Jenny & Johnny: Couples Therapy

“I feel like…at the risk of sounding less tough, there’s something fundamentally romantic about every song on the album,” Rice says. “Just the idea of singing together and the voices…[it’s] like a very musical embrace of one another, you know, if you can stomach thirty-six minutes of that.”

Without skipping a beat, Lewis quips, “Go put on your leather jacket.”

The music’s well-suited for this sort of vocal treatment; the big, bright hooks are buoyed by springy, bopping grooves that have the instantly gratifying musical directness of ‘50s and ‘60s pop, though they’re willfully rougher around the edges. Yet the lyrics are no expressions of puppy love; aside from “Scissor Runner,” they’re not really about love at all.

Lewis and Rice favor more complex and current lyrics, often irony-laced and edged in dark humor. Here they may take up a shady character or situation as a song subject (“Switchblade,” “Just Like Zeus” and “Straight Edge of the Blade”) or comment on social and political ills (“Big Wave” and “Committed”) (outright protest isn’t their thing, though they did decide to route their summer tour around Arizona to make a statement about that state’s immigration law). “That’s the best way to get people to understand your lyrics – by making it sound really poppy,” says Lewis.

One of the album’s hookiest songs, “Big Wave,” depicts the upheaval of California’s financial crisis; the power-pop number “Animal” seems to assail the notion that being an agnostic takes away from a person’s humanity; and “Just Like Zeus” could’ve been a Shangri-Las side, only with less romantic central characters than those in “Leader of the Pack.”

On the spot, Rice comes up with an off-the-wall analogy for their songwriting approach: “It’s like that scene in American Psycho – the book, not the movie – where he takes a urinal cake out of the men’s urinal and he covers it in Godiva chocolate. And he gives it to one of his girlfriends.”

The ridiculousness of that image in relation to their songwriting draws laughter from Lewis, but she gamely plays along: “It’s a musical urinal cake.”

There’s also a more pedestrian, and more revealing, comparison to be found in some of the musical influences they identify for the album – in particular, bands like The Replacements and The Lemonheads, who regularly paired pop sensibilities with subversion.

The other reason they’ve been in this headspace has to do with the live performance aspect of the job. “I think the upbeat nature of the songs is kind of a response to touring for Acid Tongue,” says Lewis. “There are a lot of ballads on that record. And I had become kind of bored of that. And I didn’t really want to play piano; I wanted to play electric guitar, and I wanted to write some pop songs. But I think it’s just within my nature, and Johnathan’s as well, to then later get into the lyrics, you know, really try to say something.”

“Yeah, we’re not big fans of fluff,” Rice agrees.

“Oh, I’ve written my fair share of fluff as well,” Lewis shoots back playfully.

Fluff aside, Lewis’ contributions in Rilo Kiley gave her a bit of a head-start on Rice when it came to crafting honeyed hooks with biting lyrics. The first single from her 2006 album Jenny Lewis And The Watson Twins was “Rise Up With Fists!!,” a silky, throwback soul-pop track that takes on social realities with a mixture of cynicism and challenge.

“From a songwriting standpoint, you have to understand that I’m a lot younger than everybody else, a lot of my contemporaries and friends,” Rice says, “whereas Jenny was always kind of like standing toe-to-toe with Conor [Oberst]. That’s kind of their generation. I was much more just looking around and learning and was nowhere near…”

When he trails off, Lewis helps finish the thought: “You weren’t entirely heated, as we put it.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t heated.”

“If you’ve got heat,” she explains, “you’re writing some sweet lyrics.”

Rice describes a scene from those pre-heated days: “My first musical experiences with Jenny were sitting in Conor’s basement in his old house in Omaha, and there’s a circle of people passing around guitars, and it’s Gillian Welch, Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, M. Ward. So when the guitar would come my way, I would, like, pretend to throw up or something.”

That was a long time ago. Sometime after, when Lewis’ roommate moved out of her small Silver Lake apartment and Rice moved in, the close proximity bred co-writing; after all, melodies sung in the kitchen easily carried to the living room. Along the way, there was also a mutual exchange of musical education. “She really gave me a master class in indie rock,” says Rice, offering early Modest Mouse and Pavement albums as examples. He returned the favor by introducing her to classic recordings by Bob Dylan and Neil Young’s On the Beach.

These days Lewis and Rice – or Jenny and Johnny, if you like – do what they do as songwriting peers. “You know,” he reflects, “it’s one of the most intimate things you can do with another person is somehow, you know, be…cerebrally involved with them in their creative thing.”