listening to joy'all at the end of the world

it brought me absolutely no joy to write this

photos and mediocre photoshop art by me obviously :)

Jenny Lewis is singing about combatting her life’s woes at the turn of 40, loose and breezy, inflected with the cadence and melody of a person who visits Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville often, and never once for the bit. Jenny Lewis has some advice for us: “If you feel like giving up,” she sings, “shut up. Get a puppy and a truck.” 

It’s a silly, laid back ditty, a carefree little slice of “Cheeseburger in Paradise” canon. Coming from an artist whose catalog is littered with anthems for depressives, who ten years ago sang “I never thought I would ever be here: Looking out on my life as if there was no there there,” the simplicity with which she now brushes off that which ails her is hard won. If only it were as easy as she makes it sound. 

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The pop stars want us to be happy. The air was orange last week. Donald Trump will probably run for president from jail. Most people in America could not get an abortion right now if they wanted to. Is it still legal to read? I haven’t checked. I can’t even go to the movies anymore without making sure I have a clear path to the emergency exit; there’s really no place in America in which you couldn’t possibly get shot, except maybe an airplane, but even flight seems risky lately. We’ve spent the past year being told we’re on the brink of economic disaster; in August, the two youngest and largest generations of voters will have to start paying back their debilitating student loans. listen I love you joy is coming, ends that famous poem by Kim Addonizio. In this economy?

But, see, the pop stars don’t want us to be sad. They’re not sad, and don’t even think about interpreting their objectively melancholic songs as such!¹ Joy, they say, is the answer. Were the past four years traumatizing for you? It’s time to let it go! Throw your phone in the ocean! Fuck! Fall in love! Fuck some more! Or break up! Go out dancing! Touch grass! Find the silver lining! Just! Stop! Being! Sad!

Joy is, yes, a form of resistance, an act of assertion of your humanity in a world that wants to beat it out of you. So why is it that when I tilt my head, it looks kind of like giving up?

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This is not an essay about Jenny Lewis, an artist I love very much, and her latest release, Joy’all, an album I am sorry to say I very much do not. But it’s not not.

I will concede that Joy’all is easy to listen to, objectively fine, an overall vibe, if you will. But to approach Jenny Lewis, one of our generation’s finest and most original songwriters, and her work from the point of tuning out banal lyrics to flow with the music feels antithetical.

The shrug that is Joy’all, though, more often than not requires just that. Though parts of it are wonderful—“Balcony” is the album’s standout; “Puppy and a Truck” is wonderful, though I hesitate to count a single released a full year and a half ago; and “Psychos” comes close to hitting the mark—its frustratingly flippant sum is a far cry from the witty, narrative songs Lewis has mastered over her 20+ year long career.

Many tracks were written in quick response to prompts from a daily Zoom writing camp hosted by Beck;² those that weren’t sound like they were. Songs sputter out as nascent sketches, creative warm-ups in preparation for the real thing, not works that took the past four years to craft. They’re full of elliptical repetitions, tired tropes, and vapid clichés like “if it ain’t right, it’s wrong,” “apples and oranges, perfume or poison,”³ “life goes in cycles, it’s a merry go round,” “take a chance on a little romance,” “follow your joy, y’all, I’m not a toy, y’all, I’ve got heart.” I keep waiting for the winking delivery, the hint of a nod toward satire rather than surface level sincerity.⁴ But in midst Joy’all’s mostly low-energy, lo-fi beats, Lewis often comes off like a spaced-out stoner reaching for profundity and coming up with bumper sticker platitudes. 

It doesn’t help that even the music isn’t so much a vibe as it is a simulacrum of what other artists have already done. Multiple tracks are dulled by ubiquitous Nashville producer Dave Cobb’s treatment of them as if they are being performed inside a tank at the aquarium for passerby to see, occasional kitschy claps and whirs coming up for air and applause.⁵

Jenny Lewis has spent the past decade pivoting from genre to genre, trying whatever interests her for the fun of it, and often following deeply personal and widely acclaimed records with wild swings in the opposite direction. Some of it works (like her brief homage to post-punk with Nice As Fuck, operating with low overhead, low stakes, and with barely any of the media coverage Joy’all has received), some of it doesn’t (her recent collaboration with Chicago-based rapper Serengeti, from which a direct line can be drawn to Joy’all).

