Jenny & Johnny: Couples Therapy

It’s an innocent, all-American pairing of names to rival Frankie and Annette and their beach parties; a combination of five perky syllables that forecast sunny, youthful romance and all but assure that the story to come won’t get too complicated. It’s Jenny and Johnny. Not Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice. And not Lewis and Rice.

“Well, Lewis and Rice wasn’t as catchy,” says Lewis, the Jenny of the duo. “And it made it sound like explorers.”

“It was a little too Louisiana Purchase,” Rice, A.K.A. Johnny, chimes in. “What’s that thing you say, Lewis, about every girl being that and every boy being, you know?”

“Every girl’s a Jenny and every guy’s a Johnny,” she offers. “Though those are our given names, it’s kind of just like a story between a guy and a girl.”

The thing is, past the name that Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice chose for their new writing and performing partnership, beyond the title of their album, I’m Having Fun Now, and the cover art depicting them canoodling against a light post – him clad in a leather jacket and jeans, she in a miniskirt – the story gets considerably more complicated; there are layers to the songs and the way they sing them.

While this is their first album together, it’s by no means Lewis and Rice’s first productive trip into the studio. Except for Lewis’ four albums with the indie rock band Rilo Kiley and a Postal Service project she sings on, every album either she or Rice has made bears at least a trace of the other’s touch. A co-write, “Behind the Frontlines,” appears on his full-length debut, Trouble is Real; he made musical contributions to Rabbit Fur Coat; and a full half of his album Further North and her Acid Tongue was co-written by the two of them (they were co-producers on the latter). As for goings-on outside the studio, he’s played with her on every single Jenny Lewis tour.

It’s safe to say, then, that Lewis, 33, and Rice, 27, had already worked together in just about every way two romantically-attached singing songwriters could – short of this: an egalitarian collaboration between two voices.

To hear them tell it, this album was both unplanned and sort of inevitable; they share a house near Laurel Canyon that’s equipped with musical gear, and far from any neighbors who’d complain about music-making at ungodly hours while they were suffering from insomnia.

“There was this really rough spot of Asian jetlag that we had coming back from Japan,” Rice explains. “And that can be very disruptive to the soul and body. There’s this room in our house where we keep all the musical instruments and stuff like that. We’d find ourselves there at strange hours of the early morning and night, just jamming, basically. Ideas were really abundant during that time, during this weird kind of jetlag-y time.”

With those song ideas (plus some that were sparked during the Acid Tongue tour), Lewis and Rice began an album with Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder in North Hollywood (without alerting the record label) and finished it four months later with Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis in an extreme Nebraska winter, playing nearly everything but the most demanding drum parts themselves.

Besides proceeding in self-sufficient secrecy, they made the Jenny and Johnny album different from even the most thoroughly entwined of their previous solo efforts by meeting in the middle.

“It was always very clear in the past which one was a Jenny Lewis song and which one was a Johnathan Rice song,” Rice says. “And although we may have contributed to it, you know, it was much more of one person’s identity. But on these songs there are literally songs where it’s like Jenny wrote the chorus and I wrote the verse, or vice versa, and they’re truly, wholly collaborative.”

Even so, they didn’t co-write every song. “But on the ones that we had written on our own,” Lewis explains, “we made a point to be a part of those songs on the record, if that means singing the entire thing in harmony, or playing as many instruments as possible on those songs. So the sound of the songs are collaborative, even if some of them were written by an individual.”

“Definitely there was an intention,” she adds, “to really try and blend together into making a new instrument. …It had to be different enough from what we had done before to be Jenny and Johnny, or whatever we were gonna call it.”

Considering all the duets Lewis and Rice have sung over the years – his heartland rocking “Carpetbaggers” on the Rabbit Fur Coat tour; their breakup number “End of the Affair” on Further North; near-nightly acoustic covers of “Love Hurts” that share more in common with the Everly Brothers than Nazareth – you’d almost expect their album to be a dueting showcase.

But that’s not what I’m Having Fun Now is at all. Sure, they start off the album singing to each other on the lighthearted jangle pop love song “Scissor Runner” and turn to sharp-tongued sparring on the second track, “My Pet Snakes”; but they spend the remaining nine songs singing with each other. Theirs is a teasing vocal interplay of snappy harmonies and sugared oohs, aahs and la la las.