Lilli Lewis Charts her Milky Way before Playing Jazz Fest 2024

Lilli Lewis, by Noé Cugny

Lilli Lewis tells the stories behind the songs that shaped her songs.

“Honestly, I’m not sure my relationship with music has ever changed,” Lilli Lewis told American Highways. “It’s always been this profound, mysterious thing that calls to me from beyond and has saved me over and over again.”

Lewis’ recent All is Forgiven, like Americana before it, presents her at home in that mystery, so much so that trusts it enough to make it the place where the musical, cultural, and aesthetic impulses that drive her come together, regardless of whether they make sense on paper or not.

Roots music is the language she speaks, but she does so because the genres crowded under that umbrella add valences to her songs, not because she needs their conventions to get over.

The Lilli Lewis Project plays Jazz Fest on Saturday, April 27 at 1:35 p.m. on the Lagniappe Stage.

Today Lilli names the songs that make up her Milky Way, the musical universe where her music lives.

“Sinnerman” - Nina Simone

As a classical pianist without a lot of mirrors, "Wild Is the Wind" was the first Nina track to steal my breath and utterly mesmerize me, but the Lilli Lewis Project is more about the rhythmic indulgences one cannot recreate alone on a big wooden box of magic. Well, at least I couldn't. 

I can't hear” Sinnerman” without losing myself to its sacred rhythm. I know I’m the sinner man desperate for redemption, but I’m also wielding that power she belts at the end of the tune. “Sinnerman” makes me feel ancient and indestructible, fragile human as I am. You might be able to sense the remnants of “Sinnerman” in the title track of our first LP, We Belong.

”Cinnamon Girl” - Neil Young
I grew up listening mostly to things that were sweeping and (dare I say) “pretty.” I missed out on so much of the muscle you get out of good ‘70s rock ‘n roll. Neil Young was one of my wife’s favorite artists, but admittedly, I got into her Neil covers more than I vibed with him…until “Cinnamon Girl” came up on one of her mixtapes. Holy wow! I felt like the innocent Catholic high school ingenue who just figured out she liked leather jackets and motorcycles. 

I liked that it didn’t make much sense, that it felt sloppy and haphazard but for the very deliberate, gut-punchy spaces found in the main riff. And I loved the one note solo after the trippy bridge every single time I heard it. 

This song became a theme song in our house. We even recessed to it at the end of our Colorado mountainside wedding. I’m definitely the cinnamon girl now.

”Mountain Top” - Toshi Reagon
Toshi was my introduction to folk-rock, though I had been obsessed with her mom’s group, Sweet Honey In the Rock, for at least a decade before I encountered her music. 

I first heard her name when my mom let me know that she and her mother Berniece would be offering a seminar at Woodruff Arts Center, home to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. I was unable to attend their talk, but the name stuck with me until I ran off to Boston to see  about this singer/songwriter thing. 

There, on my lunch break one day, in a tiny music shop somewhere near the Park Street T, I found her most recent eponymous release. Every track was a revelation to me. She drifted through genres with an ease and self-knowing that still propels me to this day. “Mountain Top” was the song I couldn’t help but keep on repeat, and years later, shortly after I met who would eventually become my wife, I learned that she not only knew the record, but had the same experience with that song! Destiny.

“Tether” - Indigo Girls
Last summer while on tour, I made my wife drive me straight from Maryland to Nashville to make it in time to see the Indigo Girls play the Ryman. It was their second consecutive night there, the supporting band was Larkin Poe, and when they joined IG for that night’s encore, what we got was a version of our favorite song “Tether” that could melt walls.

“Tether” had always been a big song for us, so when the opening organ cranked up, I was pretty much already in tears. As a young couple in Atlanta, Liz took me to see my first Indigo Girls concert at Chastain Park. I had grown up on their music, and every girl who had ever had a crush on me always had some IG song with which to reveal their love. I had obsessed over every lyric on the early records of my youth, but I had somehow missed “Tether.”

Liz, who at the time was known for being too cool for school, (on her own women's college campus she was treated like a miniature Amy Ray), lost all of her cool points by the end of that performance, crying the diamond tears that have since become her signature.

We grew up to form a band together, and would pre-game to “Tether” before our ratty little shows in the Mississippi juke joints we used to frequent. “Tether” always managed to keep us connected to that which mattered to us in life and in music, and it slays me absolutely every time.

