the year do you have any favourite records from 2010?
Jenny: I love Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. That’s one of my favourite records of the year. Beach House is great but everybody knows about them already. La Sera’s single is amazing.
Johnny: They’ve got a good 7 inch called Never Come Around. And The Black Angels, a band from Texas, I really like them and their album Phosphene Dream.
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