Jenny Lewis song for Girls, screen-cap showing Jenny Lewis on The Golden Girls, obviously.
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Alfred Soto: Last year’s Rilo Kiley odds and ends collection defined the post-2007 era Lewis: independent by default, suspicious of kicks but a quick study, turning a lack of affect into a commitment to performance. It also showed a weakness for mixing board tricks that drained instruments of affect too. To project distance from the situations — lovers — she’s ridiculing she’ll shift to a register that scrapes the popcorn off the ceiling of her range. Accordingly, she sings the hell out of this trifle and it’s not worth the trouble.
[5]
Jer Fairall: A marvellously expressive vocalist when she chooses to be, Jenny Lewis first captured my attention a decade ago with Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous, a collection of rock- and folk-pop gems with lyrics as beautifully and observantly detailed as a terrific short story collection. A shame that she’s been undercooking just about everything since then, too often falling back on both the evasive twee-like vocals that More Adventurous (and, to an extent, her band’s otherwise garish follow-up Under the Blacklight) found her moving away from, and on lyrical concepts that read as far less, well, adventurous. “Completely Not Me” starts off sounding like it might be going somewhere, her willingness to confront mortality with as much heart-rending acuity as deceptively blasé cynicism being at the the core of many of her finest songs, but the narrative stalls at the very spot where she would have previously taken us in several unexpected and affecting directions (compare this with the remarkable “Accidntel Deth”). Where the assuredly matter-of-fact vocal that she thankfully opts for this time out picks up some of the slack, Vampire Weekend guy’s laboured mock-Spectorian production draws too much unwarranted attention to itself.
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Anthony Easton: I know that Lewis has a rep for being the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of this kind of aesthetic, but I am in love with how the piano jangle works against her yearning voice, which places the tragic lyrics into an elegant context.
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Patrick St. Michel: I’m not really familiar with Jenny Lewis’ solo recordings, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume the title is accurate.
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Megan Harrington: The wall of sound production is more than capable of carrying the burden of this slight song, but with each subsequent listen I’m forced to confront whether or not I irrationally dislike Jenny Lewis the way some people can’t stand Zooey Deschanel. The quirky pronunciation of “hubris,” especially, makes me flinch.
[5]
Juana Giaimo: Am I the only one who feels that every year Jenny Lewis might release a new studio album and all we get is a collaboration or single new song? Well, if this is the case of “Completely Not Me”, then I’m OK with it. It may not be one of her strongest tracks — it lacks a certain something and feels that this is just a demo that needs to be finished — but it’s still exciting. As always, partly vulnerable and partly confident, this time with the help of Rostam Batmangli, Jenny Lewis is just doing what we all knew she knew how to do.
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Brad Shoup: Big, simple chords, hacked out like early-nineties Mike Campbell, give this a processional feel. The care lavished on the text — all that internal rhyme and death obsession — harks back to Saint Judee Sill. And the more she sings “I’m comin’ clean,” the further the production gathers echoes and goes to sea. Bright and mysterious.
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Ramzi Awn: I remember listening to Jenny Lewis with a friend of mine back in 2008 and wondering why. But the haze on “Completely Not Me” is completely spooked-out beguiling and the payoff, pitch-perfect.
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Katherine St Asaph: Books are a flawed medium; there’s no tension when you know you’ve got a thick wodge of pages where the protagonist won’t be dying. “Completely Not Me” is flawed in the same way; shivering despair in a hospital bed doesn’t sound so bad when related years later over lemon-Pledge piano or crisp stomping percussion or misplacedly pretty soprano descants, or when being completely not you, in the real world, usually ends not with cheery Vampire Weekend aesthetics but with you and the convenient, caring boy being completely not friends, or when the whole thing’d sound like one of the “glosses for self-explanatory tableaux” from this column even if it weren’t on Girls.
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Tara Hillegeist: Sometimes the world gets you. You drown, you get sucked under, your body is the coffin you bury yourself in. There are other kinds of addiction than to merely medicinal substances. Was it John Belushi who said he always was a terrible person to all his friends so he could know who really cared? But you hate yourself, you’re sick, you’re an addict, and you sit there for so long you don’t remember what it was like not to sit there, in the wreckage of absent friends. In the wreckage of your life. You feel like a revenant, haunting your own life angrily and dark-eyed. And one day the fog clears and maybe it’s because you made a choice and maybe it’s just because it did, but things start to turn around for you. You get things together. You stop hating all your friends. You remember how to like things. It’s harder than your friends made it look, but you do it because it’s worth every second of joy it brings you. Eventually, your heart casts itself back over how you used to be, and looking back on it makes the sky crack overhead: if we lived in the movies, your feelings would be a burst of sunlight between the tap-tapping of light rains (like a plaintive guitar strum over stomping percussion, perhaps). You laugh, but it’s not really like how people talk about laughing, it’s more like a Hank Williams smile: “I was completely not me.”
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Andy Hutchins: This is just really pretty singing, and even though it’s attached to a song about a feeling general and oblique enough to back the credits of an episode of Girls, I like really pretty singing.
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