Jenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis’ Joy’All Ball graces the Ryman on Wednesday, capping a 12-stop tour leg that passed up some of the biggest cities in favor of smaller markets and skipped the East Coast altogether. There will be great music as well as a real show, like at every Lewis engagement. Somehow tickets had not sold out at press time.
Lewis’ tour through five decades of popular culture continues. Born in Las Vegas and reared by lounge-performing parents based in the San Fernando Valley, Lewis launched a screen acting career as a child, at least partially out of financial necessity. By 1998, she had parlayed her show-business adolescence into a music career, fronting indie-rock band Rilo Kiley and lending vocal talent to The Postal Service a few years later. More collaborations followed, including her lauded 2006 partnership with The Watson Twins on Rabbit Fur Coat, and an exceptional run of solo albums including 2014’s The Voyager and 2019’s On the Line. With sequined gowns, neon palettes, VHS-core music videos, sunburst guitars and an absurdist Instagram presence, she is equally a daughter of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s who fits perfectly into the chaos of today.
She puts a little of everything into Joy’All, her country-inflected 2023 release produced by Nashville legend Dave Cobb. There are songs about puppies and trucks, for a start. There are also songs about avoiding psychological abuse and recognizing delusions of grandeur; living, learning and falling in love; and breaking up and getting older.
Jenny Lewis
“I’m pretty sure I made it up,” Lewis told NPR’s World Cafe last summer about the album’s titular portmanteau. “It sets the intention of the record in this moment in history: finding the joy through the shadows.”
Lewis made the record at RCA Studio A in Nashville, where she now lives at least part of her busy life. Lewis sightings filter in here and there — mingling in the Belcourt lobby, dropping in on a Soft Junk show in East Nashville, popping up for an album-release party at Eastside Bowl in June. Alongside her hypoallergenic dog, Bobby Rhubarb Lewis, she’s built a life in Music City since landing here in 2018.
“I didn’t go to Nashville to necessarily make music or ‘make it’ in music,” Lewis tells the Scene. “I went to listen to music, and to learn about music — and to have a chiller lifestyle. It’s become about music, inevitably. But it wasn’t really why I moved to the city. I moved to the city for the people, and my friends, and for the hangs.”
A self-described homebody, Lewis has built her Nashville life on the low-key and the familiar: walking the mall (Rivergate), scoping out antique malls and posting up at Mas Tacos. She’s about halfway through a $1,000 Joyland gift card she received three years ago from Bill Murray. Her radio dial favors 101.1 The Beat. Lewis loves playing the Ryman because of its rich music history and the short walk across the alley to Robert’s Western World.
“People say, ‘You live in Nashville, it must be all country music,’ and it’s not,” she says. “There’s great indie and alternative and great hip-hop. It’s a totally diverse music scene, which is amazing. You can go over to the Palace — I think that’s probably my favorite bar in Nashville — and learn so much just watching those incredible musicians.”
Jenny Lewis
In that same NPR interview, Lewis describes a cosmic songwriting connection to John Prine and recounts finding a spangly gown owned by Skeeter Davis at Black Shag Vintage in East Nashville. She wears it on the Joy’All cover, intentionally made in the image of Nashville albums from Davis’ heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
Country music shares Lewis’ strong emphasis on storytelling and affinity for pedal steel, which has been part of the instrumentation on her albums since the Rilo Kiley days. Her self-effacing Instagram posts and all-femme backing band — including locals Megan Coleman, Ryan Madora and Jess Nolan, plus Nicole Lawrence, who splits time between Los Angeles and NYC — are welcome antidotes to the ascendant bro country dominating Music Row billboards and Lower Broadway bars, a reminder of Nashville’s many sounds.
Her Ryman show includes an opening set from Logan Ledger exclusive to this stop. Locals might recognize the Western crooner from his sessions at Brown’s Diner or Layman Drug Co., the Chestnut Hill recording studio on Third Avenue South that stands like a relic of a different era. Deep twangy vocals, porkchop sideburns and a thick auburn mustache put Ledger spiritually in sync with the Ryman’s Opry history.
Ledger joins Hayden Pedigo, a young Texan guitarist touring with Lewis, on the show’s undercard. Odds are good that both will don massive cowboy hats. Pedigo’s prodigious fingerstyle playing — one pillar of a career spanning runway fashion and an unsuccessful bid for political office in Amarillo — has earned him widespread acclaim since he was a teenager. Still, Pedigo is aware that instrumental guitar has commercial limits.
“Every single time I play a show opening for Jenny, it really hits me how bonkers it is to play solo instrumental guitar music for crowds this big,” Pedigo wrote on Instagram recently. “In terms of openers I was probably the least ‘safe’ choice Jenny could have made, but it’s truly a testament to how open she is to putting a spotlight on off-kilter music people might not usually listen to.”