It’s worth saying that I find it far more interesting—and prefer—when an artist takes a risk that doesn’t pay off, rather than attempt a safe follow-up that strives to replicate previous success yet fails to hit the mark. I find nothing wrong with embracing levity, even outright goofiness, nor do I expect Jenny Lewis to forever remain the girl who wrote songs like “Jenny You’re Barely Alive” or “Pictures of Success.” She wasn’t even that girl by the end of Rilo Kiley’s run—why would she be now, sixteen years later? Being sad all the time is fucking exhausting, and, frankly, one note. It gets old fast. Joy’all’s disappointment lies not in its spin toward the future, but in the simple fact that it is, ultimately, often quite dumb work from an artist who has the capacity to write lyrics far more clever and still-fun than “he sends me flowers, and the fuckin's outta sight.”

I want to believe that joy is good. I want to believe that joyfulness is better to be around, and better for you, than cynicism. But I have to ask: If joy is so good, why does it so often sound so fucking stupid?

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This is not an argument against stupidity. Stupidity, actually, can be quite wonderful when deployed correctly. Look, I like the fun and frivolous fizz of a fountain Cherry Coke pop song as much as the next person. This is an argument against stupidity masquerading and being perceived as profound.

There’s a certain meme format that goes something like this: “_____ is not enough. I need a lobotomy.” Fill in the blank with whatever coping mechanism you’d like—therapy, a mental health walk, touching grass, a 12-step skin care routine, taking meds—the point is that the usual tools to bolster one’s mood aren’t working anymore; it’s time to call in the big guns.

I’ve noticed lobotomy jokes popping up more and more as the years grow increasingly darker and the humor becomes more unhinged to match it. Get your lobotomy at Claires; suck dick to self-lobotomize; make your next piercing through your brain. The key to happiness, it seems, is to sever part of your prefrontal cortex so you simply cannot think anymore.

“I’m just trying to have a nice time despite knowing facts and information,” another joke goes, and I can’t help but feel like it’s all connected. Is it possible these days to find your joy without detaching from reality? Without keeping the TV dark, logging off for good, and refusing to read the news? Smooth brain, no thoughts. You can’t be hurt if you don’t know what’s happening.

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A few months ago I found myself roaming an Anthropologie in Philadelphia with my sister when an emergency alert sound set off on everyone’s phones, some in unison, some several beats behind, like 10 year old sopranos at an elementary school chorus concert. There had been a chemical spill in the Delaware River, and two days later, the city was no longer confident that the water supply was safe.

And as I led my spiraling sister to a nearby Target to buy bottled water, numbed and rote, as if I had done this all before, I couldn’t help but notice how many people just didn’t care. Amidst genuine panic and chaos and flashbacks to the hoarding of early pandemic days, a generous sample of the public were still laughing and brunching al fresco, sipping daytime wine and taking selfies, nursing beers and yelling at sports on the TV. They had no idea whether or not they would return home and be shit out of luck, no clue if they’d finally venture out to the store to see desolate shelves emptied hours ago, uncertain if and when they could once again sip freely from the tap. They seemed genuinely clueless. They seemed happy. I was judging them, of course. But I couldn’t help feeling a little envious.

Let me be clear: When catastrophe finally comes for me, I have no desire to live through it. I am too high maintenance to be a final girl, let alone too much of a pessimist to believe life is worth living in the most dire of straits. Some of you have a will to survive and a faith in humanity that I both admire and fear; my capacity for hope and suffering are in below average percentiles. But I also have no desire to be like them, to go out blissful but empty-brained. So you can see the predicament I’m in.

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At the end of a week where the air on the East Coast was so bad that for an entire afternoon it changed color entirely, Jenny Lewis released an album about making proverbial lemonade out of life’s lemons. She has always had a good sense of comedic timing. 

