Long Division : Pre-Festival Interview With Jeffrey Lewis

MG) Hi Jeffrey, you're playing Long Division this year, can we expect to hear any new material in your set?

Jeffrey) Definitely. Material usually doesn't get good unless you play it before it's good enough to play! Painful but true.

MG) Do you manage to attend festivals as a fan or is it usually a case of playing and moving on, like a normal gig? If so, is there anyone on this year's line-up you're particularly wanting to catch?

Jeffrey) I haven't seen the full schedule so I don't know how things will be timed, and of course, as usual on tour we play every night in a different place so half the day will be taken up by traveling - but there's no way I'm going to miss The Fall - since I haven't had a chance to see them in a few years. I'd like to catch Allo Darlin' too, never seen them, but they did a US tour with The Wave Pictures so at least they've got taste. Makes me curious to see them.

MG) Speaking of The Fall, have a song called 'The Legend of The Fall' which is a pretty accurate summary of the band. Will you be playing this at Long Division or does the fact MES & co will be there put you off the idea somewhat?

Jeffrey) Maybe so, but I have to look at it first - it's from back around 2004 so I might be too embarrassed by the crummy old artwork to bust it out at this point.

MG) What's your favourite Fall album and why?

Jeffrey) For a lot of people it seems to be the case that the first one you get into remains your favorite, and for me that's Dragnet. Perfect combination of punk and comic book and psychedelic and horror movie and funny and scary and garage-rockin'. And so unique and weird too. And they recorded it in a single weekend! For a while I was disappointed every time I tried to get into another Fall album, none of them sounded like Dragnet. I later saw an old interview with Mark E Smith from around the time of Dragnet and he listed a couple of his favorite albums and one of them was Pebbles Volume 3, which is one of my own favorite albums, so it makes sense that I'd particularly love Dragnet since it probably had some influence from that sort of stuff if Mark was loving that material at that time. Other favorite Fall albums of mine are Extricate, Perverted By Language, Country on the Click, and Levitate. But there's still about 2 albums that I don't have! So my opinion may still change!

MG) You also write comics, which you often incorporate into your live shows, can you tell us a bit about the process of choosing the stories for each set? Do they differ depending on where you are?

Jeffrey) I do like to include some of this stuff in each set, if the opportunity is there - some venues and spaces are just not well suited to including visual elements, like if there's a lot of columns and people can't see the stage, or if it's a low ceiling, or if the lighting isn't right, stuff like that. There's no point in doing something that half the audience is going to feel annoyed that they can't see it properly, so night by night I choose my battles. Same with set lists in general, I rarely like to decide what to play until I've watched whatever acts might be playing before me, get a sense of what the room sounds like, or even what sort of material people will have already had quite enough of. If I'm getting on stage after two sets of solo acoustic white guys I probably won't feel like playing a bunch of my solo acoustic white guy songs. It usually seems like a mistake to have a solid plan of what to play ahead of actually being there.

MG) Do you see yourself primarily as a song-writer who writes and produces comics or vice versa?

Jeffrey) I still feel like I know more about making comics than about making music, but when i fill out my work visa papers or file taxes and there's a spot for writing in "what you do" I just put in "musician."

MG) What have you been listening to and/or reading recently when on the road?

Jeffrey) Audiobooks, so that answers both questions in one! History of the Mongolian Empire was a recent one.

MG) You're still frequently referred to as one of the foremost examples of anti-folk, but it's a genre people don't really like to talk about anymore and you've survived its life cycle. It seems to me that it was born as a way to describe acoustic music that broke away from tradition. What are your feelings on this tag and what does the term actually mean to you?

Jeffrey) I've been answering this question since about 1998! I never set out to make anti-folk music, I'd never even heard of anti-folk music, and when I started playing shows and making tapes people just started saying I was anti-folk  But I never minded it, I figure everybody in music gets called something, I might as well get called anti-folk  All I wanted to do was make indie-rock, like Sebadoh or Yo La Tengo or the Violent Femmes but with more of a concentration on the folkier songwriting side of things. The funny thing is that the description anti-folk really does fit me a lot more than it seems to fit anybody else who I've seen described with the tag, even though I might have had less intention to make that kind of music than those other people, this is just the music that happens to be what I want to make. You might as well just call it Jeffrey-Lewis-music and then ask me why I seem to still be making Jeffrey-Lewis-music when everybody else has stopped doing it or stopped thinking it was cool. It's just the music that I make, that I love to make, and really I don't think I've ever seen anybody else approximate what I want out of music. If somebody else would do it I wouldn't need to do it. I don't really care what people call it! I have no control over that! And I like the title anti-folk  if I'm stuck with it at least it's still weird and unknown, nobody knows what it means, it doesn't make any sense.

MG) What would you say is a more accurate description of your music?

Jeffrey) Donovan ripping off Yo La Tengo ripping off the Vaselines, on a budget but getting better.

MG) Your appearance at Long Division follows a May UK tour; i'll be coming to see you at The Brudenell in Leeds which you've frequented on many occasions. What do you like about playing the UK and are there any venues in particular that you look forward to playing?

Jeffrey) The Brudenell is a classic, classic venue. So is the Adelphi in Hull. These are the places that make it worth touring - they are actual spaces for people to gather, see bands, hang out. They are not beer ads or mobile phone ads, they feel more like autonomous zones in an otherwise feudal society; a peasant square for public use in a forgotten village - not a gig in the court of the Belgian King for the glory of the Belgian King or whatever the 1365 medieval equivalent of modern corporate spatial control is. It's hard to play a gig or a festival without being exploited as advertising for something, something that's got nothing to do with you.

MG) This time you're playing with the legendary psch-folk artist Peter Stampfel, who you've also recently recorded an album with; you seem like quite a mismatched but perfectly compatible duo, how did the idea of you working together come into fruition?

Jeffrey) A little at a time, we first met at a club on the Bowery a few years back and started talking about comic books, and then he played a few bits on my third album in 2005, and we started doing shows together once in a while, and eventually starting making up some songs together.

MG) The live shows with Peter will have a full-on five piece band featuring Franic of The Wave Pictures on Mandolin, how will this set up differ from your previous live shows with The Junkyard?

Jeffrey) Peter's got a much huger musical knowledge of pre-60s music than I do, so there's a lot of early 20th Century songwriting and melody-sense that informs a lot of his work, which is different from the second half of the 20th Century batch of music that I've got in my own head - though Peter's got a lot of knowlege and love of all of that stuff too; he'll gush about Shonen Knife as easily as he'll sing some Jerome Kern song I've never heard or start whistling a brilliant Corn Flakes TV jingle from 1942 or something. So shows with Peter have a natural wider scope, or a certain historical depth that my own shows don't have in the same way. I don't mean that we're playing covers of old songs, but there's a whole other river of music in his brain and in his fingertips that comes through everything he does.

MG) You've collaborated with Art Brut and handpicked supports with relatively unknown artists such as Extradition Order and Runaround Kids, so you seem very well versed in the UK music scene, which UK artists are you currently enjoying and have you got any recommendations for our readers?

Jeffrey) I do love the recent Extradition Order album, it's been great to see them go from a band that never failed to clear a room to being a band that makes stuff that a lot of people will be psyched about. And the first Gentleman's Relish album is still just about the best home-made CD anybody has ever handed me after a show. A recent good one that somebody mailed me was called Pocketful of Nowt..

MG) Thanks Jeffrey!

Jeffrey) Later!