‘Who the F is Jenny Lewis?’

Jenny Lewis was coming to New York, and I told my friends, and half of them freaked out and bought tickets, and the other half said, “Who?”

I’d last seen her perform two years ago. She was the opener on a Harry Styles arena tour, and when I said, “Wait, she’s an icon, she’s opening for Harry Styles?” my seatmate replied, “I’ve never heard of her.” Then she appeared. The jumbotron above her flashed the words: “Who the F is Jenny Lewis?”

Lewis never got quite as famous as the pop stars she preceded, but she’s been considered a musical godmother for many we know and love: Harry. Phoebe Bridgers. Haim. Taylor Swift. You could argue she’s the original indie singer-songwriter dream girl, and over her 25-year musical career she’s induced borderline hero worship from girls of a certain generation. I am one of those girls, and in my mind, Jenny Lewis is very famous.

Right now, she is in front of me. She has just bopped into a green room at a Manhattan hotel, said “Hiiiii” like we’re old friends and dropped her Betty Boop purse on a chair. She’s currently touring to promote her most recent album, Joy’All, and today is her one day “off” in New York. Tomorrow, I’ll see her in a black leather jumpsuit on the roof of Pier 17, strapped with an acoustic Gibson guitar, presiding over the skyline and thousands of fans. But for now, she taps the mic I’ve set up for the FT Weekend podcast.

To test the sound, I ask her what she ate for breakfast. She leans in close and, in a beautifully clear voice, the same one I’ve kept snug in my earbuds since I was 17, says three decisive words: “One weed gummy.” It’s 3pm on a Monday. She assures me she just took it. We agree that the next 90 minutes could go a number of ways.

Lewis, 47, looks early-2000s vintage pristine: tiny black hot pants, an Elvis T-shirt, a red bandanna around her neck, little white trainers on her feet and tube socks pulled high, with flames. She blinks at me a lot, through the curtain of her trademark bangs. (Rumour has it that so many women enter Williamsburg hair salons with a photo of Lewis’s bangs that stylists tell them, “Just say you want the Jenny.”) Twice, she jumps up from her seat to muffle a rogue sound that could threaten the recording, lining pillows along the door, shoving napkins down a gurgling sink.

It’s strange to hear Lewis’s voice in person, because her voice is the clearest thing about her music. It’s right there with you, undeniable, declaring things that feel true. When I discovered her, she was the lead singer of Rilo Kiley, one of the only early-2000s indie bands whose frontman was a woman. She’d sing about breaking up, and men she wanted to step up, and it was a revelation to hear someone relish her feelings while I was worrying about mine. Her solo career took off in 2006, and now she’s five albums deep.

I ask her how she writes such honest songs. “I mean, it’s all right there,” she says. “You don’t have to look too far.” Take her recent song “Puppy and a Truck”. The pandemic was long. She bought a few things. One day, she looked at her new puppy. She looked at her new truck. In 12 hours, she wrote all the lyrics, climaxing in: “If you feel like giving up, shut up. Get a puppy and a truck.” So yeah, all right there.

Lewis’s new work is emphatically doing the thing: putting words to our little lives. The heartbreak, the confusion, feeling down, feeling alive, wanting love, wanting to fuck but not fall in love, wanting a puppy and a truck. But now it also narrates a life stage we rarely hear about in song, at least with such honesty. She’s 47 and single, still hot and still cool. She didn’t get married or have babies. And she belts it all out onstage.

Lewis says she gets creative energy from the community of musicians around her. She is a member of The Postal Service, who still occasionally tour. Beck is a mentor. She’ll mention jamming with Ringo and you’ll think . . . Starr? (Yes.) She has a group of songwriter friends from Omaha, a second home for her, that includes Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. They used to come together and say, “Got any heat?” then play each other new songs. If the others liked a song, you had heat. “You want your friends to like what you’re doing,” she says. “It’s the most important thing.” She talks about her friends like they’re not famous at all, just fellow artists, colleagues. Maybe family.

Lewis is probably this comfortable in show business because she was born in it. Her parents were performers, with a lounge act in Vegas. They put her in her first commercial at three, for Jell-O, and by her teenage years she was all over film and TV, from Troop Beverly Hills to The Wizard.

She’s embarrassed to admit she was a child actor, and I ask why. “Well, look at our lineage,” she says. She points to the original child star, Robert Blake. He was accused of murdering his wife! And she was in a scene with him once!

I ask if it put pressure on her, too. Maybe not enough to murder someone . . . but just pressure. “Well, I wouldn’t recommend it,” she says. “I didn’t really have a choice.” It was a lot of responsibility, when you’re eight, 10, 15. If she auditioned and didn’t get the job, “who was going to pay the mortgage?”

But she also got bursts of time on film sets with “very creative people”, who often became like family. “Being with great artists, you learn to listen when they share the secrets of how to make art and, more importantly, how to live and how to be.” Eventually, at 17, she realised, “this is bogus”, quit acting and went into music.

I like asking artists about their work, but with Lewis, it feels intrusive. Her work is so bluntly personal, with lyrics like, “My forties are kicking my ass”; “I fall in love too easy with anyone who touches me, fucks with me”; and “I’m not a psycho, I’m just tryna get laid.” It’s my job to ask — but she’s still a person, and we just met. I tell her that.

“Well ask away,” she grants and proceeds to consider whether her forties are, indeed, kicking her ass. She concludes yes, but that she feels generally optimistic and also, having your ass kicked is just part of the deal. I tell her my thirties are kicking my ass. She agrees her thirties also kicked her ass. She says dating in your forties is “Good! Weird. Fun. Not fun.” I say that sounds like dating in your thirties. She says, “Samesies.”

The weed gummy may have kicked in, because we start talking about things like isn’t it crazy how our devices reflect our consciousness, and sometimes I think about how Hunter S Thompson had a party and they shot his ashes out of a rocket. It’s time to go.

Lewis is going to Cafe Mogador, her favourite restaurant in the East Village, to have breakfast for dinner. We embrace for a photo. Before it clicks, she says, “Hold on”, and shakes out her bangs.

The next night, I watch Lewis onstage. The sun is setting over the Brooklyn Bridge. It looks like a movie. Halfway through, she gets to a line from a nine-year-old song. “When I look at myself all I can see...” she sings, and we all scream back: “I’M JUST ANOTHER, LADY WITHOUT A BAAAAAABY!”

It’s mass-release. She is our older sister, telling us she’s hit her late forties and don’t worry, we’ll basically be fine. I’m happy Jenny Lewis wrote all those lyrics. I was happy to scream them back at her. I can’t wait to hear about her fifties.

Listen to part of Lilah’s conversation with Lewis on the FT Weekend podcast at ft.com/ft.weekendpodcast