Jeffrey Lewis Keeps Running From the Tiger

When I speak with anti-folk legend, accomplished cartoonist and New York DIY scene icon Jeffrey Lewis in his East Village apartment, I am but one of around 70 things on his plate that day. He is working on three music videos (one filmed just the day before); planning his upcoming tour; sketching its poster; drawing, writing, and inking the latest issue of his comic book series Statics; penning a new song for a local open mic that evening (he makes a point of trying to go every week with new material in hand); and preparing for his press cycle—I wasn’t even the only interview scheduled for that afternoon. All this while counting down the days until the March 21 release of his first studio album since 2019, the cheekily titled The Even MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis—a nod to Bob Dylan’s famous album, its iconic Bob-and-Suze-Rotolo cover recreated by Lewis and his girlfriend, except this time, they’re both completely naked. Even more freewheelin’, indeed. 

Nothing, however, about this breakneck schedule feels particularly notable to Lewis himself. 

“People say, ‘How do you do this art? How do you keep making songs? How do you keep making comic books?’ To me, it feels a little like somebody is complimenting you on how fast you’re running away from a tiger,” Lewis says. “It’s just sort of, like, ‘That’s not, like… an achievement? That’s necessity.’”

Nowhere is this same sentiment made more evident than in today’s jittery single “Relaxation,” where Lewis, over frantic guitar, spits out: “Relaxation’s not a nice vacation / It’s the swift invasion force / the world’s impatient for / It’s not my friend / it’s just my brutal end / And I can not give in / ‘cuz it’s oblivion.”

“It’s probably some kind of deep childhood Freudian thing or something,” Lewis tells me, wryly waving it off. “But I kind of feel that, unless I’m doing something that authenticates or validates my existence, that I’m just in this condition of being worthless or neglectable, in complete danger of being cast aside, and unable to survive. Existing always seems to me—although this is probably something that maybe 10 years with a good therapist could cure—it seems that it takes a maximum effort just to keep my head above water.”

Lewis is the first to admit that this kind of hyperproductive mindset is not, perhaps, the greatest, especially when it comes to its impact on one’s personal life: “Actually, it’s been a problem with a lot of my interpersonal relationships—my girlfriend will be able to tell you that also,” he says sheepishly, gesturing towards the bedroom where, I assume, said girlfriend is currently hanging out. “My division between work and life is very blurry and not very well defined, where it’s like, ‘Here I’m clocking into work, here I’m clocking out, and now we can just spend quality time together.’ It is very problematic that I’m just like, ‘Wait, but don’t I need to be working on this and working on that?!’ But that just never ends!”

In other words: “The only rule in my life is ‘Just do everything, all the time, endlessly’ because otherwise, how do I know if I’m not doing enough?” 

We’re sitting cross-legged on the worn couch in Lewis’ living room, across from his massive record collection, beneath a Rom the Spaceknight poster that a friend made to honor Lewis’ lifelong love for the comic book character, and a few feet from the heart-shaped rug inspired by his 2012 “vinyltine” design. Halfway through the interview, we both suddenly remember we’re speaking face-to-face, not over Zoom, and Lewis springs up to grab a pile of his recent comic drafts and sketchbooks, flipping through the pages for me. At one point, he digs out a brown hoodie with Sabrina Carpenter’s name on it, which baffles me until I realize the “Espresso” singer’s merch is nearly identical to the “vinyltine” rug on the floor, a blatant, bizarre rip off. (She’s not the first to steal one of Lewis’ designs, though; he jokes that he’s amassed enough of these “little trophies” to plaster his living room with them like one of those “big game African hunter trophy walls.”) It feels as if I am quite literally surrounded by the detritus of a life dedicated to art in all its forms. Practically every surface tells a story: shelves overflow with obscure ‘60s psychedelic records and dozens of finished sketchbooks, walls are adorned with hand-drawn tour posters, a drafting table in the corner is littered with comic book pages in various stages of completion. 

The sheer volume of Lewis’ creative output is both awe-inspiring and, honestly, a little intimidating. He has a half-dozen studio records, many of which have become cult classics in the anti-folk scene. His astonishing 2001 debut The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane still crackles with raw, unfiltered energy. It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through (2003) and City and Eastern Songs (2005) cemented his status as a singular voice in indie rock. Later albums, like 2011’s iconic A Turn in the Dream Songs and 2019’s Bad Wiring, show a steady evolution, though never a departure. But those official records are just the tip of the iceberg. It might seem, for instance, like Lewis’ last release was 2019’s Bad Wiring, but if you go to his Bandcamp, you’ll see he’s also put out unofficial tapes of new songs each year since, amounting to 84 songs in total)—a quiet but constant output of lo-fi songs recorded and uploaded with a sense of urgency that seems almost instinctual. A glance at his Wikipedia page is even more staggering: some 40-odd records are listed under “Albums and EPs.” And that’s just his music.

