Jenny Lewis: "My favorite people are addicts. These are the most interesting and complex people »

WWhen you grow up in a dependent home, "says Jenny Lewis, repairing the fringe of her auburn hive," that's what kids do when we try to pretend everything's fine and that's not the case. I'm like this little boy trying to understand that everything is cool, you see? But these were the circumstances and they are rather scandalous. "

The 43-year-old, hidden in the austere, wood-paneled room of a London hotel, discusses her dysfunctional childhood – a topic she "has not touched on for 20 years." Before, she was a revered musician – first with her beloved indie-rock band, Rilo Kiley, and then as a solo artist, collaborating with Beck, Brandon Flowers, Bright Eyes, Au Revoir Simone, Ringo, and others. Starr and (since Ryan Adams – Lewis was a child actor whose mother was a heroin addict and whose father was almost never there.

From the age of six, she was the breadwinner of the family. She has played in TV shows such as The murder that she wrote, Alert to Malibu, The Golden Girls and Roseanne, and at the age of 16, his career had paid off two houses in Los Angeles. "We lost all this," she said vaguely in a New York Times interview in 2014.

Throughout her musical career, which began in 1998 when she formed Rilo Kiley with her boyfriend of the time, Blake Sennett, Lewis never hesitated to document her relationship with her. parents. "And your mother is still calling, crazy and high, swearing that it's different this time," she sang through a muffled mic of the 2002 song "A Better Son / Daughter ". "And you tell her to give in to the demons who possess her / God never blessed her inwardly." The two were separated for most of Lewis's adult life.

But while the musician born in Las Vegas was making her new album, On the lineAfter 12 years with fellow musician Johnathan Rice, she discovered that her mother was dying. The next record – Americana's lavish masterpiece, riddled with grief, lust and glamor – tells both stories. "Little White Dove" was written during visits to see his mother at the hospital. "In the middle of love," sings Lewis, with a melody that hops through funk-driven bbad riffs, "I'm the little white dove, I'm the heroine." By the time she had finished the album – which was recorded in a vocal booth built for Frank Sinatra and starring Ringo Starr on drums – his mother had died.

"When you receive a call saying that someone is not doing well, you have the choice to be present or not," she says now. "I decided to be there and I'm so happy to have done it. You feel their true essence in this setting, where they can not stand up and bounce back. In those moments, you only see people who are what they are, and they are like you. They are you. Only souls in a body are made. They are only humans. These are your parents. They did their best. There is a long and heavy pause. "They were not good on TV," she adds with a husky sneer. "But we all have our problems with our people."

She has mixed feelings, however, when talking about her mother. "I feel a bit raw and frightened by myself," she says. "If you've ever had a mental illness or addiction, it's beauty, joy, love, and pain. My favorite people are the addicts. These are the most interesting and complex people. It's not one way. And by talking about it in the press, it does not reflect the whole story. And today, I felt bad about it. I was like: "My God, I hope I do not present this really negative image of my mother, an addict, but also a human."

"I often found myself in an uncomfortable interview," she says, "a journalist talked about it in a less than friendly way, in a way that made me angry and that I felt intrusive and weird. , and I did not do it. say anything. But at that time, my mother was alive. Speaking of that now, she's gone, "she adds with a slight sigh," I hope it will be part of the healing process for myself and the other women. "

In making peace with her mother, Lewis found that her female friendships took on a different form. “I think if your relationship with your mother is strained,” she says, “your relationships with other women will reflect that in some ways. So in repairing that with her, I really connected with my female friends.”

In 2016, she formed indie rock trio Nice as F**k with two fellow female musicians: Au Revoir Simone’s Erika Forster and The Like’s Tennessee Thomas. Before then, her collaborators had been largely male. “Having grown up in an indie rock band with all men,” she says, “and generally just being a tomboy throughout my adolescence, and really connecting with men in that way on a platonic level, there’s a little bit of a lack of accountability, because there’s always, on some level, an underlying badual component. Or a little taste of something.”