Those four smoke-choked days—when I watched the sky grow increasingly haunted out my living room window, when I emerged from a desperate last minute Trader Joe’s run to greet a sky that had darkened to a burnt orange haze in the twenty minutes I’d been below ground, when even that unnatural occurrence couldn’t encourage everyone to stay inside or mask up when out—I couldn’t find anything to be happy about. 

“No doomer, but it feels a little end times in this bitch,” I often joke when things get too, uh, concerning. It doesn’t feel like the bit it started as anymore; I’m starting to actually mean it. If joy is supposed to be singing merrily while we load up the lifeboats, right now it seems more like rearranging deck chairs.

That day of the terracotta sky, all my obligations were canceled except for the fun one, but even that seemed less like the reward at the end of a long day I had thought it would be than it did a negotiation. Was I going to show up for a friend in from out of town for the day, or was I going to play the better safe than sorry card and feel like an asshole who put her own selfish needs first?

I reluctantly took a cab down the FDR and felt badly for feeling reluctant. The driver kept the windows cracked the whole time; I showed up with swollen eyes. I stood off to the side of the crowded floor of Mercury Lounge and sipped a $5 plastic cup of Diet Coke that was, unfortunately, actually Diet Pepsi. I had a nice time. But I still said my goodbyes at the end of the show, declining an invitation to the second location in order to go home early. I thought of another version of myself, one who could push better judgment to the side and walk through a door open to a good time. I thought of all the nights I was scared but chose fun anyway. I thought of all the nights I stayed out too late and had too many drinks, all the nights where nothing was a calculation, all the nights where I didn’t think and I still ended up alright. I do a much better job now than I did then at pretending I don’t think I’m nowhere near cool enough to be included in those kinds of nights. I just wish I did a better job now at having fun. 

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You have to understand: I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to be someone for whom worry is the default setting. I don’t want to feel imprisoned, at times, by the power of my mind. I want to be someone who can turn off all complex thought as if flipping a switch. I want to be someone who sees the glass as half-full. Joy is a choice, I know this, and often an act of work. But I don’t want to work for joy. I want to be someone for whom joy is second nature, not someone who has to write an essay about it.

This isn’t to say I don’t mostly feel grateful, or content, or even a generic sort of baseline happiness. I am not the woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall. But I am not the one promising her joy is coming, either. 

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Rilo Kiley’s sophomore album, The Execution of All Things, opens famously with Lewis’s bleak “The Good That Won’t Come Out.” “You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me,” she sings before tossing off a shrugging acceptance of the blow. It’s a song that Lewis has been unable to escape for the past twenty years, one that often comes up as an example of growth, as if to say Here was one person then, here is this same person now.  

But the song I keep thinking of lately is not the one about choosing sadness. It’s the one about knowing too much for your own good. On the band’s full-length debut, Take Offs and Landings, Lewis sings on “Science vs. Romance”:

I used to think if I could realize I'd die
Then I would be a lot nicer
Used to believe in a lot more
Now I just see straight ahead
That's not to say I don't have good times
But as for my days, I spend them waiting

Crash sites keep me up at night
Impact division, it splits in two
Directly underneath you

I’m not choosing sadness, I promise. I’m simply trying to have good times despite knowing facts and information. I wish it could be easier than this. When Jenny Lewis sings that happiness can be found by getting a puppy and a truck, I wish I could believe her.

1. I will give Lucy Dacus, an artist I love, the acknowledgment that not all her songs are sad, and the “sad girl music” label is boring, old, and flattens their complex emotions into one stereotype. But do not sit there with a straight face and tell me you you don’t write sad songs, period, with tracks like "Night Shift," "Thumbs," "Please Stay," "Pillar of Truth," and "Fools Gold"—just to name a couple!!!!

2. Moratorium on the pandemic album narrative, please!!! We're four years into this, babes!!!

3. I am extremely sorry for what I am about to say here but: “Apples and Oranges” may just be the worst song Lewis has ever written. With lyrics like "he's hot and he's cool, he just isn't you," it's so shockingly sophomoric I am genuinely at a loss for words.

4. The sole exception being “Love Feel,” its satiric bend explained repeatedly in the album’s press cycle.

5. The effect feels like lukewarm reheats of the production on Amanda Shires’ To The Sunset. It worked there; here, it does not.