Among articulate indie-rock adolescents who hang on Conor Oberst’s every lyric and worry that “O.C.” overexposure will spoil Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, one woman rules.
She’s Jenny Lewis, red-headed writer of emotionally devastating songs and front person in the quartet Rilo Kiley.
“It’s strange,” Lewis, 29, says on the phone from Los Angeles. “We’ve been touring a long time, and our audience seems to be getting younger and younger. But better us, I guess, than Linkin Park.” And it’s not that all of the fans of the band are too young to belly up to the bar. Rilo also has made a convert of at least one middle-aged Englishman.
On his “Starbucks Artist’s Choice” compilation, Elvis Costello put the cleverly constructed love triangle “Does He Love You?” alongside Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin on his essential-music list. The song is from “More Adventurous,” a standout 2004 CD from the group that includes guitarist Blake Sennett (Lewis’ songwriting partner and ex-boyfriend), instrumentalist Pierre de Reeder and drummer Jason Boesel.
Lewis, a terrific conversational vocalist with a pert, agile soprano, was born in Las Vegas to a family of entertainers: Her grandparents were vaudevillians, and her parents had a Sonny and Cher-style lounge act called Love’s Way.
“It was a musical family, but not in a fulfilling-your-dreams kind of way,” she says. “More like a working-class entertainment family.”
After her parents divorced, Lewis, her mother and older sister moved to Southern California, and Lewis began an acting career at age 3. Her first job was in a Jell-O commercial, and she worked steadily, alongside Shelley Long in “Troop Beverly Hills” (1989) and Angelina Jolie in “Foxfire” (1996).
“I feel grateful for the experience,” Lewis says, “but I wouldn’t subject my children to it.” Lewis grew up listening to her mother’s Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand records, and country artists like Tammy Wynette. “Especially with female singers and songwriters, I could relate to the country songs a little more. The stories were so complete and so tragic,” she says.
Lewis secretly was writing songs at age 17 when she met Sennett, a child actor under the name Blake Soper, in TV shows “Salute Your Shorts” and “Boy Meets World.”
“Up until then it seemed really far-fetched that anyone would be interested in anything I had to say,” Lewis remembers. But Sennett was, and Rilo Kiley was born. The band is playfully evasive about what the name means, if anything.
She completed an album, due in January, called “Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins” that pairs her with sisters from Kentucky. Produced by Mogis and Matt Ward and due out by January, it’s an homage to the 1971 Gamble and Huff production “Gonna Take a Miracle” by Laura Nyro with Labelle. Don’t fret, Rilo fans: Lewis is not going solo.
“Certainly, we’ve talked about breaking up the band since day one,” Lewis says. “But we’re just starting to see the rewards of the hard work we’ve put in. This is our life, you know? And we’re really proud of it.”
Rilo Kiley
ROCK/COUNTRYPOLITAN|Gothic Theatre; 9 p.m. June 13, with Feist and The Brunettes opening|$14| through TicketWeb, ticketweb.com.