In addition to his prolific musical career, Lewis is also an accomplished artist, writer and cartoonist. His 13-issue comic book series (or “comix” as he calls them) Fuff spans nearly two decades, and since its conclusion in 2020, he’s already released two issues of Statics, with a third on the way. He just reissued his college thesis on the comic book series Watchmen in the form of a full (and sometimes illustrated) book. His illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, and The Guardian, and he even contributed essays on songwriting to the Times over the course of five years. He’s designed album covers for friends and collaborators, including Kimya Dawson’s beloved Remember That I Love You, and drawn everything from concert posters to hot sauce labels to pizza menus. The History Channel even commissioned him to create his signature “song/comix” hybrids—brief, clever illustrated histories of events like the Cuban missile crisis or the fall of Rome.

And yet, for all his output, Lewis remains almost comically humble, sitting here in socks adorned with pizza-eating rats—a Christmas gift from his mom—and currently apologizing for “yakking” too much, despite my repeated insistence that my job is, quite literally, to get him to “yak” as much as humanly possible. At multiple points throughout our conversation, he leans over to make sure my phone is still recording, his brow furrowed with concern. “I’m always double checking,” he says by way of apology early on. “I just talk and talk and sometimes I worry somebody’s going to be like, ‘Oh, actually, I should have hit record 30 minutes ago!’” 

When it comes to discussing the content of his own songs, though, Lewis grows almost sheepish. The act of creation seems far more comfortable for him than the act of explanation—which makes sense, considering that, after all, “running from the tiger” is second-nature, instinctive, impossible not to do. On the other hand, trying to explain the process of that “decision” after the fact to some random journalist pressing you on what you hoped to achieve by running, how you learned to run, and what it felt like mid-stride… Well, that is something else entirely. “Talking about songs is always…bad,” he says, searching fruitlessly for the words even now. “The song just explains itself so much better than I could.” 

Yet that’s what makes The Even MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis (and, really, all of Lewis’ discography) so magnetic: he somehow verbalizes the inarticulable. While his lyrics are typically highly specific to his own life, detailing everything from recent interactions with strangers to current sources of panic to even the entirety of his sexual history (yes, seriously), he’s an expert at using specificity as a portal to universality—to get at these ineffable, broadly familiar feelings by couching them in the particulars of his own experience. Just look at the fervent pressure of “Relaxation,” the bittersweet intimacy of “Movie Date,” the blistering catharsis of lead single “Sometimes Life Hits You” (say it with me, everybody: “Ow! Fuck, that hurts!”).

“I really never think of melody,” Lewis says of his songwriting process. Instead, he focuses on communication: “What am I trying to convey? What is this emotion? What is this idea?” Everything else, be it song construction, vocal harmony, instrumentation, or production, comes later. Lewis credits legendary singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston for imbuing this perspective of songwriting in him—and also for being the reason he started writing songs in the first place.

“Discovering Daniel Johnston was so eye-opening and life-changing for me, because it made me realize, like, you could just pick up an instrument, hit record, and have this extremely direct communication that can be so revelatory,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be cloaked in all these skills and polish and all of that stuff—and sometimes, maybe, the more direct and raw it is, the more impactful and powerful it can be. It’s just about having the guts or the creativity to make something without waiting for these gatekeepers’ permission. And all this kind of blew my mind at the time, realizing, like, ‘Oh, I can just say something that I feel?!’”

Jeffrey Lewis has been in the business for almost three decades now, but somehow, his work still feels as fresh now as it did then. A lot of musicians change over time, increased exposure encouraging them to over-produce their sound, to lean into the “music industry” of it all, but The Even MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis feels just as ripe as the albums of his that I grew up listening to. 

In a bit of a contrast to 2019’s more full-band-focused (but still excellent) Bad Wiring, Even MORE Freewheelin’ feels like a time capsule from Lewis’s early days—rapid fingerpicking, home recordings with intentionally audible click-on-click-off noises (“Just Fun”), live concert takes (“100 Good Things”) and a palpable rawness all tether the record to its anti-folk roots. But there’s evolution, too: improvements in sound quality, production technique and instrumentation (there’s a freaking violin in the band now!), all of which augment rather than detract from that classic Jeffrey Lewis sound that propelled him into “cult boyfriend” status. There’s a maturity here, a lived-in quality that can only come from years of honing one’s craft. 

