Good storytelling is in the details. Not long into her fourth solo album, On the Line, Jenny Lewis introduces a narcoleptic poet from Duluth, with whom she spars over everything from Elliott Smith to grenadine; a father who used to sing a little ditty about all the years he threw away on heroin; an East Side girl called Caroline, to whom a lover is bitterly lost. There’s mention of Candy Crush, Slip’N Slides, Rambo, Marlboros, Meryl Streep’s tears, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Don Quixote, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the bridge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a couple different kinds of fancy cars, one disgusting-sounding drink, and a truly staggering amount of illegal drugs.
Bursting with all this specificity, which fuels vivid scenes and impressionistic turns of phrase alike, On the Line ushers in something that has long been gestating in its creator, bit by bit with every “Does He Love You,” “Rabbit Fur Coat,” and “Aloha & the Three Johns”: Jenny Lewis has reached her troubadour phase. She’s telling tales like never before, singing live in the studio while charismatically leading a band that includes elder statesmen like Benmont Tench and Don Was, not to mention cameos from Ringo Starr, Beck, and Ryan Adams (recorded before the allegations against him emerged). Acid Tongue, from 2008, and 2014’s The Voyager shed more of that twee sensibility from Lewis’ Rilo Kiley days, edging her a little closer to a skeptical Stevie Nicks for old millennials. That journey continues with On the Line.
Something consistently wonderful about Jenny Lewis’ music, going back to Rilo Kiley, is how quickly she allows her protagonists to get carried away into daydreams, tangents of emotion, and imagined declarations. Sometimes this manifests musically, like when a song goes from lo-fi black and white to technicolor and cinematic in a flash. On the sprawling ballad “Dogwood,” she starts off so quiet you can hear ambient studio noises. She entertains a moody, Johnny Marr-ish guitar interlude, then floats into a stop the song, I just gotta sang moment, complete with warm layers of her own vocals and the percussion emitting a kind of subtle “boom.” Then poof, the memory falls away, and she’s back to just her piano and her far-away voice and her simple observation that the dogwood trees are in bloom again. How natural it sounds, Lewis playing the piano that Carole King recorded Tapestry on, quietly resigned to the fact that two human bodies in motion will stay in motion, bullshit be damned.