KEY POINTS:
Singer Jenny Lewis tells Kitty Empire about the strains of a life of work - and she's only 32
Who: Jenny Lewis, frontwoman of Rilo Kiley, increasingly a solo singer-songwriter
What: New album Acid Tongue out now
Programmed to self-destruct, child actors are not well known for maturing
into superb singer-songwriters. But Jenny Lewis is made of more silvery stuff than most screen brats.
If Lewis, 32, hasn't exactly emerged unscathed from a childhood spent propping up the cast lists of The Golden Girls and Baywatch, she has escaped the curse of an artistically stunted adulthood. Her terrific second solo album, Acid Tongue , reprises the gift for semi-confessional storytelling of her exceptionally rich debut, 2006's Rabbit Fur Coat.
Where the country-gospel-tinged Rabbit Fur Coat sounded like a side-project, Acid Tongue is a multi-hued stab at cementing the literate Lewis's place in left-of-centre Americana.
"I don't know if I emerged unscathed," she laughs down the phone from Nashville, Tennessee. "I haven't had a run-in with the police or shoplifted anything. I'm relatively healthy and sane, but you can't help but feel exhausted when you've worked your entire life.'
Lewis' parents were show-people; their Las Vegas lounge act also featured her elder sister, Leslie. By the time Jenny was 2, her dad, harmonica player Eddie Gordon, had left. At 3, Lewis became the breadwinner.
Around 18, she shrugged off the yoke of responsibility and devoted herself to music, meeting fellow child actor Blake Sennett and later starting her band, Rilo Kiley, with him. Over the past two years, Lewis' solo songs have given her another creative lease of life.
"It's important for me, having spent half my life working for other people, just to be able to pursue my own ideas and my own vision," she says.
It would be wrong to dwell solely on the psychodramas enacted on her two albums; she is a far more witty and compelling songwriter than a mere launderer of her own dirty linen. Rabbit Fur Coat was about many things - lost faith, imperfect love, house arrest - but the title track dealt with a spectacularly feckless mother-figure.
Likewise, Acid Tongue spans a range of concerns - death, a bad acid trip, carpetbagging - but it features a pair of songs in which errant fathers loom large. In a significant rapprochement, Lewis's father even plays on one track, the roustabout Jack Killed Mom.
She resists the idea that this record takes her father to task.
"It deals with him in that he plays on it, but I don't think that thematically this is a record about him at any stretch," she says. "I really wanted him to participate in my life and the best way to do that was to have him in the studio with me. When you play music with people, there are many things that go unspoken.
"These are characters, for the most part, that I'm writing about," she continues. "There are references [to her parents] but if you listen to the stories in the songs, particularly The Next Messiah, they are kind of celebratory."
So who will she write about on the next album? Her sister? "Oh no!" Lewis exclaims. "She's never done anything wrong in her life!"
- OBSERVER