Damage Control for a Walking Corpse

This time you’ll listen
To the movement of your body
How it keeps on to spite you
And it frightens you…
You’re desperate in finding
Something else to please you
You’ve been searching your whole life
Something to mute
Change, or just distract you
Something to put inside you
To give the illusion of life
    ‘cause you’re barely alive.

According to my mother and father, the first ever visible connection I made with music was because of Jenny Lewis. Our television picked up this weird little cable station which had a music video program, the name of which I cannot remember for the life of me now. “Portions for Foxes” came on; the song, recorded by Lewis’s group, Rilo Kiley, would have been a few years old at that point, and eleven-or-so-years-old me was apparently so enraptured that, after retreating to my bedroom for the night, I was listening to the song on repeat on my hand-me-down PC that the wood-paneled foyer had once revolved around. Looking back, there is a part of me that can vaguely remember experiencing that music video for the first time. I remember late nights gathered around the television watching the channel, watching it on my own on late afternoons. I remember seeing the tail end of “Bad Romance” for the first time on it and being blown away. And I remember flashes of details from “Portions for Foxes”, likely enhanced by the many times I would view the video on my own accord in the years to follow: the downy feathers falling, the plastic wrap encasing the four members of Rilo Kiley, the deep shadows cast across Jenny Lewis’s pretty face.

Like magic, the group’s four albums would make sail onto many crummy Sansa SanDisk portable players in the years to follow, downloaded through less than legal means by my father, who fell into Jenny Lewis’s redheaded snare alongside me. With repetition I would learn all the words to the album “Portions For Foxes” sprung from — More Adventurous —and its followup, Under the Blacklight, as well pretty much all of Take Offs and Landings, their first, though The Execution of All Things, the sophomore, evaded me aside from the title track. Why did I overlook the formidable rest? I really don’t know. All I know is that “Portions For Foxes” was a crown jewel of a discography of glimmering, perfect rubies. It was emotional, poised, so complex in its often paradoxical licks on loneliness, pain, love. I know I’m alone if I’m with or without you, but just being around you offers me another form of relief. I used to imagine, vividly, for some reason, the last three words of this sentence collapsing into a girlish giggle — fffform of relief — as Jenny collapsed in a laugh in a crowd-echo bar, surrounded by jovial girl friends. I suppose I interpreted the voicing of such quiet and small observations of emotion as an inherently communal effort. However humble her presentation through her sweet and utterly feminine voice, there was no way that Lewis could ever whisper those words. It was as if such thoughtful poetry was the one manner through which she could present these findings of the human condition to the world. There could never be just one person privy to her, regardless of how captivated I was, sitting in a chair with a tinny pair of foam headphones on.

That lyric is one of the many contradictions throughout “Portions for Foxes” — I keep on talking trash but I never say anything — and they all went together like one of those little wooden three-dimensional puzzles that looks like a little apple when you put it all together, stem and all. If all the odd-shaped pieces weren’t there, it would look off. All of these little details, each their own little world, combining into these massive statements, which themselves were their own little worlds, worlds of contained emotions wrapped in close-kept boxes, like the ones from Tiffany’s. You opened a box, and there on a tiny satin pillow sat an adorable open secret, the sonic equivalent of a caramel-drizzled gourmet chocolate.

It was so scandalous to me, at this age, that a song would contain the word “sex”. I would even censor it for myself, stepping in cautious circles at the top of the second story stairwell as if atop a rotating platform, an invisible guitar in my hands, imagining a sea of darkened heads before me and every ticket sold going towards helping children with cancer: And the talking leads to touching, and the touching leads to friends, and then there is no mystery left. I would fantasize, back then, about being a pop star, wrote fragments of songs on sticky notes in orange marker wore sequined scarves and t-shirts with innocent slogans emblazoned in glitter that rubbed off on everything. This was only natural for someone who grew up watching Hannah Montana and listening to Selena Gomez and the Scene. The Disney Channel taught me that pop stars were real people who cared about others, and so Jenny Lewis in subconscious ways became the big sister I never had, even though, to this day, calling her anything than her full name sounds just a little bit wrong. Some figures become mononymous in their fame, but Jenny Lewis always needed a first and a last. She had been born once.

