Indie girl with the most cake, Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley fame, is now singing with her boyfriend Johnathan Rice, and it is not a stretch to say that the people who were packed at Amoeba hours in advance were here for her and not that much for him. People, guys and girls, simply love her, and since she is so cute and pretty in person, this obviously explains the attraction.
I came an hour and 30 minutes in advance and it was already crowded, as Iman had predicted it. It turns out it is not so easy to get a hold of the persons who are in charge of the shows, and I ended up once again in the third CDs row, but managed to go to the front for the last song.
There was a ultra short sound check during the wait and I was a little surprised people did not even cheer up when Jenny & Johnny came on stage,… quiet crowd… may be they were falling asleep after waiting for hours, may be they were too busy checking their cell phones, the number one activity during these pre-concert waits.
Jenny & Johnny disappeared again for another half an hour which seemed an eternity. They both looked cute together, Jenny, with her long red hair, short black skirt and little red boots, Johnny with his hair hiding his face and his long sleeve Mickey Mouse shirt.
Poppy, catchy, breathy, even sunny, their songs are extremely easy to like with their beautiful vocal harmonies. Definitively, they are big on this, harmonies, they are such a melodious duo.
If the songs seemed very familiar to me right away, it’s probably in part because of Jenny Lewis’ voice, I must have listened to Rilo Kiley too many times! But there is a certain familiarity due to something else, their inspiration comes from many sources, and you will think about Tom Petty (especially on tracks like ‘Scissor Runner’), or about Lucinda Williams, poppier and with a lesser country flare, or even about a modern Roy Orbison (Johnathan Rice played him in ‘Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic!), or about R.E.M. especially on ‘Animal’, and this is without even saying that the song seems to share some thematic similarity with ‘Losing my religion’.
They played, among others I could not identify, ‘Scissor runner’, ‘My pet snakes’, the playful ‘Just like Zeus’, ‘Big Wave’, ‘Straight edge of the blade’ which had a somewhat Rilo Kiley feeling, and the very catchy ‘Animal’.
Jenny showed her skills, playing guitar, bass, drums and keyboard, and they were backed up by a drummer and another guitar player.
Despite an apparent shyness, Johnathan Rice was communicative with the public, joking by saying he was sorry to have interrupted everybody’s casual shopping. They were playing at Amoeba the day of their ‘I’m having fun now’ album release, and since it was their first ‘baby’ together, Johnathan actually used the term ‘gave birth’ to talk about it, may be a wishful thinking.
They closed the set with ‘California’, a song that does not figure on their album, but could as well be, since their music seems to be one of the possible soundtracks of the Golden State.