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**Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat**
★★★★☆

There's something deliciously subversive about watching a former child actress transform into one of indie rock's most compelling storytellers. When Jenny Lewis stepped away from the spotlight of Rilo Kiley in 2006, few could have predicted she'd emerge with an album that feels like a lost Gram Parsons recording filtered through the lens of a California girl who'd spent too many nights in dive bars and too many days questioning the American Dream.

*Rabbit Fur Coat* arrived at a peculiar moment in Lewis's career. Having spent the better part of a decade fronting one of indie rock's most beloved bands, she found herself creatively restless, yearning to explore the country and folk influences that had always lurked beneath Rilo Kiley's more polished exterior. The catalyst came through her friendship with Chandra and Leigh Watson, identical twins from Louisville whose harmonies possessed the kind of otherworldly chemistry that can't be manufactured in a studio. What began as informal jam sessions in Lewis's Los Angeles home evolved into something far more substantial – a full-blown artistic collaboration that would produce her most emotionally raw work to date.

Musically, the album occupies that sweet spot where classic country-rock meets indie sensibility, where Emmylou Harris might bump into Mazzy Star at a honky-tonk and decide to form a band. Lewis's voice, always her secret weapon, sounds particularly vulnerable here, stripped of the production flourishes that occasionally masked her emotional range in Rilo Kiley. The Watson Twins provide the perfect foil, their harmonies wrapping around Lewis's lead vocals like silk scarves in a desert wind. It's Americana music for people who grew up on MTV but found salvation in their parents' record collections.

The album's opening salvo, "Run Devil Run," sets the tone with its hypnotic guitar line and Lewis's world-weary vocals painting pictures of small-town desperation and big-city dreams gone sour. It's followed by the title track, a meditation on mortality and materialism that finds Lewis contemplating her grandmother's possessions with the eye of a poet and the heart of a granddaughter. But it's "The Big Guns" that serves as the album's emotional centerpiece – a devastating account of family dysfunction that manages to be simultaneously specific and universal, personal and political.

"Rise Up With Fists!!" represents the album's most adventurous moment, a seven-minute epic that builds from whispered confessions to full-throated gospel, with Lewis channeling everyone from Johnny Cash to PJ Harvey. The Watson Twins shine brightest here, their voices creating a cathedral of sound that transforms Lewis's narrative into something approaching the sacred. Meanwhile, "You Are What You Love" strips everything down to its essence – just Lewis, an acoustic guitar, and words that cut straight to the bone.

The album's production, handled by Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, deserves special mention for its restraint. Rather than drowning these songs in reverb or studio trickery, Mogis lets the performances breathe, capturing the intimacy of those original living room sessions while adding just enough polish to make everything shine. The result feels both timeless and immediate, like discovering a classic album you somehow missed the first time around.

*Rabbit Fur Coat* stands as a fascinating document of an artist in transition, caught between the indie rock world that made her famous and the roots music that clearly fed her soul. It's an album about growing up, about reckoning with family history, about the weight of expectations and the freedom that comes from finally deciding to be yourself. Lewis's lyrics alternate between the observational and the confessional, painting portraits of American life that feel both nostalgic and contemporary.

Nearly two decades later, *Rabbit Fur Coat* feels like a pivotal moment not just in Lewis's career, but in the broader conversation about what American music could sound like in the 21st century. It helped pave the way for the Americana revival that would follow, proving that country music didn't have to mean cowboy hats and Nashville polish. Instead, it could be as complex and contradictory as the country itself – beautiful and broken, hopeful and haunted, wrapped in a rabbit fur coat that's seen better days but still keeps you warm when the night gets cold.