For reasons that did not feel fully explained, the stage had been moved perhaps ten or twenty feet toward the center of the room. After George William Lewis Jr. walked up to it — a small circle filled with guitars, a laptop, and an enormous microphone — he said, perhaps jokingly, that he had requested a rotating stage. “Real ones know this, when I’m nervous I talk a lot,” said Lewis, who has been putting out records since the late 2000s as Twin Shadow. “And this is going to be [like] stand-up.”
Playing Elsewhere, a newish club in his old Bushwick stomping grounds, it was his third show promoting his latest and sixth album Georgie, following similar sets at SXSW and the Barnsdall Theater in East Hollywood. He was joined on stage by an attentive steel guitarist and, packed right under the small stage, a keyboardist. The pair appeared strikingly demure next to Lewis’ entirely denim outfit, which lacked only for a ten gallon hat. Instead, he wore a bandana and an enormous pair of headphones, which complimented the enormous micophone. Sometimes, he would jump up and then down, after singing a song, and then clap his new, crisp leather shoes together. On Instagram, Lewis said of his new album: “I’ve ditched traditional labels, agents, management, and drums for this record. ‘Georgie’ is my most stripped down body of work yet.”
“So, I got one of these targeted ads one time that was like ‘hypersexuality is an ADHD response,’ or something like that. And I got that ad, so I wrote this song, what more do you want?” he asked before he started singing one of these new songs, called “Permanent Feeling.” Before another new one, called “Funny Games,” he was even more frank: “this is about when shit’s fucked up and you know you’re going nowhere.”
Because the stage was not rotating, he would lift up the enormous microphone between each song and then place it in front of a different section of small stage. After doing this for the first two or three songs, he knocked over a beer, which spilled for about a minute before someone in the crowd waved to him and, politely, righted it. “There used to be a time when if I spilled a beer, there would be twenty guys with a towel,” Lewis told him, and us. “I used to have a motherfucker who plugged in my cords too,” he said before bending down to plug in one of his electric guitars.
Opening for Lewis was Vines, who I had learned was not the vaguely disorderly 2000s Australian rock band of the same name, but instead the recent sobriquet taken up by Cassie Wieland, a composer and sometime singer who lives in Brooklyn. She had accomplished some renown as well; her publicist informed me that Wieland recently “went viral on TikTok” with her sumptuously-titled record “being loved isn’t the same as being understood.” Wieland’s publicist reports that this song “recently climbed to #1 on TikTok’s Viral 50 chart, peaked at #4 on Billboard’s TikTok chart, and passed 8 million streams across all platforms.”
Wieland, wearing a t-shirt and backed by both a violinist and a drummer in front of a set of pads , would sing occasionally, lyrics like i don’t mind, i don’t mind, i don’t mind repeated hazily, as if uttered in a dream. The publicist compared her repeatedly to Grouper, the electronic musician from California with a cult following, though the ferocious, purposeful thundering coming from the trio Wieland brought to Elsewhere was more evocative of post-rock indie acts like Sigur Rós or Explosions in the Sky. Shortly, she told us, she would be releasing a debut album of some of these songs called called I’ll Be Here .
In the song “being loved isn’t the same as being understood,” Wieland doesn’t quite sing at all. It is about three minutes long and follows a gently programmed string section moving through an eerily calm basin of sound and her voice can be heard gently ooooing into it.
Some of the captions in the more popular of the about 650,000 TikToks that have used the same seven-second clip from that song, part of a trend called “That Pretty Much Sums Me Up As A Person” include: “My little brother turned down a full ride to college to stay home and help our mom battle breast cancer,” “My gf has stayed with me for over a year and a half despite me having cerebral palsy” and “when I was 15, my dad died from suicide and 3 weeks later, my mom left me and I had no utilies, a eviction notice on the door, and no food.” The way Wieland’s purposeful, deliberate voice ooos through these situations feels both tender and forceful, like the rush of a subway train on an empty summer night. She was a big fan of Lewis, she told us, having had the luck of seeing his SXSW set last month in Austin.
About a decade ago, Lewis made an appearance in “an abandoned mansion in Bushwick” where he confessed to the blog Pitchfork that “girls and guys throw themselves at me a lot.” Born to a Jewish father and a Dominican mother, and raised in what the New York Times called “a backwater part of Florida,” Lewis would move to Bushwick, where the blogs would report that Lewis could “drop a mean bedroom beat.” His songs from this era were bright bursts of romantic tenderness, sugar rushes of chillwave synths held together by Lewis’ Duran Duran charisma and Elvis haircut.
He was still playing those songs but they sounded different now. He opened with one of them, a twinklingly minimalist version of “Castles In The Snow,” from the debut album he recorded in Brooklyn with the dude from Grizzly Bear. I must have listened to that song at least a hundred times before, but I had never heard it played on a sad twanging steel guitar. He did the same, about midway into his set, with “Five Seconds,” another thrillingly fun record from his time putting out music on 4AD, the British indie label that helmed the careers of the Cocteau Twins and the Pixies.
“This is a good mellow Tuesday night thing,” Lewis told the crowd after this version of “Five Seconds.” He went on: “I used to have shows that were rowdy, rowdy shows. I believe in god now, though, and the shows are more chill.”
In the years since, Lewis would move to LA and release two albums on Warner Music, and land a sync in the Cara Delevingne movie Paper Towns. He would do a song with HAIM, he would do a song with Zeds Dead, which he recently reported on Instagram had become his “1st platinum record.” The blog Pitchfork refers to this as his “decade of unsuccessfully chasing Top 40 hits.”
Since then, he’s self-released a self-titled album with a bright folk art cover, and then Georgie, as a press release has it, the “first ever album release” from Dom Recs, a label recently put together by Dan Petruzzi, a decade-long veteran at Okayplayer, and Roxy Summers, a local promoter. I noticed that one of his most energetic fans, earnestly thrilled at every lyric Lewis could bring himself to sing, was wearing a Violator t-shirt and then Lewis sang “Enjoy the Silence” before closing and I wondered if she knew something I didn’t. His version was remarkably faithful and brought out the song’s desire for word-less pensivity in a curious way. Lewis was pensive, nevertheless.
“I was going back to La Isla, on Myrtle. It’s okay. And, I really did have this funny New York-is-the-fabric-of-the-world moment. There was a Hasidic guy, you know, the way they lean forward … I passed by all the white girls coming in from yoga, holding their mats… past the Black dudes chilling on the corner and I thought, don’t get sentimental about New York, you live California now. It’s all good.”
Georgie is out now.
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