Almost Famous: Johnathan Rice

With big Bambi eyes, the kind of hair you’d expect on a 12-year-old girl, and a perennially querulous expression, women, Johnathan Rice sheepishly admits, are forever trying to mother him: “Hey, you get it while you can, right?” he says in a muddled accent, a byproduct of having been born in Virginia and raised in a posh suburb of Glasgow.

Two years ago, the now L.A.-based 24-year-old singer-songwriter released his somber debut, Trouble Is Real—think Jeff Buckley with a headache—a record inspired “by the general melodrama that comes with being 19, 20, 21,” he says. “When I first arrived in New York in 2001, I was looking for the Greenwich Village of 1963, some kind of folk mecca. But the company I’ve kept ever since”—his famous pals include R.E.M., Conor Oberst and girlfriend Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley—“has led me down other avenues. I don’t take myself quite so seriously anymore.”

Following an unexpected sideline into movies—he popped up as Roy Orbison in 2005’s Walk the Line—he’s released a new album, the Tom Petty–fragranced Further North, which comes with a pleasing shot of deadpan humor, compliments of Lewis, whom he considers “the best songwriter I’ve ever met.” The album’s first single, “We’re All Stuck Out in the Desert” has a vaguely antiwar message, but Rice prefers to draw focus to this arresting line: “An investment banker started something/So I broke his neck.”

“True story,” he says. “Well, almost. I was at a Christmas dinner in Beverly Hills, and there was this real Patrick Bateman type who’d been doing cocaine all day and was aggravating everyone. I didn’t quite break his neck, but I did throttle him. The next morning, I heard he’d checked into a recovery program.”Gosh. How very gallant of you. “Well,” he murmurs, smiling, “I don’t like to boast.” With big Bambi eyes, the kind of hair you’d expect on a 12-year-old girl, and a perennially querulous expression, women, Johnathan Rice sheepishly admits, are forever trying to mother him: “Hey, you get it while you can, right?” he says in a muddled accent, a byproduct of having been born in Virginia and raised in a posh suburb of Glasgow.