This return to Lewis’s acoustic roots was not necessarily planned so much as it was a shift partly born out of necessity during the isolated years of the pandemic. “The material on the new record just kind of naturally was a little bit more solo-acousticy,” he explains, “because it comes out of a long period of just making songs in my apartment in isolation and not having as much time to perform with my band, or even to see them.”

But don’t mistake the stripped-down sound for simplicity. Lewis’s lyrics remain as sharp and incisive as ever, tackling themes of existential dread, the struggles of daily life and the constant battle against inertia. The album’s opening salvo, “Do What Comes Natural,” is a wry takedown of self-care culture, progressing from mundane chores like washing dishes to supposedly more “leisurely” activities like picnicking and swimming, all of which are presented as equally daunting challenges—because, for some of us (myself included), they are. Lewis, ever the keen observer of human nature, dissects the hollow platitudes of wellness culture with surgical precision. It’s a song that feels particularly poignant in our post-pandemic world, where the pressure to be productive and positive has reached fever pitch: “Even just to be lazy,” he sings, “still demands that I try.” It’s a biting, unsentimental, disconcertingly accurate portrait of executive dysfunction—how even rest can become another overwhelming item on the to-do list. None of it will feel relaxing or rejuvenating, but you still have to do it.

As Lewis puts it: “It’s something most people might take for granted, that certain level of just existing that has always seemed to take maximum effort for me, even just to be at the level that I feel other people are at, just to be able to wake up and walk through the day like a normal person. So I think people maybe should get a lot more credit for the basic things that they do. It takes a lot of effort. It’s not just to be taken for granted that somebody can even just get out of bed, go to work, call their parents—whatever it is, people just don’t get that all of that is an achievement in some ways.”

The album’s title and cover art (which, it bears repeating, features Lewis and his girlfriend butt-naked on West 4th Street) were conceived in early 2023. The nod to Dylan was less about hero worship and more about Lewis’s roots in the Village—and also about Lewis just finding it utterly ridiculous, which meant, of course, he had to see if he could actually pull it off. In the end, it also became something of an “unintended statement on global warming,” too, as the lack of snow this winter made a true recreation of Dylan’s cover impossible.

Unfortunately, the release was delayed into early 2025—meaning that it now overlaps with the hype surrounding the recent Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. So let it be known that there is no actual relation between the album and the film; even the fact that the closing track is named “The Endless Unknown” is mere coincidence, one that Lewis himself hadn’t even realized until I brought it up. “In some ways, maybe it’s… good timing, in the sense that everybody’s talking about Bob Dylan suddenly?” Lewis muses, then immediately backtracks: “But then, I mean, still, my album isn’t gonna be out until March, so maybe by that time, the movie will really be old news, and everybody’ll be sick of Bob Dylan and it’ll be terrible timing.”

Dylan isn’t the only one of Lewis’s artistic guiding lights cheekily referenced on the record; there’s also the track “DCB & ARS,” a song both dedicated to and born from the late, great David Berman of Silver Jews fame. Lewis and Berman had struck up a correspondence in the months prior to Berman’s suicide, and Lewis often opened his email to find strange missives from one of his musical heroes inside. One such email from 2019 consisted of a free-verse-poem-esque slab of text imagining the petty crimes Berman would commit with writer Amy Rose Spiegel, and began with the following oddly-worded request to Lewis himself: “Could you riff out some verse evidence for a song?” Berman’s email goes on to detail a surrealist list of misdemeanors: “using Canadian quarters,” “singing Happy Birthday,” “moving expired milk” and “bowling in street shoes,” all typed out in lower case and separated by line breaks rather than punctuation. 

At the time, Lewis honestly didn’t know quite what to make of it. He had an album of his own—Bad Wiring—to prepare for, so naturally, Berman’s strange request was not exactly at the top of his priorities. A few months later, Berman died by suicide, and Lewis was left reeling. “I obviously should have just sat down and done it right then, because then I could have sent it to him and maybe he could have…” Here, Lewis trails off, before picking back up again: “Now, of course, it’s one of those things you kick yourself for—I should have just done it right then and there.” 

The album closes with two tracks, “100 Good Things” and “The Endless Unknown,” that embody what Lewis calls his “pessimistic optimism—or, maybe, optimistic pessimism.” “It’s about trying to find some kind of positive spin on a situation that feels otherwise very dark,” he explains. “It requires maximum effort just to reach that baseline of normalcy—not some ecstatic, great championship level, but just the baseline for a continued existence. And sometimes the baseline seems so low and depressing that you’re just trying to find some perspective to just get through the day, and that’s what this is.”

