EP Review: HOWL by Lee Lewis
Lee Lewis builds six soul songs around one affair, from honeymoon to hardened exit. He writes about wanting a man who wrecks him, and you believe every reason he gives.
Most records about a breakup are written from the other side, when the singer is no longer in love enough to make such decisions, to sort the mess of it all. HOWL is from the near side, where the Los Angeles soul singer Lee Lewis already knows where it’s headed, and he walks further into it anyway. It’s his love songs, to other men. The record is a what-the-fuck you tell a friend they have to leave, and he stays. He’ll even tell you what he’s getting out of it.
The first song Lewis starts on is the honeymoon, but the mold is already in it. “Forever & You” is pure devotion; he can’t detect the deceit. Both choruses are asking the exact same question: “Do you miss me?” But the next shows the bind, it’s been hard for me to cut the cord/‘Cause I still love you like I did before.” He can’t let go of the phone, calls it love. “Your Love (What I’m Dying From)” has even less disguise. “I wanted peace, but you wanted war,” then “pull me closer,” because this love is worth the wound: “I know that it’s over/But I’d do it all over again.” He sings about loving someone “even when I’m bleeding” in the second verse; this injury has been presented as love.
It’s the only non-Lewis song, and the one that turns the screw the most. “Maneater,” the original from Nelly Furtado, he keeps most of the words verbatim: “He’s a maneater/Make you work hard/Make you spend hard,” down to the details. The only substantial alteration is the pronoun change. In Furtado’s song, it was an anthem for women—here, when he sings “He’s a maneater,” it’s about being attracted to other men; the playful warning is the actual pull toward the other man. He cited the song as the sound of middle school for him as a closeted boy; he’s dubbed the cover, “what it feels like to be devoured in plain sight.” The track falls between the songs about fantasy and songs that look back to the future of this, and it makes “Wish you never ever met him at all” no longer a warning about somebody else, but a goal of his own.
Lewis, throughout “White Flag,” surrenders while also standing his ground. He signals the surrender in the hook “Trying to make the best of you and me”), but then reveals that he enjoys the struggle. He likes the “power, the little taste,” and it appeals to him when he is made to say his name. The other man seems to get off on the chase, and Lewis satisfies him by not only submitting gracefully but continuing to do it, “again and again.” The flag turns out to be false, “Can’t make the best of you and me,” and he actually continues the battle, which he says he is exiting. ‘The Long Way’ shifts the accusation onto Lewis. Amidst an aura of wolves and halos—“There’s horns above the halo/I know you ain’t no angel”—he moves from cataloging the other man’s flaws to owning his desire for the collapse. This is where the title of the EP is actually stated in the form of the threat that he lays to the man. He will “fall a long way,” and then “Howl like the moon is missing,” and finally “be the perfect storm.” The warning here is directed toward the man about Lewis.
In “Bitter,” the war has ended, and Lewis is accepting of both himself and his partner as participants in its conclusion. “Since the day I met you, I’ve been fighting,” he sings, and declares the entire scenario out loud: “I took the love, surrendered to your violence.” The exhaustion of the fight, rather than the possibility of its outcome, is celebrated in the chorus, “I’d rather go home tired and beat up/Than spend my whole life stuck waiting on you,” with the sentence clearly established, “The blame is on you.” This is where the M2M aspect of Lewis’s experience is declared in plain English; he acknowledges he “let a grown man treat me like a side piece,” and will now choose to “go home to a better way than misery.” This song means that Lewis is actually going to go home. The repeat of this track after its conclusion will turn the phrase “Forever & You” completely perverse; the man promising to hold on even if he wished not to, had been laying a trap all along. The honeymoon phase had already been a sign.
Favorite Track(s): “Your Love (What I’m Dying From),” “White Flag,” “The Long Way”