Ask me and I'll swear to you that I saw Lewis backstage at this year's Pitchfork Festival. Not because he was there—he wasn't—but because there is so much longing in me to fix a real person onto this album called L'Amour that I saw a tall, blond man with an artist's badge and cast him as Lewis in my memory. He was alone; he had the blue eyes, the eyebrows, the long, distant gaze. He kept holding my eye contact in the way a mysterious, singing time traveler might. I kept trying to place him and couldn't, so I turned him into Lewis.
L'Amour and its followup, the recently unearthed Romantic Times, remind me of exactly one other sad, lost album: Val Stoecklein's Grey Life. Originally released in 1968, the album came to me in the summer of 2007 over the speakers of a punk rock clothing store in Cambridge, Mass. I liked its faded strings and soft vocals immediately; I tried to identify it with an app on my Sony Ericsson slider phone and came up with nothing. I asked the cashier, who was happy to tell me all about it: Stoecklein was a more or less unknown songwriter who composed just one solo album alongside sporadic collaborations with bands in the '60s. His career was stifled by bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and he eventually committed suicide at the age of 52.
The detail of his suicide, the cashier told me, was what sold him on the album. How could you not love a document of melancholy that portended actual tragedy? Stoecklein's goneness made the music more real.
But in some sense, a musician's death ends his story. While I love Grey Life, it never hooked me like Lewis and his oblique, messy recordings have done. A dead musician holds a finite amount of mystery; you can long for Nick Drake through his soft, sad discography, but you know exactly where he is. Someone like Lewis, neither dead nor alive but simply lost, pulls you in deeper.
A copy of Lewis's unheard-of second album Romantic Times just sold on eBay for nearly $2,000. The seller, a lucky record collector from Canada, noted in the listing that a search for the record brought up zero hits on Google. It was undocumented, even by the all-seeing eye of the Internet. It had truly been lost.
Now that a few words typed into a search bar can dredge up just about anything you'd like to know about anything, un-Googleable music takes on a rare sheen. What if an artist's anonymity, the shroud around their biography, lasted for longer than a single press cycle? What if a pseudonym wasn't a gimmick to grab blog posts but a cover for a fascinating and unknowable life lived some decades past?
I listen to L'Amour and I keep trying to make out Lewis's words. On a purely technical level, he's not the best singer: His diction is a mess, and his voice keeps sputtering in place of vibrato. The rumor goes that he was on a lot of Valium during the album's one stolen recording session. But there are words there, buried beneath lovely titles like "I Thought the World of You", mingling with preternaturally trendy synths. The bleariness of his delivery combines with the bleariness of his biography. I feel that if I listen hard enough, I'll be able to make out both his words and his identity.
That longing to know an artist who has not died but has otherwise vanished bolstered more than one career since the web started rooting out strange, lost items from history. Almost as much as his music, it was Jeff Mangum's secrecy that launched the fame he's enjoying now festival after festival. He disappeared and gave those of us who dug up Neutral Milk Hotel's albums, demos, and bootlegs the feeling of belonging to a secret society. If we could just dig deep enough, we felt, maybe he would come back from that other world of his we were so lucky to have glimpsed.
Neutral Milk Hotel played to thousands on the second night of this year's Pitchfork Fest. He still keeps as much of that shroud around him as he can, only playing with the festival screens turned off, urging people to put away their phones, and hiding behind one heck of a beard. But we dug deep enough. He came back to play for us.
If music works by simultaneously creating and satisfying desire, then the desire created by a lost artist might be the rarest and most powerful kind. Google exists, so lostness is scarce. But find an artist that can't be Googled, and the desire to know them has to resolve itself in their music alone. The music is all that's left of them. It sounds better that way.