Jenny Lewis, Serengeti Share Quarantine Video for ‘Idiot’

Jenny Lewis and Serengeti have released their third quarantine collaboration, “Idiot.” Produced by Lewis and Andrew Broder, the track features Lewis singing a hook over a hip-hop beat (“I’m an idiot/Forget oblivion/Joan Didion/Pacific Ocean blue”) while Serengeti raps a verse that, as he describes, is “about a man who gets knocked out by his mom’s boyfriend and then reconnects with his high school girlfriend.”

“These songs with Dave [Serengeti] start with a late-night feeling and access to — because of where we’re at right now in the world — whatever you have in your house that makes a sound,” Lewis says of the collaboration. “Or, I don’t have Pro Tools, so I use my phone, and I’ve got a little drum machine and a drum kit. Sometimes when I’m doing my vocals, Forensic Files is on in the background. That makes it onto the track because that’s just what’s happening.”

Lewis released an iPhone music video alongside “Idiot,” featuring her dancing around her house in a bikini.

Lewis and Serengeti previously released the tracks “Unblu” and “Vroom Vroom.” The tracks are part of an ongoing series of collaborations between the two artists, who struck up a friendship after meeting at the 2018 People Festival in Berlin. They only began working together in April of 2020, and had to adapt to both the remote nature of their collaboration and the limited tools available to them.

“This year is when people have learned how to do stuff technically because they have to,” Lewis told Rolling Stone. “I think it’s really informed the kind of art people are making. In some ways, it’s more lo-fi, but it’s also more intimate.”

Earlier this year, Lewis appeared on Bon Iver’s “AUATC.” Her most recent album, On the Line, came out in 2019.