This reality kept me from ever registering Jenny Lewis as truly titanic; she was more so this inevitable voice of reason, a woman who happened to be armed with this incredible ability to turn the introverted inside-out, bleed beautiful songs from strange wounds. There’s blood on my mouth because I’ve been biting my tongue all week. I could picture this vividly as I listened to “Portions for Foxes”, still can see the blood drip down her perfect lip, but I did not even feel bad for her despite the present tense. A part of me knew that, however passionate the emotion and however much human folly Jenny had faced outside the boundaries of the gritty clubs and venues the group once called home, this situation she was singing about was not a real one, but an imagined one — classifiable as tragedy, almost a comedy, definitively a play. In the realm of the Globe or any theatre, no matter how many bodies are left on that wood-plank stage, the actors will rise and do their bows to rapturous applause, and they will exit to the wings, and they will begin the next step of the cycle and prepare themselves for the next performance. And in the video for “Portions for Foxes”, the velvet curtains rise, and the feathers fall.

With the recent reunion tour of Rilo Kiley — which I unfortunately have been unable to see — Jenny Lewis has been back in the media spotlight. In the footage and photos from this current round of shows she’s as perfect as ever, wearing little vintage minidresses presumably from the seventies with their funky little art-deco throwback skirt-suit style. The pattern Butterick 3298, which sits in a cardboard box somewhere in the depths of my currently-psychedelic sewing room, springs to mind; it’s a little wrap dress with a pale collar and options for short, semi-puffy or long, puckered-shoulder sleeves, both with the dearest little cuffs.

I myself own a similar ensemble. It’s probably homemade itself, in watermelon pink gingham polyester. I got it for a steal at one of my favorite stops for vintage — Vicious Circle in Columbia, Pennsylvania — because it is so petite in size that it wound up in the children’s section. While I personally have never encountered a vintage boutique uncharging for larger sizes, which is something I hear many enthusiasts complain about but never provide evidence of, I can’t help but feel lucky for the inability of me to find clothes that fit me without having to deal with mothball scent and tired metal zippers. Except I am not so lucky, because when I don this ensemble and look in the mirror I look exactly like Jenny Lewis. Right down to the red hair against my back. I did not intend to ever have this occur to me at all, and it is so creepy to me that I barely even bear to pair the jacket with pants for a business-casual look. I rarely wear miniskirts these days anyway, especially not those that flare out. It’s not that I have bad legs — or bad legs compared to Jenny Lewis, whose gams are quite important — but I just feel out of place with my legs so out-there much of the time. I suppose, in this minuscule way, I’m growing up.

As Rilo Kiley have been around since the late nineteen-nineties and Jenny Lewis is now forty-nine, many of her listeners already have. And they are going to these shows and getting a bit happy-sad to be in a room of fellow disaffected Gen-X-ers who were disaffected teenagers when this music first touched them. I hear her work called ‘sad girl music’ and associated with suicidal thoughts that last well into womanhood (it is always womanhood, since manhood apparently doesn’t look at the lyrics, only looks at the idea of it, as well as the gams; womanhood is apparently blind to the gams, until now). It feels like an incredibly reductive label, even though “Does He Love You?” may just be the saddest song ever sung; it is true that no one writes from the perspective of the ‘other woman’ like Jenny Diane Lewis, and the epigraph in the CD booklet only makes the melancholia sting even more: Dear friend. Two words, and I am already crushed. Dear, then friend, followed by a comma. Dear friend. So sad! The whole thing is so sad.

But Jenny Lewis could never make me sad-sad, because in many ways her music was one of the great comforts I had as a young person. Jenny Lewis’s magic came and still comes from the fact that her music, in a unique way sounds like a friend. There is life lived both within and outside of each of these songs; they follow you down windswept streets as the pavement gets inexplicably wet and the days grow more and more overcast and the leaves turn the color of her hair. It is what makes “Does He Love You?” so crushing — Jenny’s mistress is fragile yet earnest. I am flawed if I’m not free.

Perchance these women I see talking about the tears they shed to Jenny’s word were older when they came across Jenny Lewis’s music, already disillusioned or at least seeking some sort of outlet for confused, artsy angst. And, like any proper rock star, Jenny Lewis served as a vessel for those often conflicting and barely explainable emotions, and the palpable breaths taken between each line gave some explanation, gave room for these women to find little corners they could curl up in and feel at home. Rilo Kiley and she in general became some thing you could consciously turn to if you needed it. But with time, I have learned that I can be blind to that which is not directly in front of me. I still cut into the innuendos like they are cake at a wedding commemorating a marriage that is destined to crumble to pieces, but after I’ve had my sliver of sickening eggs-meet-flour-meets-milk, I return to the raspberries lined around the top telling me how grateful we all should be to be alive to experience this beautiful poetry, this beautiful music.

