Twenty Years of Jenny Lewis' Rabbit Fur Coat
This review originally appeared in the May 02 and 03 edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
I remember the first time I heard Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins’ 2005 album, Rabbit Fur Coat. I can remember the way the air tasted, how it felt blowing through the rolled down window of my best friend’s Honda Element when we were finished shopping at the skate supply store.
It was my best friend, Stacy, me, and two other girls who’d joined the new roller derby team. We’d spent the last several weeks learning to skate on our baby-deer legs. That day, we’d gone shopping, looking for long socks, skate tools and helmets, knee pads and wrist guards, but also body glitter and fishnets. When we were heading back to Conway, where we were all college students and part-time workers in retail and fast food, Stacy put a new CD into the player.
“But she will wake up wealthy
And you will wake up 45
And she will wake up with babies
There, but for the grace of God, go I”
“Who is this?” someone else asked. I stared at the analog digits of the clock, felt the way something in me shifted to meet Jenny Lewis’ voice rising up from the stereo system and blowing away in the window, out into the world.
It was like everything I’d heard before and nothing like it at all. Here were the sounds and language I had grown up with, grace, God, the angel sounds of my church congregation on Sunday morning, but employed in new ways, to ask questions, to point fingers, to indicate a fear in me that at twenty years old I felt but could not articulate. That life could slip away from you, could turn into something else while you weren’t looking.
Stacy told us the album title over the sound of soul and gospel filtered through California sun. Jenny Lewis sang her soulful ballads all the way home and I dreamed of a rabbit fur coat, knew what she meant somehow without knowing at all.
This was in the summer of 2011, five years after the album’s initial release. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already familiar with Jenny Lewis. She was the female vocalist in the Postal Service’s one and only album, Give Up, the indie album that is still a kind of a totem for millennials, the band that launched a thousand other bands. She was also the lead vocalist of indie-rock band Rilo Kiley. Two bands that held hands over the divide of emo and indie, with sad lyrics and upbeat tunes, the kind of music that asked us to go dancing into a sad, absurd future.
Rabbit Fur Coat represents her coming out as a solo act and is a sonic and lyrical departure from her time with Rilo Kiley and the Postal Service. Rabbit Fur Coat is slowed down, pared back, a conversation and a reckoning. It’s a deeply personal album with heavy influences of soul and gospel, sung with the spiritual conviction that only the lost can feel.
Jenny Lewis, before becoming an indie rock star, had a first career as a child actress, with roles in movies like Troop Beverly Hills alongside Tori Spelling and Shelly Long. She grew up in California as the breadwinner for her family. The title track of the album is a semi-autobiographical narration of her difficult relationship with her mother, the pressures of growing up in the spotlight, and material need and desire. The iconic rabbit fur coat is a symbol of wealth and status, but also a kind of desire, a desire the lyrics admit she isn’t immune from.
“But mostly I’m a hypocrite,
I sing songs about the deficit,
but when I sell out and leave Omaha, what will I get?
A mansion house and a rabbit fur coat.”
The album is a search for personal belief and meaning with the tools at hand—soul music, gospel music, her family’s legacy—but also an attempt to move beyond them, into new territory.
This is the music I am always drawn to, lyric forward, storytelling music that rewards self-insertion. Simple, emotional music that does a good job of laying it out there. I burned a copy of Stacy’s CD onto my computer and downloaded it onto my iPod shuffle (RIP).
The album followed me around through the next semester of college when I travelled abroad, though the sunny sound of Jenny’s voice barely fit into the gray English days, it followed me past my years in roller derby.
Jenny Lewis went on tour with the Watson twins during the ten-year anniversary of the album and I remember talking about making a trip to see one of the performances, but I can’t remember why I didn’t go. Money, probably.
One spring, on Independent Record Store Day, around 2016, I bought a used copy of the CD and gave it to a friend, like a shorthand for our understanding each other. We played it on the drive home, the windows down, the spring air a little cold. I had to hold my tongue to keep from singing along, I wanted to make sure she got to hear Jenny do it.
In 2018, pregnant with my daughter, I saw Jenny Lewis perform in Fayetteville at George’s Majestic. I went with the same friend I’d given the CD to at that record store. Lewis didn’t play much from Rabbit Fur Coat. In interviews, Lewis has said that she doesn’t like to perform those songs much. She told Vice during the ten-year anniversary tour that performing those songs, especially the four-minute-long title track, made her “feel very exposed” with the audience, just her alone with her guitar.
I wasn’t disappointed. I’d been listening since then, following along with all the experimenting and genre shifting that Lewis had been putting out since then. I’d gone from a roller derby college girl to an editorial assistant at a literary magazine before finding myself working for a chocolate company and getting ready to have a baby. I felt like I’d done plenty of genre shifting of my own, but there’d always been Jenny Lewis and there’d always been that rabbit fur coat.
I put the album on for my daughter this week, not for the first time, but I told her again how she’d gone to that concert with me, tucked into my tummy. “Best seat in the house,” I said.
She gasped, amazed that she’d done that. I realized there’d been a literal lifetime now between the concert and that moment—my daughter’s lifetime.
Jenny Lewis’ voice through my speaker, angel sweet and soulful, brings me back precisely to the moment I first heard it, in my own messy middle. In my own reckoning with my badness, with my losses, my grief at the life I’d thought I’d have and the one in front of me.
Somehow, I’m the same person I was that day in my friends Honda Element every time I hear it, but I’m also the person I was when I was singing it alone in my room, the one walking around trying to make a movie of my life with the soundtrack playing through my headphones. I’m the woman at the concert on the edge of motherhood and I’m the mother singing it to her daughter while we drive home, a story of how many ways a mother can betray a daughter.
Part of this is the time travel power of music. Part of it is the fact that even with all the years, there are some things that don’t change. I am still realizing, for the first time, all the things I realized then. I am still all these people layered together, stitched by the music and my memories of it.
I don’t want to go back, but I am glad to know they are all still there.
