After wrapping an electric run as opener for Harry Styles’s Love On Tour, the singer, songwriter, and cofounder of Aughts indie band Rilo Kiley is releasing her fifth solo album, Joy’All, on June 9. Featuring some songs written pre-Covid and some conceived during a one-week writing workshop led by Beck in 2021, the 10-track effort is just as much about relationships and self-discovery as it is taking pleasure in the beauty of the mundane.
“On the surface, a lot of the [older] songs are about dating in your 40s,” says Lewis, who had initially shelved them. “But what I learned in putting them aside in 2020 was that they were more about me and my relationship with myself and my own spirituality.” Along with the lead single, “Psychos,” about doing inner work, Joy’All includes “Puppy and a Truck,” an upbeat country anthem Lewis wrote during Beck’s workshop about the cockapoo named Bobby Rhubarb she adopted. “I’m trying to find the conversational tone in my songwriting,” explains the artist.
This summer, Lewis will kick off tour in support of Joy’All, followed by a slate of shows opening for Beck and Phoenix. “When I bring an album to the stage, I like to create an experience,” she says. “I like to create a visual character and a color palette that I can lose myself in to channel all the feelings.” For this tour, that palette is red and black—a combination that continuously popped up throughout the process of making Joy’All. Not only did Lewis religiously wear the shades in the recording studio, but she decided that her living room, which she painted black in 2021, would serve as the perfect backdrop for the album’s cover art. “Once we got the color palette down, I knew I wanted the cover to also reference classic singer-songwriter Nashville records where the song titles are on the front,” she says. “I’m a big Skeeter Davis fan and I used one of her records as a loose template for the cover.” Miraculously, one of Lewis’s creative collaborators happened to find an authentic vintage Skeeter Davis costume for her to wear in the photo. “It happened to fit me perfectly,” she says.
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For this issue, Lewis curated a playlist around the theme of freedom. “I was born in 1976, which was the bicentennial, so my entire life I’ve identified with this red, white, and blue thing,” says Lewis, “but the playlist touches more on themes of personal freedom.” Along with “Most of the Time,” Bob Dylan’s ballad about overcoming heartache, it includes Nina Simone’s stirring “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” and Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s soulful “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” “Just the sound of it makes you want to drive around in a convertible,” Lewis says.
Listen to Jenny Lewis’s playlist exclusively on Apple Music.