Truth be told, The Indigo Girls still get me every time I hear them live. I played 5 shows supporting their small ensemble last Spring, and then subsequently caught them at every stop where our respective itineraries permitted when they were on the road with the big band. Call it making up for lost time since as a poverty kid, I never managed to catch the shows when I was young and The Girls were new. I cried backstage every night. They generated such power and generosity every time they hit the stage. Their shows felt like church camp, just without all the problematic stuff.

That said, my only complaint about “Tether,” their glorious song of songs, is that I always wanted it to go on forever. They fixed that that night at the Ryman.

“You Wreck Me” - Tom Petty
I grew up hearing Tom Petty on top 40 radio, but never made an intimate connection. Then for a little over a decade I pretty much only listened to classical music (and The Indigo Girls). Enter another track on my bad-boy girlfriend’s mixtape and watch my Earth shake again.

While Tom Petty is an absolute staple in our lives, with way too many songs to obsess over to mention here, I have to give the influence spot to “You Wreck Me." I say this partially because it was the breakthrough track. 

For starters, I was so used to analyzing music at that point, but I couldn't figure out what made that song work. It seemed like not much was going on, but everything that was happening was utterly delicious. It was so straight forward and so mysterious at the same time. It became the blueprint for my favorite kind of rock 'n roll, and is the reason why I hear TP's voice in my head when I write songs like the title track on my new record All Is Forgiven.

Without this song I would never have found records like Wildflowers or The Last DJ, or any of the countless albums from TP, The Heartbreakers or even Mudcrutch that have taught me what it feels like to have absolutely everything sitting right in my bones, no matter what life is busy throwing at me.

”St. Teresa” - Joan Osborne
I was also late to the party with Joan Osborne (I'm noticing a pattern here),  but when Relish finally reached my ears, I was captivated by every track. It was earthy, raw, idiosyncratic, even weird at times, but I was in love with how she used her instrument (yes, the voice is an instrument) and how she would bend it, even break it to get the story across. She was in command and I was happy to surrender her world.

In “St. Teresa,” I found something of portal to the sensuality of brokenness. I had lived through the allure of the undertow, and here it was vocalized, primal and “high.”

I have always had an affinity for what were once referred to as "perfect meters," and they especially get me when they are used to tell stories about imperfect people. So even now, songs like my recent "Possible" find their roots in Joan. 

”Run the Voodoo Down” - Cassandra Wilson
I skipped a pre-paid, expensive recording session to see the Dave Holland Quintet play the Regatta Bar in Cambridge, MA back in 2001. I thought I could see the first set and be extra inspired for my session that  was happening just a few blocks away, but that's not how that night went down.

Dave Holland came into my world by way of the opening track to Cassandra Wilson's Traveling Miles. It was “Run The Voodoo Down,” a joint I may have missed had my brother not called me from South Africa to tell me about the amazing artist he heard on the airplane radio that he played to keep himself company on the long flight over.

I immediately looked up everything I could find by her (back then you had to wait for CDs to be delivered by mail if they weren't in the local store) and immediately got hooked.

Cassandra's take on “Run the Voodoo Down” makes the influential list because back then, it was the funkiest ish I had ever heard, and I was living the story she mapped out in the track, the legacy of which still shows up in my lyrics, like in my recent "Drink This Water Child."

This was one of the first songs I brought The Project to play, and we opened with it at our first show, which was actually a birthday party for my 40th, complete with chicken wings and collard greens. Yeah you right!

”Penitentiary Philosophy” - Erykah Badu

I heard this opening track to Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun on the first day of its release and it exploded my world. It made me want to spend the rest of my life finding pathways to funk rock fusion in every possible iteration. I've spoken so many musical languages along the way, but nothing makes me feel more alive than that type of soul and angst ridden frenzy. 

The groove is as tight as it is loose, but the song isn't wasted vibe alone. It speaks heavy truths, though she "tells it slant" as Emily Dickinson might advise. At that time, and maybe even now, I wanted all the airwaves to be filled with that sound.

Incidentally, I never thought I'd hear a satisfying cover of that song, but last fall, the singular Arsene Delay delivered a fire and ice performance of it with The Coven, a collective of woman centered bad asses that can all blow the roof off the muthasucka. The Coven will play a show at d.b.a. On May 1 during the second week of Jazz Fest.