Wiki
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Release Date
30 October 2015
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Length
11 tracks
Singer/songwriter and underground comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis is known for writing sharp, literate, touching, and often hilarious songs, but Manhattan (his seventh full-length album for Rough Trade) focuses on tales relating to his home borough, resulting in some of his most personal songwriting to date. A few songs, such as "Scowling Crackhead Ian" and "Sad Screaming Old Man," paint lyrical portraits of eccentric characters, but most of the songs focus on personal issues such as relationships or music industry woes. Lewis is at his most immediate and rocking on "Outta Town," a fun, rollicking number about forgetting how to do basic, everyday things while his girlfriend's away visiting her family.
As great as Lewis is at penning punchy, acerbic songs like these, he's still a master at taking his time to craft a calmly paced narrative, as best exemplified here by the jaw-dropping eight-minute centerpiece "Back to Manhattan," which chronicles a breakup taking place during a 40-minute walk home from Brooklyn, returning to the phrase "they're in the home stretch but our path is just starting" under different contexts. Lewis concludes the album with "The Pigeon," a Lower East Side retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," loaded with modernized Jewish humor.
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