Jenny Lewis got more than she had bargained for when she tapped Ryan Adams to help record her third solo album. Ryan agreed to work with her on the proviso that the record be assembled in single takes and that they’d never listen back to what they’d just committed to tape. As if that wasn’t enough, he rewrote several of the songs Lewis had put together painstakingly during several years struggling with insomnia.
Far from weaving magic, however, Adams overhaul has created a curious tension. Lyrically Lewis has never been as confessional - not even dissecting her romantic split from fellow Rilo Kiley member Blake Sennett on the group’s final LP, Under The Blacklight. She delves into her troubled relationship with her father on ‘You Can’t Outrun Em’, dissects her unhappy experiences with drugs on ‘Head Underwater’.
But, as per Adams dictat, the music is endlessly sunny, all languid slide guitars and sloe-eyed singing. Perhaps the goal was to point up the tensions between the words and the songs, a strategy that has been part of the pop toolkit since Abba. However, here the results are offputting – only on the Beck-produced ‘One Of The Guys’ does Lewis sound as melancholy as she clearly feels.
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