This little explanation by Jeffrey Lewis was meant to appear in issue 4 of backlash, but due to lack of space was dumped in favour of a longer article about the awesome New York based anti-folker. So we decided to stick it up here, to let the world (well, a very small percentage of the world) know the truth behind one of the biggest myths surrounding Jeffrey Lewis - that he drew the cover for the Moldy Peaches' first album. So here's Jeff in his own words, taken directly from an email he sent backlash sometime after our interview with him in New York (which does appear in issue 4!):

To clear up - I did NOT do the cover for the Moldy Peaches album - as if they would need me to draw that stick figure! I don´t know how or why this misinformation has spread so far and wide in the press. What I did do is the drawing inside the CD of them on stage, which was a drawing of them playing at the Mercury Lounge in New York City, probably from 1999. They didn´t ask permission to put it in their CD and I don´t get credited for it! At least I get credited on the vinyl version of the album. But it´s cool that that drawing got used and has probably been seen by more people than anything else I´ve ever drawn – that CD has probably sold like 100,000 copies! It was just a drawing in my sketchbook that I gave them a copy of. I used to draw a lot of the performers in the ‘antifolk scene.’ Mostly it was like at the open mic at Sidewalk, every single Monday night in 1998 and I´d be waiting for 7 hours to have my chance to perform my two songs and in the meantime I would draw everybody who played.
After a little while I started to get to know more people, I got to be good friends with Grey Revell who I still consider one of the greatest songwriters I ever came in contact with – his albums Crazy Like an Ambush and The Green Train are two of my favourite CDs – I really thought he would be the one person out of all the hundreds in that scene who would be world famous. But he ended up getting married and having a kid and moved out of NYC and stopped performing as much. I was playing the open mic and started playing full shows at Sidewalk and meeting all these people, Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend, Major Matt Mason, etc. Then I left New York to go to Maine for a few months in 1999 and while I was gone Adam Green showed up on the scene and people started telling me in letters about this new kid who was really great who came to New York right after I left. I think the first ever press about the Moldy Peaches was an article in the NY antifolk fanzine Antimatters that was comparing Adam to me, and the similarities in our styles of writing and playing.
At that time I guess we were in similar musical territory, both very inspired by Skip Spence´s album Oar. But underneath that we were actually pretty different from each other, and those differences have developed more and more. For one thing, he was super into Beck who I have never had much interest in. Anyway, this was going on while I was gone. The very night I got back to New York in September 1999 I bumped into Brian Piltin on the street and he took me to a Moldy Peaches show – I think one of their first – the original band which was Adam and Kimya plus some kids from out west, and they were already getting popular in New York. Nobody else was wearing those crazy costumes and doing these really great collaborative male-female songs, and they were super catchy.
As it turns out they already had a copy of my first cassette, and then after they signed to Rough Trade in late 2000 they put some songs from that tape onto CD and recommended it to Geoff Travis, the head of Rough Trade (all of this unbeknownst to me), and he emailed me and that was the start of my ‘career’ as far as having CDs out and playing outside of New York City. So you could say knowing the Moldy Peaches certainly helped me. If not for them and their success and their generosity in turning some of that spotlight onto the other people at the Sidewalk open mic I might still just be playing the open mic every Monday and making my cassettes and drawing everybody. Which I will probably go back to doing as soon as my ‘career’ dies! But we have all gone in some interesting different directions since then, Kimya´s amazing solo material and Adam´s and it´s really cool to get to play shows with them now. I´m always amazed at their creativity.

Words by: Jeffrey Lewis   Pictures by: Holly Donmall