Jeffrey Lewis

Jeffrey Lewis is a 37-year-old musician and comic book artist from New York City. He has taken a bit of time off from his busy tour to catch up with us, and talk about his artwork, working with Daniel Johnston, and why he’s just happy where he is.

The first thing that strikes me about Jeffrey is his dress sense: the battered shoes, worn black jeans and ‘My Two Toms’ baseball cap, all have which have been thrown on, most likely a few days ago. They reflect his personality right down to the writing on his cap (that sort of comic book, child-like scrawl).

Taking a seat on the pavement outside Monorail, he mentions Doune the Rabbit Hole festival that he and his band played the night before, and his disappointment at not seeing much of it. “The problem for me is, while we’re on tour, I can’t carry around all this extra rain gear just for one or two days of the tour, because I’m going on flights and stuff for a few weeks on end. I only have my one pair of shoes, my one pair of pants, my one little coat, so once all that stuff gets wet and muddy then it’s just wet and muddy for the next 3 weeks. I just kind of try to avoid that. It’s a shame, I would have really like to see Pram, I’ve never seen them before. I did see a little bit of King Creosote, and Withered Hand, which I enjoyed though.”

Jeffrey seems exceedingly on the ball today, which could be down to the fact that he’s only been on tour for half a week and it’s not hit him yet that there’s still another 2 and a half weeks to go. He comments: “Three weeks seems to be the perfect length, so we always try to keep tours this length.
“We’re playing Stockton–on–Tees tomorrow, and a few other semi-obscure corners of England which have become regular spots for us. They were early supporters of us since we first started touring ten years ago, so it’s nice to make return stops to places like Hull that we’ve done for so many years, even though they’re not necessarily on everybody’s tour schedule. We’re not even playing Manchester this year, we’re played Hebden Bridge, a little way outside Manchester. It’s nice to have the alternative to playing big cities, by just playing smaller towns around them.”

With all this touring going on it’s a wonder he gets time to devote to his other passion – comic books. Lewis has a unique way of combining his cartoons with his music though, by playing illustrated songs, one of which was a highlight of his show that evening – ‘The History of Punk from 1950-1975 on the lower east side of New York City’. “I spent the whole summer renting an art studio in Brooklyn and I basically have been in there like it’s a full time job. I go in there at 9 am, unlock the gate and work on stuff all day.” he says.
“In terms of comic books, I’m still very much influenced by the comics I read growing up – 1980s Marvel, so the 80s Marvel artists like John Romita Junior and people like that who got the job done. I really like that kind of functionality in their work. In the past 15 years I’ve really gotten into some of the indie crowd – Dan Clowes is a tremendous idol of mine, as well as Joe Matt, Joe Sacco and Chester Brown. I look to them not just for general inspiration but very specific things that I want to do. It’s very much what my stuff is based on”.

Turning more to the business side of the comic book world, he seems almost disappointed in the way things are going. “For the stores that carry my comics, it’s probably not that good for them to be so cheap. If they’re making a dollar a copy or $2 profit, they could be making $10 dollars profit if it was a big thick book in the same space. For the sake of the retailers, I probably should do something bigger.
“I also have a kind of philosophical argument that I’ve been ranting about for ten years, which is that so many people have moved away from doing regular stapled comics into only doing these big collections.
“It’s more prestigious to be carried by bookstores but, I dunno, it’s just not as cool. I love comic books; I like reading them, and I like making them and I feel like that ‘trying to get more respectable’ in terms of society has probably been good for a lot of artists, but at the same time I don’t think it’s been that good for comics in general. I miss the days I could just go and buy an Eightball comic rather than having to buy a giant Ghostworld collection. It seems as though comics are not very cool these days and those big collections are the cool things. I’m sort of trying to rebel against that and keep on doing little stapled comics for as long as I can.”

At this point it’s obvious Jeffrey likes to do things a little bit differently, possibly why he was identified as part of the anti-folk movement in New York, as soon as he started out. “I had never heard of anti-folk, when I started making music. When I started playing little concerts in New York City around 1998, people were saying ‘oh, you’re part of the anti-folk scene’. I certainly didn’t mind it, or have any problem with the title. Although, when I hear that some other band is anti-folk, and I see them, I’m like ‘Aright, that’s fine if that’s what anti-folk is, but if that’s anti-folk then that’s not what I do’. The description kind of matches me more than it matches other bands, so I mean if you have be called something, I might as well be called Anti-folk.”

Most of all though, Jeffrey just seems content being him. “It’s fascinating. I didn’t have any ambition to become a musician until about ten years ago, then I wrote some songs and one thing lead to another and we’re still running around here playing these songs. Everybody has this idea in the music business that you have to get big, you need to make it. We’ve been touring at the same level, give or take, for the past ten years and that seems totally fine. It’s enough to live on, and travel around the world. I’ve just come back from a tour in Alaska, and I’ve been to Canada, China, America, loads of places. I have no pressing need to get bigger, I’d just like to keep on doing this.”

One of the main reasons Jeffrey started playing music is down to one of his idols, Daniel Johnston. “If I hadn’t heard those early recordings I probably wouldn’t even be making music. That really opened this door about a different way to make music; you didn’t have to wait until you had a professional recording situation or until you were at a certain level with your technical ability or with your band.
“It just stripped everything to the most basic element. If you have a really good song, that really is important to you, it doesn’t matter what method you have of getting that out. Other people might have felt the same sensation when they first heard the Buzzcocks, but for me, it was Daniel Johnston’s stuff. Of course, all the early albums he was doing in the 80s and early 90s are almost too good to listen to. I only put on those records on special occasions, because they’re just devastatingly good.

All this leads to the question, ‘what’s next?’ seeing as he’s already played with his idol, and toured the world. Jeffrey pauses, slouched over in his relaxed pose on the pavement. “Well, I just contributed a song to Daniel Johnston’s ‘Space Ducks’ app… And I would always like to do more comic book stuff. Maybe some kind of album or collection of all these illustrated songs that I have. I’ve got about 40 of them now, some of them are just weird stories, some of them are histories and none of them have ever been released. I’m sort of working on a project to put a bunch, if not all, of them together. Maybe just 10-12 best ones, not sure what format I would release it in.”
Sounds good to me!
www.thejeffreylewissite.com