Jenny Lewis – Voyager

As much as I’ve imposed my musical tastes on my kids through the years (what choice did they have?), sometimes it does come back in the other direction. One of their friends turned our younger one on to this Jenny Lewis album a few years back, and hearing it around the house, I became fairly enamored of it myself. Otherwise, I’d probably never have heard of it. Everyone says, “Oh yeah, from Rilo Kiley.” Well, I don’t think I’d ever heard of them, so that meant nothing. I did hear about her first solo album with the Watson Twins, checked some of those songs out, and decided it wasn’t for me.

Well, this one registered differently. In particular, “Late Bloomer” struck me as one of the greatest story songs written in a very long time. “The Voyager” is dreamy, and the rest of the album is some beautiful, soft, Sunday-morning rock that I like to slot in with April March and some other nice easygoing sounds for a lazy morning. A lovely work that’s been in my collection since March 2022, though the album itself dates to 2014.