One thing I have learned in my interactions with women who enjoy music is that you cannot necessarily judge someone’s engagement with any sort of art by the depths through which they plunge into the minutia. Some women I have known feel the urge to know every meaningless crumb about someone they admire. This is a way of crowning one’s self as the most superior supporter; they know more about these people then these people know about themselves, and so they have won some imaginary contest. These people scare me. I understand why they act the way they do, but the mental consequences of this behavior are nothing to play about, especially since it is so masculinized. I have always found most interesting, though, the stories of those who choose not to dive so deep, because there is always a why to why these women hold themselves back. No matter whose party you are crashing, there is always something there on the surface, in the garnish or stirred into the icing, that strikes some chord and sends you on an emotional tangent that no words can truly explain. It’s the subtle warble at the end of lines of your favorite take on a Dylan standard that sends you into a tightened tizzy each time you reluctantly listen, because he’s just revealing so much vulnerability, a lifetime’s worth of it, through just those slight and calculated imperfections of his voice. It’s watching the musical guest on This Is… Tom Jones make delicious eye contact with the camera for the briefest second and carrying that lightning throughout your entire middle-section for days to follow, the perceived safety of your wood-paneled sitting room now raped, defiled. Sweat on suede, polyester pants or even those made of leather or tin-foil, buckskin and tie-dye, thin Courtelle dresses that you throw on without even having to iron them paired with Mary Janes —these textures, these sensations, defile us in ways that we do not fully understand. The strangest things will strike you, and always when you least expect them to. They will cut like rays of shivering sunshine.

The concluding song of the encores at these recent gigs is one of the greatest examples of this in music: “Pictures of Success”. And what a warm beam, I’d bet, runs through every person in those crowds at the big climax, the big ready to go-o, I’m ready to go-o swell that tears through your body, whether live or from the world’s worst basement speaker. But Jenny’s songwriting isn’t so conventional as to simply end on such a note. She carries us out on a strange wavelength, as peaceful as it is high-strung. These, are, times, that, can’t, be, wea-thered and, we, have, ne-ver been, back, there, since, then. Her mantra builds in intensity until, having dragged herself through the standard four recitations, she lets the spit turn to silence. And then there are a few more bars of instrumental music, and the show is over. Woooo, and then we return to our adult lives which this music speaks so acutely for, lives that we know must be weathered because the other option is dropping dead or off of the face of the earth.

The tension of this song — its plain, almost sarcastic details of international travel that numbs rather than excites, the knowledge of a sole, final resting place once the money runs out and the heart wears down — has only increased exponentially in the years following Take Offs and Landings’ release. The album is littered with images to make airports become alert and sometimes cry, from its title to its packaging to its lyrics: and, sometimes, planes? They smash up in th’ sky. Less than two months later, the Twin Towers would fall. The strength of the music would keep the group from a Donnie Darko fate of obscurity-then-rediscovery, though both works — this group’s poetry and this film’s storytelling — carry a simultaneous depth and ease of understanding that have made them beloved among young people finding themselves in certain places and times. These are the ones who, most often, are those whose minds drift, compel them to look a bit deeper into what is placed before them. They take that risk, sometimes because they had to, sometimes because they read about it, and both are very sad situations to be in.

And, of course, Donnie Darko is a very sad story of mental illness, an extended exploration of a thought that cross every vulnerable teenager’s mind: what would happen if I died tomorrow? Actually, it is an exploration of the concept of a teenager, with so many years ahead of him, even considering that at all. The persona Jenny Lewis crafts in her songs is more worldly than Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, and the strips of her diary are more abstract than the John Hughes-mimicked, perfectly interlocking pieces of plot — if Rilo Kiley songs are an apple puzzle, Donnie Darko is a flat lay of a Frank Lloyd Wright — but the emotions are just as raw, their pinnacle effect only truly revealing itself to you as you ruminate on a scene or shot, string bend or lyric, days or weeks after first exposure. Both are filtered through a lens — of a catchy rock song, of a mock-mid-eighties blockbuster — through which anyone can understand what is being said, but underneath that facade exist many, many existential layers. This film and this music are sad, but they are sad only in that they reflect things that everybody goes through, things that impact entire communities.