It’s at this point that I bring up Ryan Adams. The musician produced most of her brilliant 2014 album The Voyager, and contributed (minimally) to the new record, too. He’s since been accused of badual misconduct and emotional abuse by several women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore, the singer Phoebe Bridgers, and an underage girl referred to as “Ava”. When the allegation first went public, Lewis tweeted: “I am deeply troubled by Ryan Adams’s alleged behaviour. Although he and I had a working professional relationship, I stand in solidarity with the women who have come forward.”

In interviews from around five years ago, Lewis spoke of her experience working with Adams. “It felt like he was needling me,” she said in one. “He was winding me up. I was sometimes agitated.” In another, she said, “He’d say things like, ‘God, I can’t take this campfire bullshit’.” She also spoke of having to “submit” to him. When I read these quotes back to her, she snorts.

Does she see this behaviour as a positive thing? “I think I did at the time,” she says. “Hearing you read that back now, it feels different to me. It’s interesting to have someone pull up something that you said years ago, because I think we’re all going through this together right now. This dialogue. And this movement. I think my perspective is evolving, and I’m understanding more about my place in the whole thing, as a woman.

“I haven’t really thought of myself as a female artist,” she continues, “I’m an artist and I’ve just tried to do my work and keep up. And I tend to like a little tension in the studio. When we recorded the Nice as F**k record, Tennessee was getting really riled up. In order to pull off that fast drumming, she had to punch the wall and cry a little bit, which was really intense. But this,” she points to the quotes I’ve just recited, “is not necessary to create great art. And this is not something I’ll ever tolerate again. Ever.”

Did she make a conscious decision not to let that kind of thing happen again? "Non. I’ve had to go through a series of unhealthy relationships, where this masculine toxicity is just something that ends up in my orbit, until I make a decision to remove myself. And I’m always trying to combat it with love and care and understanding, and more love, and that is just not always practical. But I truly am still learning.”

She clearly doesn’t consider her relationship with Rice to have been a toxic one, though the pain and frustration of their breakup engulfs On the Line. “After all we’ve been through, don’t you wanna kiss me?” she asks on “Red Bull and Hennessy”. “Don’t you even wanna try to devour the moon?” On the hunched and haunted “Dogwood”, she admits, “I believe you will chase me away / So that you can prove love is not enough for you.”

They hadn’t broken up yet, she says, when she wrote “Dogwood”. “Maybe I manifested it with that song. Well, I don’t know what comes first, the song or the experience.” She lets out a “pfff” sound. “But that’s the magic of healing songwriting, it comes through in a way where I don’t know what the hell I’m singing about. And then it’ll either predict or… no it’ll always predict. Every single f**king time.”

The breakup wasn’t easy for Lewis. “You don’t know what it’s like until you’ve had your heart broken,” she says. “And it has a physical manifestation. You can’t get out of bed in the morning because it hurts your chest. Have you ever felt that?” I nod. “What is that?! That’s why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best movie ever made. Just the idea that you can erase someone. Because there’s no way out of that feeling. You think it’s never gonna end, you wanna erase the memory of the person, you’d do anything, you’d take a pill, you’d get surgery, you’d move away… and then one day you don’t think of them all day long. And the next day, you think of them less. And then you’re better. And you forget what it feels like to be heartbroken. And you like someone else. J'espère. And certainly you can experience that in your twenties, but I think thirties heartbreak has a whole other level of weight. It hurts. It really hurts. Physically. I wonder if men feel the same heart hurt in that way.”

Still, she considers the relationship an achievement. “I think over a decade is a success,” she says. “I didn’t think I would be with anyone, for all length of time, let alone 12 years.” Why is that? “I never really had… I didn’t really have a lot of boyfriends, so this was really my first significant relationship, at 28. I always felt like a lone wolf in the world. Just buried in my notebook. So that was the first time that I really felt like a team.”

En elle Rolling Stone profile, Lewis reflected that when she was with Rice, she “didn’t finish any of my stories. Johnathan finished every story for me.” “That’s not a negative statement,” she says. “You said that to me and it gave me a really nice feeling. But when you’re with someone for that long, you just become one thing. We were so connected that even our stories were connected. So re-emerging in the world, and learning how to finish the story, or tell the punchline to the joke, or do whatever it is that you’ve relied on someone else for… I think in pursuing that independence and autonomy, you just kind of get back to your own full story.”

She smiles. “We think of breakups as endings, but they’re beginnings.”

On the Line is out now