Jeffrey Lewis never expected to end up as a professional musician. Growing up, he always assumed he’d create comic book, and iIt wasn’t until after graduating college that Lewis started heading out to open mics—a practice he actually still continues to this day, largely as a means of forcing himself to write at least one new song every week. (“It’s an arbitrary deadline, because it’s not like anybody cares, but at least it sort of forces me to generate ideas,” Lewis says. These days, he frequents Baker Falls on Monday nights, meaning he spends Monday afternoon scrambling to write something—“because I always leave my homework for the last minute,” he jokes). On some level, though, he’s still a little baffled as to how this career has lasted as long as it has, even just on a logistical level.

“I don’t quite know how it’s all working specifically?” Lewis’ face screws up in genuine bemusement, then lands on the expression of someone who has been perplexed so long they’ve had no choice but to stop questioning it. “Whatever it is, it seems to have been… enough. Somehow. I don’t know! It’s very strange!”

But when you’ve put as many different things out into the world as Lewis has, some of it is bound to come back to you eventually. Lewis has carved out a niche as a semi-accidental entrepreneur, his income a patchwork of royalties and random windfalls from art and music created years or even decades ago. A doodle from a 2012 sketchbook ends up on pop star merch (looking at you, Ms. Carpenter). A sparsely attended gig in Dallas five years ago results in a $500 podcast licensing deal. It’s a perpetual game of artistic roulette, with Lewis never quite sure where the ball will land next.

In an era of carefully curated personal brands and strategic career moves, Lewis’s approach feels refreshingly haphazard. He’s an artist first, businessman second (or maybe third or fourth). Even when he did start playing at open mics, he never considered reaching out to record labels or trying to actually turn his music into a full-time career; it kind of just happened to him.

“I mean, it was all just very accidental,” Lewis says, gesticulating. “I never thought that my stuff would be heard by this many people. I was just making these homemade tapes! It’s completely insane that it ended up being released on Rough Trade Records, that I’m touring Europe and England and—like, what do these people know about life on First Avenue?!” 

Lewis’s homemade tapes and comic books seemed almost laughably at odds with the heroin chic sheen of the era’s darlings, the “sexy, sleek” aesthetic that dominated the early 2000s with bands like The Strokes and Interpol, he says. “I was just really not cool,” Lewis grins, scratching his neck, his lips curling up in a small grin. “You were supposed to be hip, glamorous, supposed to go to clubs and look fashionable and be sexy or whatever, and I was absolutely none of those things.”

Yet, through a strange twist of fate involving the success of his friends The Moldy Peaches, Lewis found himself unexpectedly thrust onto the international stage. Rough Trade Records came calling, looking for the next big thing from the New York anti-folk scene, and suddenly Lewis was thrown into the judgmental gaze of the public eye at large and had to face the sneering critiques of the press. And the critical establishment, particularly hip tastemakers like Pitchfork, didn’t quite know what to make of him (although they have since come around).

“The press then—Vice Magazine, Pitchfork—just hated me,” Lewis reminisces. “Every single mention of me would just be dissing me. But, then again, like, what did I expect? I wasn’t in it to gain their approval. They had nothing to do with me.”

Yet, as the years rolled by, something curious happened. A new generation of listeners, unburdened by the context of those early-2000s scene politics, began to discover Lewis’s work. Thanks in part to streaming services and a general shift in musical tastes, Lewis found his audience growing, particularly in the last five to six years.

“I think the current generation just doesn’t realize how uncool I am or was,” Lewis says, half-contemplative, half-thoroughly-tickled. “They’re just like, ‘Oh, there’s the Mountain Goats and there’s the Moldy Peaches and then there’s Jeffrey Lewis!’ But that was never the case! 

“It’s funny,” Lewis continues, “there are these people who think they’re, like, finding me really late in the game, and everyone already knows me. But that is so not what happened! Nobody else knows me, or knew me then! It’s not like their older siblings knew me 10 years ago. Really, their older siblings 10 years ago would have been like, ‘Fuck that guy.'”

Lewis may never be a household name (not that he even wants to be one), but it’s inarguable that he’s carved out a unique space in the indie music world. With over two decades in the game, Lewis has long accomplished enough to actually call it a career, and a successful one, at that. Even if he still feels as if he’s running from that tiger, as if he has not and never will do quite enough, there is, at least, this: “I’m successful, beyond anything I ever could picture,”  Lewis sings on “100 Good Things.” “I’m a small but thriving cultural fixture / and I think I deserve it.” He is right on all counts.

Watch the video for “Relaxation” below and, further down, check out Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters’ 2008 Daytrotter session. 

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].