Jeffrey Lewis

Since the late 1990s Jeffrey Lewis has stood among the most celebrated figures tied to New York City’s anti-folk circles, crafting incisive, bookish, and frequently comic tunes that examine urban routines, ordinary events, the past, and fringe artistic circles. Delivered through his unmistakable monotone delivery, the material often cites touchstones such as the Fall, the Misfits, and Will Oldham while favoring loose, anecdotal storytelling or a closing gag. At times he has condensed the full chronicles of particular groups or local movements into single tracks, notably the 2004 single “The History of Punk on the Lower East Side of NYC 1950-1975,” and a set of pieces recounting pivotal moments including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the French Revolution appeared on the History Channel’s site. Beyond songwriting he is widely recognized as an illustrator and author whose graphic novels have appeared in multiple editions, whose drawings have run in The New York Times, and whose artwork has adorned sleeves for acts including the Moldy Peaches.

Born in New York City in November 1975, Lewis grew up without a television because his beatnik parents preferred comic books and his father’s blues collection as household staples. Although Whodini’s Escape became the first record he purchased, high school introduced him to the Grateful Dead—he attended forty concerts—and Nirvana. After completing his studies at the State University of New York at Purchase, where his senior thesis examined Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, he began performing on a guitar borrowed from his father and discovered the more eccentric sounds of the Fugs, David Peel & the Lower East Side, and the Godz.

By 1998 he was performing at open mikes and self-releasing the cassette Indie-Rock Fortune Cookie, which came packaged with one of his comics. A CD-R drawn from that tape reached Rough Trade through the recently signed Moldy Peaches, leading the label to issue The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane and Other Favorites in 2002. He next appeared on the Moldy Peaches-assembled Antifolk, Vol. 1, followed by the 2003 release It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through. He joined members of the Moldy Peaches for European dates supporting the box set 4 Seasons, which contained a comic, a DVD, and two 7-inch singles.

City & Eastern Songs, credited jointly to Jeffrey and his brother Jack, surfaced in 2006, while 12 Crass Songs arrived in 2007 and consisted entirely of material first written and performed by the British anarchist punk outfit Crass. One of Lewis’s drawings was etched onto the B-side of Cornershop’s 2009 comeback single “The Roll Off Characteristics (Of History in the Making),” and that same year saw the arrival of ’Em Are I, whose single was titled “To Be Objectified.” Guests from Dr. Dog, the Vaselines, and Au Revoir Simone contributed to A Turn in the Dream-Songs, released in 2011. Also in 2011 he began a partnership with Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders that produced Come on Board that year and Hey Hey It’s...The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band in 2013.

He assembled Jeffrey Lewis & the Rain and cut “WWPRD,” a track concerning the Russian anarchist punk collective Pussy Riot, which accompanied a matching comic strip published in the London newspaper The Guardian. A subsequent group, Jeffrey Lewis & the Jrams, recorded an album in a single day in early 2014 that incorporated a live recitation of “WWPRD” captured the previous year. Lewis rejoined Rough Trade in 2015 for Manhattan, released under the name Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts. In 2018 he issued Works by Tuli Kupferberg under the billing Jeffrey Lewis & the Deposit Returners, an informal ensemble that included Peter Stampfel and Steve Espinola; the record interpreted fifteen songs by Kupferberg, the poet and activist who co-founded the Fugs and with whom Lewis had earlier collaborated on an autobiographical piece for the anthology The Beats: A Graphic History. Bad Wiring, a more existential collection credited to Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage, appeared in 2020.