When we last saw Jenny Lewis, she was headlining Sunday night at XPoNential Music Festival 2022, playing to a loving crowd gathered around the Wiggins Park river stage and teasing new songs as well as old faves. Flash forward three-quarters of a year, and she’s back in Philly and headlining The Met with a stellar new record under her belt.
Joy’all is the latest in an impressive catalog of work for Lewis. While she might not be the most prolific artist of her generation — The Mountain Goats have released 12 albums in the same time span that she’s released five, for instance — the caliber and consistency of her work is practically unmatched. In other words, she takes her time, but it’s worth the wait. With empathetic character sketches, introspective personal ruminations, witty wordplay and classic melodies, her music always hits hard and connects at a big level, and her discography is full of great record after great record, rather than a longer list of pretty good records.
Jenny Lewis | photo by Ben Wong for WXPN
At The Met last Thursday, she stretched out and showcased most of those corners of her career, absent only any selections from her solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat. (Which, kind of a cool move considering how strongly her setlists leaned on that acclaimed album earlier in her career.) “Joy’all” skidded and shuffled coolly, “Apples and Oranges” and “Cherry Baby” were delightful pop highs with notes of Nashville and Southern California, respectively. A couple songs from the game-changing 2014 album The Voyager kicked the set off, selections from On The Line raised the roof, and 2008’s sometimes-overlooked Acid Tongue showed up in the title track (which ended the main set with a raw round-a-single-mic performance with her bandmates) and the show-closing dance tune “See Fernando.”
For the encore, Lewis brought out openers Cass McCombs and Hayden Pedigo to cover a McCombs song, “Dreams-Come-True-Girl.” Lewis explained that he’s one of her favorite songwriters — but lest we needed a reminder that most people in the venue felt the same about her, the encore also featured a selection going back to her time in the beloved aughties indie rock band Rilo Kiley, the spine-tingling singalong “With Arms Outstretched.” I knew she’d been playing Rilo songs on this tour, but I was not emotionally prepared to hear this particular Rilo song, and the 3,000-strong room raising its voices to sing “It’s sixteen miles to the promised land / and I promise I’m doing the best I can” affirmed that Jenny Lewis is one of the contemporary greats of American songwriting.