Woe betide anyone who asks budding rockstar Juliette Lewis just how serious she can be about this whole "indie musician" thing after spending her entire adult life as a movie star.
"Really?" Lewis says, her disbelief obvious even over the phone from Washington D.C., where her band is busy driving from one raucous East Coast show to another. "Well, I took four years off (from acting) so I could just tour, tour, tour. ... A lot of people assume that because I've been in films I can just start making records, but in reality it just means that it's easier for me to get interviews where other new bands can't. ...There was no sense of security (for my band), no safe way for me to just return to my ‘other' career. I don't do movies while I'm on tour. At most, maybe I could do a short one over Christmas. So yeah, music's my main gig."
But if Lewis, whose band The New Romantiques will play at Boulder's Fox Theatre on Oct. 6, remains unsettled after major turns in everything from "Cape Fear" to "Grand Theft Auto IV," that's just the way she likes it.
"I don't like repetition," she says. "I always want to feel unsafe artistically. ... As a kid, I was always going to do music and drama, but then I got successful with films at a young age and I got comfortable. You know how you can get married to your job? Then all of a sudden I was approaching 30 and I realized if I put (music) off any longer, I was going to be looking back at 50 like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?'"
Lewis says her drive was among the reasons her previous band, the Licks, broke up. While the various members wanted more downtime or to play more mainstream rock songs, Lewis was lining up more concert dates and noodling around with funk riffs and piano ballads. Earlier this year, the Licks split and she assembled The New Romantiques as well as a new, broader sound: The group's first album "Terra Icognita" was produced by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the decidedly weird Mars Volta, whom Lewis met at a music festival in Japan.
"Most people look at me through ignorant eyes," Lewis laughs. "They don't get what a snowball's thunder I can be. I played some piano demos for Omar that were very vulnerable, very personal. He could have laughed in my face, but he didn't. He gets what I'm doing."
Lewis, whose only formal music training is in voice and piano, says she thinks about music in a more visual context than most musicians. But Rodriguez-Lopez operates the same way, she says.
"I'd tell him what sound I was thinking of, like, ‘It sounds like fairy lights,'" she says. "Then he'd ting on some weird piano thing and make a sound that felt right. ... That's my relationship with sounds; what they make me feel like."
Because music is so personal to her, most of Lewis' songs are about her own life, either literally or metaphorically, she says. As she and her fans have come to embrace this, her live performances have become increasingly improvised.
"It's crazy," she said. "Even before, the Licks live was something different from the Licks on an album. But now I'm even more able to do spoken word over a beat or just make shit up out of something the audience gives me. It's like the weirder I become, the more the audience is going with me."
While Lewis says all of her performances, on screen and off, come from a similar place ("At the end of the day, it's all energy," she says), there's not as much common ground between music and acting as many people believe.
"Coming from acting, it's definitely not the same thing," she says. "Physically, recording an album is not very demanding. I just finished a movie (‘Whip It') with Drew Barrymore where I did a month and a half of roller derby training. But actually making this record scared the shit out of me. They're very different challenges.
"At the same time, I don't think Mick Jagger is ‘on stage' Mick Jagger when he's out buying groceries. There's definitely a heightened sense of reality (performing live). It's your job to connect with God and every single soul in the room."
So far, she says, the job seems to be going well.
"One of the proudest things for me is that my audience comes from all walks of life," she says. "Young and old, gay and straight, poor and privileged. ... We did the Warped Tour (one year), and the demographic there is 12 to 18. Those kids didn't know shit about my movies except for maybe ‘Old School,' which I just did for shits and giggles. It was basically a cameo. So I was just another underdog to them, which was cool."
Lewis, who has previously played at Red Rocks and elsewhere in Colorado, says she is looking forward to the return trip — especially for dietary reasons.
"It had a good vibe," she says. "I like places that have health food and lots of independent stores."
One constant at Lewis' performances are her psychedelic outfits, which run the gamut from glam to Village People chic.
"I picture myself as a little pixie in the middle of the jungle," she says of her ensembles. "I'm very inspired by Tina Turner and (David) Bowie. I've got a headdress and a belt with a bunch of sashes that I tie around my body ... basically, I gotta bring my feathers everywhere."
On the personal front, Lewis, who in the past has been involved with Brad Pitt, skateboarder Steve Berra (they married and later divorced) and Kurt Cobain's former nanny, is now in a long-distance relationship with another musician.
"I met a very nice man," she says, insisting that he is not anyone famous, nor does he live in Los Angeles. "Both of us are always on tour, so we'll see."
For more information about Juliette and tour dates, visit her MySpace.
