Album Of The Week: Jenny Lewis The Voyager

Track five on the new Jenny Lewis album starts like this: "When I turned 16, I was furious and reckless / Got a Chelsea girl haircut and a plane ticket to Paris." The song is about meeting another American girl over there and sort-of/kind-of falling in love: "How could I resist her? / I had longed for a big sister / And I wanted to kiss her, but I hadn't the nerve." Later in the song, Lewis ends up in a threesome with that girl and with a doofy American songwriter that her soulmate was obsessed with, figuring this would be the only way to get with her at all. Then, the two girls separate and never see each other again. The name of the song is "Late Bloomer," and it doesn't even seem to be ironic. (It's something that Nancy, the other girl, calls Lewis, or the narrator who Lewis is pretending to be, or whatever.) It all seems terribly glamorous, the idea that you could end up in a Parisian three-way at 16 and still think of yourself as a late bloomer. But the song isn't about the glamor of its story. It's about feeling lost, attaching yourself to someone and about doing everything you can to hold on to that person, and about losing touch with that person anyway. It's a song about being lost. And that's what we get with The Voyager, the new album: A series of finely observed, beautifully recorded, impossibly glamorous songs about being lost.