Jeffrey Lewis' On The Road Playlist

(NOTE! I don’t like listening to stuff on headphones while on tour with my band. A tour is a road trip with friends, sharing music and conversations and audiobooks with each other is all part of the group experience. It seems to be bad for band morale when people start disappearing into their private headphone worlds. A band member who starts retreating into headphone time is a band member who’s going to quit soon; it’s like in those Vietnam movies where you can tell from early clues which member of the platoon is going to be the one to crack first!) 

Barry Bliss – March 2017
[How?, 2017] 
This track is from the newest Barry Bliss album How? which we’ve already listened to multiple times on the road, a masterpiece. It’s intense and driven but also kind of funny. It has a guile-less clarity that makes most other music seem phony. Apparently the entire album was recorded, mixed, mastered and released for sale on Bandcamp all within 6 hours or something. Amazing.

Fela Kuti – It’s No Possible
[He Miss Road, 1975]
For those long drives it helps pass the time to listen to some long 17-minute tracks like this one… Fela Kuti is like the African version of The Fall: awesome repetitive riffs that go on forever and then a bad-ass little guy who comes in and rants on top of it in pidgin english. A winning formula!  

Current 93 – The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion
[The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion 12", 2002]
I love Current 93 on all occasions, but especially when on a drive through some foggy creepy landscape in England or Ireland or elsewhere. I love listening to this music while driving alone, and I also love exposing other people to it if I’m in the car with other folks, especially in those foggy situations. Real chills and atmosphere. This song is not necessarily my top-favourite Current 93 track, but it’s a good one and has a particularly good title. I remember listening to this driving on some foggy little roads in Cumbria on tour in a car with Schwervon in 2005. I also have fond memories of listening to Current 93 while driving alone in a car from Dublin to Cork.

Schizo – Paraphrenia Praecox
[Schizo 7", 1972]
A woman in France sent me an MP3 compilation of "Heavy French Psych", I’m not sure if it’s a commercially available compilation or just something she put together herself. This 1972 track is the stand-out to me, I can’t get enough of this one. The sound is lo-fi stoned hard-edged krautrock, like between Amon Düül and Black Sabbath. The lyrics are unintelligible but there’s a line that sounds to me like “that blasted little duck!!” I imagine the singer as a space-villain whose plans have just been foiled by Howard the Duck, or by one of Daniel Johnston’s Space Ducks, and the defeated space-villain is shaking his metallic fist while retreating back to his own nebula, swearing revenge and saying “I would have conquered the galaxy, if not for that blasted little duck!!” Totally awesome. 

Faith No More – Faster Disco
[Introduce Yourself, 1987]
Great track from the Chuck Mosely era of Faith No More. An apotheosis of late-80s alternative music, it sounds to me like a lost and forgotten cultural moment, like a cool weird TV show that nobody you know has ever heard of, that got cancelled after only a few episodes, and maybe you just dreamed that it existed. Sounds good in a rental car.

Chrissy Zebby Tembo – Gone Forever
[My Ancestors, 1974]
I first heard this Chrissy Zebby Tembo album in a bar in Beloit, Wisconsin. My brother and I walked in and heard this sound that immediately made us both run up to the bartender and demand to know what in the world was coming through the speakers. I think it’s from Zambia, 1974, something like that. The voice, the guitar sound, the lyrics, everything about this album is so cool and unique. Since getting into this one I’ve delved into a bunch of other “Zam-rock” records, like Witch and Ngozi Family and others, but nothing holds a candle to this record in my book.

Dave Van Ronk – Losers
[Going Back to Brooklyn, 1985]
I have a few early Van Ronk LPs at home, but this track is from a later album called Going Back to Brooklyn. I got the album from my brother’s laptop, he got the album from his ex-girlfriend’s dad. This solo acoustic song is pretty much instantly charming, perfect for an album’s first song; it really ropes you in with great playing, great writing, great singing. This song could be good to sing around a campfire. In some cars with crappy soundsystems, the only music that sounds good is simple solo acoustic stuff, other stuff sounds too muddy.

Country Teasers – Don’t Like People
[Satan Is Real Again, or Feeling Good About Bad Thoughts, 1996]
When I was on tour opening for the Fat White Family in 2014 they told me that I should check out the Country Teasers, and soon after that I found this CD used in a cool second-hand shop in San Diego. Listened to it all summer and got pretty into it. Haven’t yet found any of their other records and I don’t know much about them but this one is funny and nasty twisted garage-indie awesomeness.

Stanley Brinks & Freschard – The Lottery
[New Cologne, 2011]
There are now about a hundred Stanley Brinks albums, with or without his old band Herman Dune, and under various other solo names. There are also a number of albums by Clemence Freschard, and also some albums they have made together, but this particular collaboration album called New Cologne is maybe their all-time best, and this track is a solid classic. 

Cara Stewart – Song of the Burmese Land
[The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush, 2003]
[This is] also a great song to force other people to listen to, everybody is always like "what is that?!” It’s from one of the compilations of “song-poems” where people would mail in lyrics and get a studio band to put them to music, sometimes with charming, weird or touching results. This is one of my favorite song-poem recordings of the ones that I’ve heard on various compilations, it’s so catchy, with tiki-themed exotica vibes and bizarre and funny lyrics. We’ve listened to this many times on the road!

---

Jeffrey Lewis plays solo Scottish Tour Dates with Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom (The Burning Hell):

4 Sep – Hibs Supporters Club, Leith, Edinburgh
5 Sep – Clark's on Lindsay Street, Dundee
6 Sep – Tunnels 1, Aberdeen
7 Sep – Drouthy Cobbler, Elgin
8 Sep – Blackstairs Lounge, Wick
9 Sep – The Treehouse, Lochcarron
10 Sep – Tooth & Claw, Inverness
11 Sep – Braemar Gallery, Braemar
14 Sep – Community Hall, Knoydart
15 Sep – The Old Bridge Inn, Aviemore
16 Sep – The Mediterranea, Stirling