LEVY
INTERVIEW CHRISTEN THOMAS
COFFEE SHOP, NEW YORK
PHOTOGRAPHY BRENDAN DUGAN

What was meant to be an hour interview over coffee turned into several nights out with members of the band Levy. Beer-by-beer and story-by-story, the lyrical layers of the band’s self-titled debut record unfolded. During our first sit down together with the entire Levy line-up, James Levy (guitar, vocals, tunesmith, namesake), Mike Jones (drums), Matthew Siskin (guitar) and James Broughel (bass), things did not go all that well. At one point in the interview, Levy turned off the tape recorder to tell me that this was the band’s first interview and they really wanted to put everything on the table, fuck shit up, and get the dirt out. But ultimately, when I asked them how the songs were constructed and who does the writing, I got shot down.
How does your song-writing process work?
James Levy: Uhhh, do we have to?
Are you vetoing that question?
JL: Yes.
OK.
JL: Sorry.
No, it’s cool. It’s your gig.
JL: My apologies.
What’s the worst part about being in Levy right now? This interview?
Mike: This is cool.
JL: I just don’t understand why you can’t ask something meaty.
Something meaty? OK-who’s Regina [in your lyrics]?
JL: She’s an ex-friend of mine.
Is it the Regina I would assume it to be?
JL: Maybe. I don’t know if you know her.
Does she have a record out?
JL: Who doesn’t have a record out?
Is it called Soviet Kitsch?
JL: Uhh…Yes.
When you use people’s names in songs is it always people you know?
JL: It’s so literal for you, isn’t it?
What do you want me to ask? What do you want to say? I feel like I’m not asking the question you want to answer?
JL: No, keep going.
Mike: This is good.
JL: What do you think of the Bang Revolution?
The bang revolution? Like what’s going on with my bangs? (All the boys laugh)
JL: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Matthew: With yours specifically.
I don’t know. [To James] Why’d you do a ‘hawk so late in the game? (All the boys, but James, laugh)
JL: To be honest with you, if you saw the full thing…it’s not a traditional-fuck it, what are you, from Boston? (Silence)
JL: Where are you from?
Yeah, I’m from Boston. What’s that supposed to mean?
At the end of the shaky interview, we went outside for a smoke, and Levy asked if I wanted to go for a beer. Not exactly what I was expecting after our strange and unusual coffee conversation.
Throughout the night, hints were dropped as to why Levy was so sensitive about his lyrics and how the songs should be interpreted. So, the next morning I listened to every word on the record and discovered that there’s something strangely dark about Levy’s self-titled debut (due out in the fall of 2005 on One Little Indian). Just about every song on the record is about fucked-up love. But it wasn’t until I listened to the 90-second track “You Be Sweet” that I started putting the pieces together. The song starts out, “You be sweet/ Don’t cheat/ Turn around on me.” And then the second verse comes in with an uncharacteristic amount of fuzz, distorting the vocals, but underneath the mess, you hear “Julian, oh Julian/ Out with you/ It’s truly a sin to be a has-been of a has-been.” The lines have been drawn connecting the Regina in “Rotten Love” with Regina Spektor, but with this song, it seems obvious that a gauntlet has been thrown down to Julian Casablancas. Upon closer inspection, LEVY explodes in buried meaning.
A couple of days after our awkward coffee-to-drinking meeting, I sent Levy an e-mail laying out my theory about the lyrics, and asking if he wished to confirm or deny. Later that week, we met again in Brooklyn and we finally got blunt.
At its core, Levy is indeed a record about rotten love, an unfolding love triangle. In the up-tempo track “In the Woods,” Levy envisions how an affair may have gone down while Regina and Julian were away on tour. You can almost hear the alleged phone conversations between Levy and Regina in the lines: “She told me that he’s just a friend/ I told her that he’s just a trend/ She told me that she loves me and he’s just a friend.” The havoc it wreaked on his jealous imagination when he sings, “Don’t tell me that you love me if you don’t know why/ I see you kissing him through the window outside.” When Levy talks about Regina choosing Julian, he speaks about an inevitable romance. When the Strokes invited Regina to open on their Room on Fire tour, Julian was the rock king of New York; it’s hard to imagine how anyone could resist that allure.
But lest you think Regina is the sole inspiration behind the heartbreak on this album, listening even closer proves otherwise. On Levy’s final track, “Sunday School,” James sings, “Aaron, my first son/ Aaron, summertime has come/ We go talking/ We go walking/ Your life don’t matter now.” This Aaron, the same Aaron to whom the Strokes dedicated Room on Fire, was Aaron Wilkinson, an integral part of New York’s Lower East Side family of musicians that came together in the early 2000’s. Aaron, who was also Levy’s best friend, tragically died of a drug over-dose. “No matter what I do/ My love is gone/ My best friend’s dead,” Levy sings on “Wednesday.” James mentions to me that if I had met him a few years back, before he had lost both his best friend to drugs and his girlfriend to the Strokes within months of each other, I would have met a very different man.
Ultimately, Levy, the band sounds like a collection of pop songs, but the lyrics themselves harbor a history of deception, heartbreak, death, confusion and betrayal, reflecting the boy-to-man status that the band seems to have achieved collectively, during their time in New York. The album, at times, is a hearty challenge, so I suppose it’s fitting that my first meeting with the band was slightly challenging. But it is gratifying getting through to the core of their incredible duality of a seemingly simple pop band weighted down with a history of pain. That’s why Levy is so great. Every time you come back to the record, you get another layer of the story. And I have a feeling that this is just the beginning.

artist=Levy
Interviewer=Christen Thomas