Jenny Lewis Writing New Songs, Film Score

It’s been a couple of years since we heard from Jenny Lewis — her last album, recorded with boyfriend Johnathan Rice under the Jenny and Johnny moniker, was released in 2010 — but she’s getting ready to hit the road again, and it sounds like we could be hearing new music from the erstwhile Rilo Kiley frontwoman sooner than later.

Speaking with the OC Weekly about her upcoming I Heart Cali Tour, Lewis was asked about future musical projects, and it turns out she’s been up to quite a bit. “I have been writing,” she admitted, musing, “I guess I’ve been home for almost a year since the Jenny and Johnny tour.” She went on to describe what we might hear next, saying, “I’ve been finishing some songs. I started recording a handful of them. I’ve also been working on a score. My friend is making her first movie, and she asked me to score it.”

Asked to describe her musical evolution in two or three sentences, Lewis said, “Oh man. I don’t know if I could do that,” but she did discuss her songwriting at length. “I tend to write about what I know. Even if I’m writing about a character I’m still writing about things that I observe and how they relate back to me,” she pointed out. “Rilo Kiley is putting together this B-sides collection. We’ve been listening and sorting through all these songs from 1998 and just the tone of what I was writing back then was so sad, so dark. And I don’t necessarily feel like that all the time anymore.”

Looking ahead, Lewis described her current writing process: “I’m trying to write about all of the emotions. I’ve gotten my heart broken, and fallen in love, and moved out [of] my shitty rent-controlled apartment, and lost my father and tried to rebuild my relationship with my mother. All of these things have definitely popped up in my songs, and I want to write something that’s real that people can feel.”