Jenny Lewis’s house looks like an ice cream parlour. So much so that the singer – and her legion of fans – refer to it as Mint Chip. “Look, it’s very minty!” she trills, taking me on a virtual tour of her longtime place in LA. It’s full of confections, too. There’s a menagerie of instruments, the lagoon-like pebble stone flooring, and the kidney bean-shaped pool outside. That the place was once owned by the Disney animator behind Fantasia and Peter Pan is no surprise; it has an air of magic to it. So too does its current resident, copper-haired, loose-limbed and cross-legged on the brown and turquoise chequered floor.
Her world has always been like this: captivating, colourful, a little off-kilter. Lewis, 47, began her life as a child star, and was always finding herself in fantastical situations. There was the time Lucille Ball called her family home in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, a “dump”, or when her friends and fellow child actors Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio came round to witness a paranormal investigation being led by Peter Aykroyd, brother of Ghostbusters star Dan. “I lived a whole first life before I turned 18,” Lewis laughs now.
