#53, Jenny Lewis, “Acid Tongue” (2008)

150 Favorite Songs, #53, Jenny Lewis, “Acid Tongue” (2008)

I’ve known who Jenny Lewis is pretty much my whole life, but I didn’t start listening to her music until a few years ago.

As a child actress, Lewis was in a few things that were often on in my house as a kid. I loved the movie The Wizard, where she and Fred Savage run away to take a Nintendo prodigy to play in a tournament, and absolutely refuse to watch it as an adult to see if it holds up; my sister liked Troop Beverly Hills, and my dad adored the show Brooklyn Bridge, where she was a series regular. She’s always kind of been a name that I’ve known.

When I was older and into indie rock, she had quit acting and was in a band called Rilo Kiley, and I mostly just assumed that they weren’t for me. There’s a snobbery that comes with being twenty-one years old and they were on a label I thought was corny, and so I just sort of wrote her music off, and let it stay written off pretty much forever, even as she went on a solo career and became an icon to other people. I’m not sure I ever heard a Jenny Lewis or Rilo Kiley song on purpose until 2019.

Then, when her album On The Line came out, I was in L.A. and it was early in the year and I was hungry for new music, and whatever feelings I had about Saddle Creek Records twenty years earlier were no longer important, so I gave that one a shot, and it found me at exactly the right time. It had been a long time since someone with a catalog that deep hit me that way. I remember being a teenager and finding out about, say, The Cure and being like “oh shit, there are more albums this good?” and immediately diving deep into the back catalog, just excavating an entire career like an archeologist. I knew I’d be back in Austin a few weeks later, and that she’d be playing, so I made a playlist of the songs she’d been playing on that tour to get to know them better, and got to know twenty years worth of music piece by piece that way.

So many of those songs were great—“Just One of the Guys,” “With Arms Outstretched,” “Rise Up With Fists!!”, I could literally just type the name of twenty Jenny Lewis songs right now—but then, at the end of the show, during the encore, she surprised me with one I hadn’t heard before, that she hadn’t played on the rest of the tour. I remember it really well—the album was called On The Line, so there was a bit during the show that involved phones, and so the bit was that she got a surprise call and then Britt Daniel, who fronts the Austin band Spoon, came onstage, and they sang a song I had never heard called “Acid Tongue.”

And, well, listen to it. It’s just one of the lovelier things I’ve ever heard, a simple ballad, strummed on an acoustic guitar, with a little bass accompanying it, as she sings one of the sadder songs about hard-won truth anybody ever wrote. Like most Jenny Lewis songs, it’s got a sense of humor along with its sense of wisdom; she rejects religion (“i’ve seen enough of my friends in the depths of the god-sick blues”) and embraces connection (“i found myself a sweetheart with the softest of hands / we were unlucky in love / but i’d do it all again”) and laments how the way life gives and takes (“to be lonely is a habit, like smoking and taking drugs / and i’ve quit them both but man was it rough”). All throughout, she sings a simple chorus with a group of friends joining her for harmony vocals, making the song shine in a new way. (The backing singers are uncredited except as “Jenny’s Birthday Party Patrons,” but I’d assume Britt Daniel was one of them.) And that’s it—it’s just a few simple moments that contain a lot of wisdom and truth, delivered without much adornment, and a sincerity that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

And from that day forth, I understood why Jenny Lewis was such a touchstone for people I’d known for many years. What might have been a fleeting interest in her music became a new part of me, someone added to my personal canon like she’d been there all along.

I think those personal canons are important. (I mean, obviously, that’s what this whole project is.) But for reasons that make a lot of sense, it’s rare that they get added to as we get older. It’s hard to have your mind blown and your perspective reshaped by music as an adult because you’ve just got too much experience. There’s plenty of room for a brief obsession with a song or an artist, but it’s hard—at least for me, but I think for most people—to feel the same thrill of discovery as a full-on grown-up that you could get when you were a teen or in your early twenties. There’s just too much out there, plus too much new coming, plus all the old stuff you already love. Who has time to find someone you skipped out on for twenty-some years, go back through everything they released, and situate it into your life the way you might have if you’d been listening to it all along?

One answer, for the few months in 2019 when I discovered Jenny Lewis, was me—and my life’s been better because of it, in the same way that finding Leonard Cohen or Black Sabbath or Bob Dylan when I was a teenager made my life better. I don’t know how many more discoveries there are left for me to make, but when I listen to “Acid Tongue,” one piece of wisdom that isn’t inherent in the song that I know to be true anyway is that the answer isn’t zero.