A voice that straddles precious and powerful with effortless grace
In recent years, guitar music has repeatedly been read its last rights. Old-fashioned rock‘n’roll has been left looking dated as pop’s shiny production and hip-hop’s swaggering beats ratchet up the charts.
If Jenny Lewis heard as much, she doesn’t appear concerned. On a hot summer’s cool evening, the 42-yearold singer-songwriter gladly got to work with a guitar that looked like it had been stolen from the My Little Pony factory: lilac, and covered with rainbows and sparkle.
Born in Las Vegas, Lewis is a conflicting kind of showgirl. At Koko, in Camden, she performed in a spangled jumpsuit that cut off at the thigh; she threw roses out to the crowd and smothered them in pink and blue balloons. A retro phone sat on her keyboard purely so that she could say: “Hello, telephone call for disco ball?” before the room filled with dappled light.
But the razzamatazz stopped at the staging. Lewis’s songwriting and voice sit within the realm of contemporary country, and, while she offered a pastiche of the music hall trappings reminiscent of June Carter or Dolly Parton, she didn’t bring their trademark patter. Instead, she explained herself through her songs, with a voice that straddled precious and powerful with effortless grace. Her varied back catalogue (she came to fame as the front woman of indie outfit Rilo Kiley) has won her the kind of followers who are more than happy to hear their favourites bellowed out at an intimate show such as this.
And for the devoted Lewis fan, this was a near-perfect set list: she offered up snippets from her Rilo Kiley years (Silver Lining, a raucously sensual The Moneymaker) and a handful of songs from her 2006 album Rabbit Fur Coat. Sitting these alongside more recent songs such as She’s Not Me and Just One of the Guys, Lewis wove a tapestry of her own womanhood.
The downside of relying on her songs for communication is that one can feel kept at a distance. There were times when it felt like we were seeing Lewis not in front of us, but through the small screen of a Seventies TV set.
What was undeniable, however, was Lewis’s talent and enjoyment. That red-lipped smile may have felt hard to grasp, but you could see it bouncing off the glitter ball.