Death is the ‘thing’ that unites us all, makes no person better than the other, as it is only a matter of death being dignified or not. This dichotomy warps itself into ‘too soon or too late’, and everyone who leaves before you is a blow to your chest, either propelling you forwards into some sort of action or propelling you back to how you felt as a child when your goldfish went belly-up, or when your mother had to explain to you why your grandfather wasn’t going to be around at Christmas anymore. Too much thought of death, usually those thoughts which refuse to accept it, short circuits the brain, makes it incapable of perceiving it as a logical conclusion unless it occurred to someone who you never met and did not like. It keeps you from living life fully because you’re either fearing who’s going to go next, or praying for someone to check out early. But the world never rests on one person’s shoulders, though it may lay on single events. The butterfly effect is fascinating, and it is real. One song can, in the strange and subtle ways that music wields, change lives. And a song is more than an effect to one’s individual cause. A song is its own universe.

How many times did I listen to “It Just Is”, one of Rilo Kiley’s most aching songs and the final track on More Adventurous, while I was still in middle school, and how many of these women would make a joke at the expense of their perceived-askewness of my brain if they knew it?

And this loss isn’t good enough
For sorrow or inspiration.

I would learn years after first hearing this song that it was written about the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith’s untimely passing. Smith and Jeff Buckley and Cobain and others, due to the unfortunate circumstances of their careers, are also labeled as ‘sad music’. Being men, this label carries a different connotation than them. Men are often assumed to be unemotional creatures, and women are not often expected to be articulate in their emotions, and if they are, they are expected to have offed themselves already. But the root of it all is still the same: both the women and men who express themselves are expected to cut their cord too soon.

You’ve cursed all perfect days
As you walked away,
I can hear you say:
    “Jenny, you’re barely alive!”

This verse is from a Rilo Kiley song I hadn’t heard until revisiting them in recent times, released on a compilation album promoting their record label in ‘03. Lyrically, it is very sad. Sonically, it’s rollicking, a stumble-fragment jangle-clangy-ness-mess, all bruised knees and collage-cardboard birds behind button suns. It is maybe the only Rilo Kiley song where Jenny screams — she nears it at the end of this stanza, goes head-on later in the song. Her screams freeze into a beautifully unintelligible dial-up blue-screen screech, but there is an audible grin on her face. How jovial it is to air these grievances about the human mind; how silly it is to make a song that sounds like the Wall of Sound put through a rusty meat-grinder, and how cliche has it become to find a ghost in every Ronettes hit.

Now, Jenny Lewis’s life, as both a child actress and child of divorce, has not been the easiest for her to conquer. But autobiographical criticism, at least as it exists today, often bores me. It has become the easy-way-out to excuse a song. It recognizes creative expression as human, but it turns that humanity into a way to make it immune to something. The problem is is that life, however drawn by fate, is often unpredictable. Life reflects art reflects life, but life itself is immune to nothing. The ethics of pouring so much time and effort into analyzing the life-trajectories of living people and how any fragment of what they place into the world are highly suspect, because when we do so we tend to believe that anyone who has gone through struggle as we have could immediately understand us. But there are many in this world who go through unspeakable traumas and come out the other end not grateful, understanding people, but self-absorbed and flippant against those who they assume by a quick glance that they do not understand them. They become stuck in that trauma, for some reason or another, and refuse to let themselves mature past it and the emotions of misery they project onto those who do not have the time for them. I have known these sorts of people. They would be unable to believe that the Jenny Lewis of today wakes up at 8:36 A.M. and visits flea markets and gets mall massages and generally spends her days very peacefully, as she describes in a recent interview for the Los Angeles Times. And they will never make art as incredible as Jenny Lewis’s.

As More Adventurous comes to its inevitable close, by some unimaginable force of human passion, Jenny Lewis turns everybody dies into a statement that is blooming with flowers. I can say affirmatively that I have never contemplated the mortality of myself or anything when listening to this song; it is instead the triumph of life that I think of, have always, somehow, thought of. I am great at this sort of sonic-cognitive dissonance, I’ve learned with the growth of my record collection. When I listen to Jenny Lewis sing, the words come to me like they’d come to an elite student of Shakespeare, overjoyed at the arrival of the suicide scene. When someone brings up The Beach Boys Love You, I think, however wistfully, of the conscious delicacy and humor in what others perceive as hard proof of Brian Wilson’s permanent-damage.  And when I take a sonic stroll down Tim Buckley’s “Pleasant Street” — that’s Jeff’s pop — I get lost in the groove, almost sway as I weave through the stony crowd. It is almost as if life’s inevitable sadness and life’s inevitable wonder are there beside me, all-too-familiar strangers, walking hand in hand.

Today is the day
I realized
      that I could be loved.