The cardigan is a doubly apt metaphor for Lewis’s approach to interviews. First, because Lewis, singer with the acclaimed indie band Rilo Kiley, is as prim and proper and carefully buttoned up as that cardigan when answering questions about the meaning of her songs; and second, because Lewis has chosen an item of clothing, a rabbit fur coat, as the central metaphor for (and title of) her first solo album — so why shouldn’t we do the same? Anyone who has heard Rilo Kiley — their third album, More Adventurous, sat confidently in most of last year’s best-of lists — already knows that Lewis’s songs are exceptional. If you haven’t heard them, you may want to take the word of Elvis Costello, who has said that Lewis writes “the best lyrics I’ve heard in many a day”.
Lewis has just turned 30. The landmark birthday “didn’t really inspire the record, but it’s a nice gift to myself to have made it this far and to have a record of my own”, she says. “All of these songs were written in a fairly short period of time after recording the last Rilo Kiley album, and you know how long the whole recording/touring cycle is.”
She shrugs at the thought of the two, maybe three years she would have had to wait for the next band album. “But I wanted to record them before they became meaningless, which tends to happen with songs. So it became apparent that they were going to have to end up somewhere else.”
Fortunately, there was somewhere for them to end up. Rilo Kiley started out on the Omaha-based label Saddle Creek, home of indie star Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes. Although Rilo Kiley moved to a major label, Warner, for More Adventurous, Oberst had asked Lewis if she would record a solo album for his own label, Team Love. And so Rabbit Fur Coat emerged: a mixture of country, white soul and indie-pop that Lewis says she modelled on Gonna Take a Miracle, the stunning album made in 1971 by the singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, backed by the then little-known soul group Labelle. Lewis has hooked up with a now little-known duo, the Watson Twins, who provide distinctive backing vocals.
Kentucky-based Leigh and Chandra Watson are friends of Lewis’s bandmate Blake Sennett. “When I was asked to play a solo show, I was afraid to do it on my own,” says Lewis, “so I thought, ‘This is a great opportunity to call the Watson twins.’ And it worked so well that they became a part of most of the songs on the record.” Indeed, their contribution proved so important that Lewis gives them “above the title” credits on the album cover: “Yeah,” she says. “I don’t think I could have done the whole thing without them there at the first show.”
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Apart from Nyro, Lewis’s other influences are Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Roberta Flack, “a lot of the women I grew up listening to — my mother’s record collection. And New Morning, my favourite Bob Dylan record”.
Dylan has an even more direct influence on Rabbit Fur Coat, via a cover version of the Traveling Wilburys’ Handle Me with Care. “I had a ‘no covers’ rule in Rilo Kiley — I think I was just being stubborn — but I wanted to record a cover for this album,” Lewis explains. “I’m a huge Traveling Wilburys fan, and that’s my favourite of their songs. So I figured, okay, I’ve got to do it.”
The legendary original line-up is echoed by a modern-day indie supergroup. Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard takes the Roy Orbison part, Conor Oberst is Dylan (“Obviously,” says Lewis), M Ward emulates George Harrison’s slide-guitar parts, while Lewis herself handles Harrison’s vocals. “At first, I thought they wouldn’t be interested, but everyone loves that song,” she says.
“Younger people tend to assume it’s my song — which I never take credit for, although I’ve been tempted. Older people are upset about it sometimes. They think the original is perfect. Which I do believe it is.”
Given her band’s growing reputation, Lewis could easily have taken her solo project to Warner, but says she didn’t consider the more commercial move for a second. “This is where I come from — independent labels, working with my friends. This is where I feel most comfortable. When your boss is your friend, it makes things a lot easier. No pressure.”
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Judging by the song Rabbit Fur Coat, Lewis may choose to avoid pressure now because she had quite enough pressure in her childhood. Or perhaps not. She’s not about to clarify this extraordinary fable, a tale that centres on the ownership of the titular coat, and the effect it has on those who wear it, and appears to tell the story of Lewis’s relationship with her mother.
It’s a tale of rags to riches and back to rags again, I suggest. “Yes. Although not exactly rags ... not exactly riches,” says Lewis. “The coat is a metaphor,” she adds. For? “Wealth ... success.” Which then bring bad luck? Lewis nods. Is this a lesson she has learnt, or something she fears? “I think both. Yes — both.” Lewis laughs knowingly at her own unwillingness to elaborate.
In the song, the mother is waitressing when a customer tells her, eerily: “You treat your girl as your spouse, you can live in a mansion house.” As if by magic, she does indeed live in a mansion, while the daughter becomes “the hundred-thousand-dollar kid”.
“I think there’s something that happens in Hollywood that mixes up the roles of parent and child, and when the child is working, those roles get really confused,” says Lewis. So, this is a reference to her days as a child actress? A long pause. “Sure.”
Lewis worked regularly as a child actress, notching up occasional film roles and guest appearances in TV shows, including playing Lucille Ball’s granddaughter in the sitcom legend’s last series, Life with Lucy. Further questioning drags out the admission that Lewis was the principal earner in the family at this time — her parents split up when she was two, and her relationship with her father is “nonexistent” — but she won’t be drawn on the section in the song where the daughter’s earnings mysteriously disappear. “There’s some truth to it, but as a writer, I have the luxury of lying when things get a little uncomfortable. The details are fictional, but the feeling is more truthful.”
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Lewis is so determined to undermine the apparent autobiographical nature of her songs that she even ends the album with the songwriters’ equivalent of the small print at the bottom of financial ads. A song called It Wasn’t Me states clearly: “It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there ... it doesn’t count, ’cos I don’t care.”
This isn’t the only time Lewis has tried to avoid the consequences of her own lyrics. One of the best songs on the album, Rise up with Fists, seems to be a damning attack on the possibility of self-improvement. “You can’t change things — we’re all stuck in our ways,” Lewis sings. Trying to change yourself, the song continues, “is like trying to clean the ocean”.
“At one show, a girl came up to me at the end,” Lewis recalls. “She said, ‘But I think we can clean the ocean.’ I just said, ‘I don’t want to go into it right now.’”
I know how that girl feels. Lewis doesn’t want to go into it at all. Except, fortunately, in her wonderful songs.
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Rabbit Fur Coat is released on Team Love/Rough Trade tomorrow