Kevin Bronson on September 30th, 2015

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When Johnathan Rice plays the Bootleg Theater tonight, it’ll be his first solo show in quite some time — although the Scottish-American singer-songwriter hasn’t exactly had his feet up on the coffee table.

Since his third solo album “Good Graces” came out two years ago, Rice has performed live with many in his wide creative circle, including his frequent co-writer and girlfriend Jenny Lewis, and Blake Mills. He and Lewis wrote seven songs for the Anne Hathaway movie “Song One,” almost all of which were performed by the film’s co-star Johnny Flynn, and the duo collaborated on the tune “Cold One” for the new film “Ricki and the Flash,” which stars Meryl Streep.

With its beautiful, dusky odes to romance and resignation, “Good Graces” came three years after the well-received Jenny and Johnny album “I’m Having Fun Now” and spoke to the fact that a solo artist is hardly ever alone; Lewis, Z Berg, the Watson Twins, Dawes’ Wiley Gelber, “Farmer” Dave Scher and Jason Boesel all helped Rice realize his songs. It is likely to be so with his next solo album, which he says is almost completely written and is “about cowardice and debauchery.” (He’s also seeking a producer.)

Now ensconced in the San Fernando Valley, I caught up with Rice, 32, at a locals-only restaurant for a conversation that covered, in no particular order: writing songs for film; the Valley and life in L.A.; running backwards and that certain thing that is “so J and J.” File under wryly humorous:

It seemed like “Good Graces” didn’t have the legs a record of its caliber should have.

I did a 25-city tour when it first came out. It came out on this record label SQE that did this weird thing that labels can do nowadays, which is vaporize into thin air. All the people who worked at label were very nice and very well-intended, but it kind of evaporated right when my record was out. It was my first time releasing a record independent of a major label, but I’ve since gotten record back and I’ll likely re-release it at some point.

Some people don’t get their records back in such cases.

Some people do the Def Leppard thing and re-record it.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going through personally when you’re writing and recording an album, but when you listen to it later, or are rehearsing it, you think, “Oh, that’s what I was talking about. That’s what I was feeling.”

Would you do anything different if you had a do-over?

I don’t think so. I’m very proud of it. Even when I go back and listen to it now, I learn about my life. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going through personally when you’re writing and recording an album, but when you listen to it later, or are rehearsing it, you think, “Oh, that’s what I was talking about. That’s what I was feeling.”

Like looking at old photographs?

Exactly. I feel in many ways it’s my best solo album, but I’m 90% done with the writing of the new record, and all of those songs seem to be about cowardice and debauchery.

Inspired by what series of events?

A lot of things, and most of them not very serious at all. The tentative title for the record is “Coward’s Night” and I definitely want to work with an outside producer. I want to be produced. I want to be told what to do, within reason.

Is that an outgrowth of your having done a lot of production yourself?

It is, but I must add the caveat that most of the production I’ve done is co-production. Jenny Lewis and I have produced a lot of music together, and I’ve started producing a lot of stuff with Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes. So I love to co-produce. [For my new album], I don’t want to use the same palette of sounds and ideas and approaches. I want fresh blood, and be able to dump a bunch of songs into someone’s lap and say, “How do you think of these things?”

A lot of the songs I’ve been writing are influenced by this Frank Sinatra record called “Where Are You?” It’s one of his more downbeat albums; it has “The Night We Called It a Day,” which is the song Bob Dylan recently played on the penultimate episode of Letterman. … Besides, nowadays you have to get a big celebrity producer — you can get a day and a half of press out of it. [Chuckling]

You need major bank to get a celebrity producer, though.

There’s that or there’s blackmail.

Do you have a person in mind?

I do have a couple of people in mind, but I’d like to text them first.

Are you at a stage where you feel like you need to be pushed a lot? Or do you just need to be massaged?

I’d like to be pushed. That’s how I’ve always learned. I’ve always been sponge-like when I watch other people work. And I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really great people over the years.

There’s a lot of collaboration in everything you do, especially with Jenny.

