Jenny Lewis Embraces Her "Acid Tongue" for "Black Sand" Video

It's no secret Jenny Lewis has been living in California's Laurel Canyon, the home of a brand-new generation of hippie songwriters (see our report, The Return to Laurel Canyon). And she told the Smoking Section the title track from her latest album, Acid Tongue, recalls one specific (and not so fabulous) experience with LSD when she was 15 years old: "I was so desperate to get back to normal I decided to drink an entire gallon of orange juice. I saw that it was in the fridge and decided that this would sort of flush the LSD out of my system, but I didn't realize that it did exactly the opposite."

But her new video for "Black Sand" may be the trippiest thing Lewis has produced yet. The clip layers multiple shots of her singing over vintage-looking footage and starts out charming: "I fell in love with a boy on the black sand," Lewis sings over images of smiling children crawling and sunny beaches. But as the song builds, the video's metaphorical treatment of "black sand" turns eerie. As a final touch, Lewis hits the hook in her upper range as weather pattern images of a developing hurricane swirl behind her.

Although her "intimate" club tour winds up in early July, you can expect to see a whole lot more of Jenny when the singer premieres her documentary Welcome to Van Nuys, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Acid Tongue. "We set up three cameras in the studio during the entire recording process and we kind of left them rolling and over the past year. It's taken me about a year to sift through all the footage," she told Rock Daily, adding the film was partly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's Rolling Stones doc Sympathy For The Devil.

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

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