Review: Jeffrey Lewis at The Rabbit Hole
To preface this review, I have to set the scene:
It was the summer before eighth grade, a strange limbo for any 13-year-old. Music was my salvation from the heat in those sweltering days.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, I stumbled across Jeffrey Lewis’ 2001 LP The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane. It was one of those albums that grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you to your core, cradling you in its honesty. Lewis sings about introspection, existentialism, and nervousness in a way that’s teeming with life and is utterly human.
His wit and self deprecation knocked something loose within me. To quote another one of my favorite Lewis songs, “Back When I Was Four” — “I was lost and found and I’ve never been the same.” Luckily, Lewis’s generous outpour of songs and my later discovery of his work as a comic book artist kept me occupied for the rest of that fateful summer, and my worship of anti-folk began.
Fast forward five years and the Rabbit Hole was bursting with life on the lively night of April 13. There was no better place to see Jeffrey Lewis and his occasional backing band The Voltage — DIY house shows have a certain charm that perfectly complement the lo-fi noisiness of the group.
The night began with Lewis clicking on a projector and beaming pulsing psychedelic imagery onto the basement walls. The band opened with “Heavy Heart,” the warm music reflecting the gradually warming room as a healthy-sized crowd began to file in. With Brent Cole on drums, Isabel Martin on bass, and Mallory Feuer on keys, a steady hum backed up Lewis’s continuous strumming on his sticker-covered acoustic guitar.
About halfway through the set, Lewis crouched down to the projector and began to tell the audience the story of Champion Jim, his drawings adorning the walls in their augmented glory, illustrating the tale of perseverance against eternal strife. As the evening progressed, Lewis treated the audience to his insights on the meaning of life (a fact so existential that to share beyond that mic would be doing a disservice to the world); learn about the development of punk music on the lower East Side of NYC 1950-75; and soak in the sincerity of the lyrics that emerged from the layers of noise.
After the phenomenal show, I was lucky enough to talk to Lewis about monkeys, life, and literature.
Violet Dwoinen: You talk a lot about cult music and cult art in your songs, and you are now regarded as a cult artist. I’m curious — is this what you set out to be? Was it a conscious decision to create art more catered to an underground scene?
Jeffrey Lewis: I have some kind of fondness for things that are maybe more raw, personal, or unusual than mainstream has allowed for — it’s definitely inspired me to follow my own path. What looks good and sounds good to me is stuff that I want to exist. But I certainly never imagined having an audience like this — to be able to come and play a sold-out show is really astounding. I feel like streaming has allowed for people to know my stuff has existed.
VD: How long have you been playing shows?
JL: I mean, if you count an open mic —1998? I guess I started doing little tours in, like, 2002. It’s been many, many years where the turnout tonight would be a huge deal. But in the past five or six years, it’s been like this.
VD: Did the COVID-19 pandemic increase your streaming [numbers]?
JL: It seems like it — or maybe that was just when I was starting to really notice. It was a little bit before that. The tours we were doing right before that had started to snowball into something more than I had seen before. I was nervous COVID was going to kill the momentum, but it didn’t. I am super happy to be back on the road and find that's not the case.
(This next question warrants some explanation. I’m graduating high school in early June and leaving for college mid-August. It's at points of upheaval like this where I turn to music, just like that one summer. So here I was, face to face with the very voice that guided me through my middle school years, and I had to ask…)
VD: Your art touches a lot on this very human fear of change. What would you say to someone who’s at a crossroads in their life? How have you gone about navigating these times of transition and uncertainty?
JL: I mean, if I had advice that would help, I would have a better life. But I do think that work is an objective thing that seems to stand the test of time, No matter what my personal ups and downs are, I feel like whatever I’m feeling — confused, lost, depressed — I can look backwards on all the art that I did or books that I read, or something that seems substantial enough, and that is what becomes objective. Feelings come and go, but art lasts.
We wrapped up the evening, and that post-show exhaustion settled into my bones. It was a night of art, creation, and collective appreciation blooming in everything that it is. That night, the dreamy echoes of The Rabbit Hole became a cavern of careening sound, a celebration of the most human aspects of being alive, and a beating heart of music and life and love. The realization dawned on me, as it always does after a good show: I am so lucky to be able to celebrate the magnificence of music.
(Photo by Ilya Popenko)