It’s almost 2016, which means Jenny Lewis and I have been writing songs together for 11 years. I look back on that record, and I’m really proud of it. The reason we wanted to call it a new project is that we felt we merged our lyrical and musical personalities until it warranted calling it something else. And it was the very beginning of our developing a merciless style of writing with one another. There’s zero barrier when we are talking about writing songs. We had written enough that we weren’t so precious about critiquing one another. And we were really using our voices to make one character out of two, or sometimes answering back and forth in a conversation.

And in retrospect I think that’s why we’ve been able to starting writing songs for other people. We wrote songs for “Song One,” the Anne Hathaway film, which [meant] essentially writing for a character that me, Jenny, the director and the producers collaboratively created. You know, a guy who had a fictional backstory. We had long conversations with the Johnathan Demme and Kate Barker-Froyland about the character. … When we created a song for Meryl Streep’s character Ricki Rendazzo in her last film, it was the same process.

It takes a certain level of maturity to write songs that way, doesn’t it?

It does, and I don’t think without the Jenny and Johnny project we would have developed that kind of camaraderie as songwriters. Because I can really tell on certain songs that the ones we write together are different than the ones we write separately. It’s an absolute necessity that both exist, and you have to know when to work together and when not to work together. You have to have, as Virginia Woolf said, “a room of one’s own.”

And a certain thickness to your skin?

That’s absolutely true, but that’s all been broken down. One still prickles, of course.

You wrote your last album in New York. Are the new ones being written here?

They’re all L.A.

To me, at the moment, it feels very dark and brooding and strange to me in L.A.

Inspired by L.A. in any way? You said it was about cowardice, after all …

Definitely. Not necessarily a bunch of geographical references, it’s more like about a lot of the broken people that are my friends, and the situations we find ourselves in. To me, at the moment, it feels very dark and brooding and strange to me in L.A.

But not long ago I think you mentioned that everything seemed to be firing on all cylinders here, at least among people in your creative circle.

That’s still true. Maybe it’s just because it’s been real hot the past few days and my brain’s been boiled, but I mean it as a compliment that it seems that way. The perspective of a lot of the new songs is kind of this debauchery that’s going on in this beautiful place with all this beautiful people while we enter the final stage of man.

That could be true. If mankind is going to end, I definitely want to witness it in L.A. It seems to have unique way of hiding its broken people.

It’s almost a prerequisite that you have to mask that and present a facade of well-being, health and success. Underneath that, there’s this really paralyzing anxiety. Because when you’re here and you’re really close to it, you’re mingling with people who are really successful and people who are just clawing to get at it, and they’re all at the same bar. And using the same dealer.

But there is more good work coming out of this city than ever before. It’s become a destination for creatives in spite of its many faults.

Certainly in my creative and social circle, it’s a very safe and beautiful place. Last week I played with Blake Mills at the Palace Theater, and at one point we all were onstage at the same time and I thought, “Wow, my friends are really really doing something here.” It’s amazing, and it offers just the right amount of support and competition.

Are any of the songs from “Song One” ever going to be performed by you and Jenny?

Yes, I’ve started to perform some of them. I’m going to do some at the Bootleg. Personally, I think they survive out of the context of the film. And with Jenny recently we performed the song we wrote for Meryl, “Cold One.” I’m as proud of that song as any I’ve been a part of.

It’s extremely serendipitous that we were involved in that project. Because we had worked on “Song One,” Jonathan Demme was the executive producer of that, we hit it off with him. [Later], when we were in New York working, he emailed me asking if there was any we could meet with Meryl Streep. I said, “Sure we’ll move some stuff around.” [Chuckling]

Because it was such short notice, we hadn’t had time to read the script before the meeting. She said, “Well, my character is a cover band singer who is from the Midwest, but she’s moved to the Valley and tried to make it big in L.A. as a rock star. And it didn’t really happen. But she’s still holding onto the dream, and her expectations have been managed to where she’s a cover band singer in the Valley. She gives her all to it and has this really strange relationship with her family.” And Jenny and I look at each like … Because Jenny’s mother was a cover band singer from the Valley, and the main relationship in the film was this mother-daughter tension. We looked at each other and thought, “Maybe we should tell her a few things about our lives …” Meryl was rather shocked. You couldn’t make it up.

