Juliette Lewis energetically follows her muse

A decade ago she was in London, starring in a Sam Shepard play that required her emotions to surface and scald like the bubbles ascending in a vat of boiling tar.

“Fool for Love” was written by Shepherd in the wake of a divorce, when a new love doubled as the thread stitching his cleaved heart back together, healing and stinging at once.

It’s an emotionally turbulent tale, one that required its female lead, Juliette Lewis, in this case, to practically combust on stage from the moment the curtain parted.

“I had to start the play crying and enraged, about to have a fight,” Lewis recalls, her voice rising slightly as if the mere recollection of her performance brought her to the verge of slipping back into character. “And so I listened to everything from Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ to Chet Baker’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ to the Tindersticks to whirl up all these different emotions.”

For Lewis, an Oscar-nominated actress, music has long served as a sort of skeleton key to open the door on any emotions kept locked away, deep inside the characters she portrays.

It’s an important part of her performances.

“I can remember each movie I was in by the music that I was listening to, and also the music that people turned me on to,” the 43-year-old says.

For her role as the forever-frazzled Adele Corners in 1993’s cult classic “Kalifornia,” it’s the Gipsy Kings, Steve Miller and Creedence Clearwater Revival that she thinks of, recalling the times she listened to said artists on the tape deck as she and some of her castmates took road trips through the Southwest.

For her turn as Mallory Knox in Oliver Stone’s flammable, pop culture-skewering “Natural Born Killers,” it’s Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen and Radiohead that come to mind.

“That’s the amazing thing about music: It’s an immediate channel to your emotions,” Lewis says. “I can immediately connect with a Neil Young guitar solo in three chords and feel what he’s saying in ‘Down by the River.’ ”

Now, all of this might seem a tad trivial, an actress explaining but one of the many ways she gets into character, but what Lewis is saying is more than anecdotal for several reasons: One, she’s not just an actress, but also a well-traveled musician who’s toured the world and released a trio of albums ranging from amps-to-11 rock ’n’ roll to soft-hued pop. Two, she approaches making music the same way that she does her acting.

Creatively speaking, they’re one in the same to Lewis.

“I don’t separate music and drama and theater,” she explains.

So, if acting’s about shedding your emotions, your sense of self, in order to channel something new, Lewis wants to provoke a similar response among anyone who comes to one of her shows.

“I want people to just lose themselves,” she says of her live gigs, where she’s a blur of hair and energy. “I actually want them to shed all their problems and all their artifice and just become 10-year-olds.

“There isn’t a wall, there’s no safety net for me,” she continues “What am I channeling? The deepest purpose that there is, which is to connect with other people.”

If Lewis tends to speak with the spirited, yet head-in-the-clouds high-mindedness of a punk rock yogi, her tunes are much more grounded, anchored home by the earthy, dirt-clogged roots of rock ’n’ roll.

After a pair of fist-in-the-air rock records with her former band The Licks and a more diffuse solo album recorded with At The Drive-In/former Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Lewis has put together a forthcoming new EP that was written and produced with Cage the Elephant frontman Matt Schulz and Florence and the Machine keyboardist Isabella Summers.

Though music has long been a part of her life, it wasn’t until Lewis was 30 that she started a band. She initially developed her voice, which is ballsy yet tensile, by singing along to Nina Simone and Billie Holiday records. Then, in the early ’90s, Lewis went to her first rock show, seeing alt-rock game changers Nirvana in their short-lived prime.

“That was real eye-opening, because that Kurt (Cobain) could reach everybody in a room,” she says. “That guy just emanated a volatile sunshine.”

Hey, that’s a pretty unique way of encapsulating the man.

“Yeah!” she exclaims proudly. “I just put that one together.”

Couldn’t that description just as easily be applied to Lewis as well?

“The sun, I get a lot inspiration from the sun. That is a powerful source there,” she says, her words inadvertently self-directed. “It burns you, but it also makes you feel good.”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.