Orange Crush

Jenny Lewis
Rabbit Fur Coat

Team Love

What kind of sex symbol is Jenny Lewis? Crimson tresses, sumptuous curves and a child-star past—she jogged a generation’s libido by popping annoying baby brother Ben’s kissing cherry on Growing Pains—stimulate the fanboy lust Lewis earns as singer for the surging L.A. indie-pop band Rilo Kiley. Men who would be ashamed of even glancing at Pamela Anderson fawn over Lewis; a lesser talent would be buried by the gallons of slobber. But it isn’t her looks that have made Lewis the favorite duet partner for sensitive boys like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Ben Lee, or the envy of songwriters from Conor Oberst to Elvis Costello. This solo project, released by Oberst’s label in the pause before Rilo Kiley’s mainstream breakthrough, explores how Lewis’s favorite body part—her brain—fits in with and fights the rest of her.

Lewis has called these songs a tribute to her mom, a former lounge singer who supported her kids waiting tables and collecting welfare after the family split up. Her daughter learned young that one man’s dream is another’s divorcee; in her songs, Lewis lovingly dissects the dreams men make of women and the ones they allow themselves. She is to indie rock what Ally McBeal (or this season, Meredith Grey) is to evening-cereal TV: the thinking lover’s wistful, exhausted, whip-smart champion, a struggling survivor of the sexual revolution’s melancholy collapse.

Marked by a longing for God and an intact family unit, Rabbit Fur Coat wonders what “real” or “love” could possibly mean in a world of promiscuity, agnosticism and designer knockoffs. “I was born secular and inconsolable,” Lewis sings, her voice lustrous as a dimestore diamond, as the avant-gospel duo the Watson Twins testify behind her. The first single “Rise Up With Fists” epitomizes Lewis’s unchurched gospel sound, its vocal crescendos and meaty guitar licks countered by droll lyrics surveying a world’s worth of bad decisions. A Traveling Wilburys cover featuring Gibbard, Oberst and home-studio whiz M. Ward is Lewis’s offhanded self-locator: Reveling in the twilight of the Dylan/Orbison/Harrison/Petty rock gods who made the ’80s original, she focuses on the way glory fades.

Lewis’s sense of history reflects her smarts. Unlike the “alt-country” types she’s often lumped with, she knows there’s nothing down-home about a silver-screen Valley girl channeling Dusty Springfield. The Motown, country-rock and white-girl gospel that Lewis found in her mom’s record collection schooled her in secondhand sincerity, and that’s the tradition she honors here. Produced by Ward and Omaha’s own Phil Spector, Mike Mogis, the record has the relationship to “genuine” roots music that its titular ratty heirloom implies—it’s a perfect fake, dyed to match the sensibility of a skeptic who won’t give up “I’m in love with illusions, so saw me in half,” she croons. But what Lewis really loves is taking the magician’s box apart until she finds what makes her feel as though she’s being torn up. It’s a painful process. Lewis can’t stop rising to the challenge.

DOWNLOAD: “Happy,” “The Charging Sky”

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Rabbit Fur Coat
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