Anyway we wrote several songs for the film, but the only one that made it was “Cold One.” What we were aiming for was profound simplicity, and the only direction Meryl gave us was: “Write me something without an apology.”

That’s an interesting instruction.

For us, that’s just the type of thing that sets us off. There’s not much apology in our stuff … maybe a little resignation, but no whining.

We spend a lot of time in the San Fernando Valley; that’s definitely our canvas. We used to live in Silver Lake but made this decision to move back here. It’s its own world. Certainly less pretension, and there are more people aren’t in lockstep with the facade we were talking about earlier. There’s a realness to it.

I feel that …

Oh, and one other anecdote from Meryl. [At one point,] she said, “You know, I look around and there’s not many people my age I can look to who are still doing it. And when I bump into somebody who is, I like to talk to them about what they do to stay inspired. When I was at a Stones show and talking to Mick [Jagger], I asked him. And he said, ‘I don’t know, running backwards.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I run backwards every day.’”

I think what she was giving us was metaphor for staying vital, but every since that day I’ve been doing some running backwards. You know, to work some different muscle groups.

Is there going be another Jenny and Johnny record?

I think so, but in many ways the second Jenny and Johnny record is on the “Song One” soundtrack. We gave seven or eight songs to that. And we have been busy giving out songs to others. I think I said to a friend of mine the week that “Ricki and the Flash” came out, “By the time the weekend is over, more people will have heard something I’ve done because of that film than in the entire 15 years or whatever I’ve been working.” Thank whatever benevolent force there is for that.

Sometimes I’ll play a piece of something I’m working on and Jenny will say, “Oh, that’s so J and J.”

Is there just a certain creative direction that lends itself to collaboration?

Sure … Sometimes I’ll play a piece of something I’m working on and Jenny will say, “Oh, that’s so J and J.”

It’s your own household genre, right?

It’s generally something that sounds sweet but ain’t.

That’s the best review of the Jenny and Johnny record I’ve ever heard.

[Laughing] Sure, I’ll sit here and review my own records all night.

In one interview, you referred to yourself as “part-creep.”

I think that’s true. Any man that isn’t is no friend of mine.

You have to be to be a songwriter, right?

There’s a certain withered archetype of a singer-songwriter that you have to be aware of. And I think when I was very young, growing up and idolizing Townes Van Zandt, Waylon Jennings, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake or whoever, there seems to be a self-destructive element there. You have to be careful if you end up in it. I’ve had a strange and beautiful life where I’ve had a chance to rub up against some of the people I idolize, so I’ve seen them in their mortal form and know that their life is not just what’s in a rock biography. You have to make sure that the habits that you form because you think that’s part of the gig don’t kill you. And they will try.

So is the Bootleg show part of a tour?

It’s a warm-up for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, which Conor Oberst invited me to play.

I owe a lot to him. He’s a dear friend. He invited me out for a drink one night in 2002 when I was 19. He and I found ourselves in New York at the same time. We were very young and trying to do as much damage as we could out there in the very hedonistic post-9/11 climate. We went to a mutual friend’s apartment, and in that apartment were him and a few other people, like Jenny Lewis. And he said, “You should meet Jenny.” So I owe him one there.

Also, I was very much in my gestation period as a songwriter. I was signed to major label when I was 19 after only a year in New York City playing whatever remnants of the folk circuit were left there. And was under a lot of pressure from Warner. They thought they were signing another John Mayer or Jason Mraz, and with great respect to those artists, I am not them. When I met Conor and that crew — a bunch of Nebraska transplants — it really reinforced the notion that the words matter and the message matters, and it’s not always going to be digestible to a lot of people or sell a million records. He’s always been a guiding light in terms of that.

||| Live: Johnathan Rice plays the Bootleg Theater tonight, with Phoebe Bridgers and Pearl Charles supporting.

||| Stream: “Good Graces” and “In April” from the “Song One” soundtrack, written by Rice and Lewis and performed by Johnny Flynn