A few months ago, at Greta Gerwig’s 40th-birthday party, Molly Lewis walked in and began to whistle “Happy Birthday.†No one seemed especially surprised. In fact, they knew precisely what was happening — the Whistler was whistling. “Her tone is so specific that everyone in the room knew who it was,†says Mark Ronson, who set up the performance at the request of Noah Baumbach, Gerwig’s husband. Some — including Gerwig — were moved to tears.
Lewis recounts this story while sitting naked, in the middle of a workday, in the so-called ice room at Spa Palace, a popular Korean spa in Westlake. “I appreciate L.A. so much,†she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if I didn’t live here. I really believe that. It’s a city that really cultivates the weird and the wonderful.†Lewis is 33 and has been whistling in an official capacity for the past eight years. It started as a childhood hobby — her best friend since elementary school in Hollywood, Nora Berman, recalls her whistling as early as the second grade. “Her teeth were kinda suited for it,†says Berman. “She had a little space. I remember her making these, like, alien noises.â€
Incidentally, her father, the Emmy-winning director Mark Lewis, mostly makes films about niche subcultures. “He was making stuff about ferret competitions and synchronized swimming and the world-champion hairstylists’ competition in Russia,†she says. When Molly was a teenager, he showed her a documentary about a whistling competition; he thought she’d be interested since she liked to whistle so much. The fact that whistling contests existed in the first place stuck in her head, and when she was 22, she applied for an international whistlers competition in North Carolina. She won her first — albeit slightly A-for-effort-ish — award for her skill: “Whistler Who Traveled the Greatest Distance.†(She was living in Berlin at the time.) The next year, she moved back to L.A. and reconnected with Berman, who, as it turned out, had developed a practice as a performance artist, throwing impromptu poetry readings at McDonald’s around the city. Berman asked Lewis if she wanted to perform, so she took to the PlayPlace stage and whistled the “Queen of the Night†aria from The Magic Flute. It killed. “From then on, I always felt like every performance led to something else,†Lewis says. More specifically, it led her to an unlikely friendship with the actor John C. Reilly, who somehow found a video of the performance. “I said, ‘Holy crap!’ Like, who even whistles like this?†says Reilly over the phone.
He remained a distant fan until he met her at the 2016 Harry Dean Stanton Awards at the Ace Hotel. Kris Kristofferson, Ed Begley Jr., and Father John Misty were performing, and so was Lewis, whistling alongside Karen O to the old spiritual “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.†(Karen O had invited her via DM. “I don’t know how she found me,†Lewis says. “I hadn’t really performed much.â€) Since then, Reilly has made a cameo appearance in Lewis’s music video for her whistled song “Oceanic Feeling,†asked her to join his roller-skating league, and attended her whistling competition last summer in L.A. (she has continued on the circuit).
Being a professional whistler in Hollywood has led to some truly odd jobs. She recorded in the studio with Dr. Dre. (His producer stumbled upon her randomly. He was looking more generally for “dope whistlers.â€) And she whistled at Stanton’s hospital deathbed; their mutual friend Sonny Bones, the actor’s favorite bartender at Musso & Frank, invited her. “He asked me to whistle ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’ and ‘Danny Boy,’†she says. “He was lovely and still himself and asking the nurse for a smoke.†Since 2017, she has been putting on regular “Cafe Molly†performances at the Frogtown venue Zebulon, where she invites other musicians to back her whistling of old jazz covers and occasionally tests out new material. Reilly naturally has joined her. So have many others. “She has some really hot-shit musicians that work with her,†Reilly says — Caroline Polachek, Cat Power, and Mac DeMarco among them.
The evenings have become so popular over the past few years that one night, Ronson walked in without really knowing what the performance was. “I don’t know how I ended up at the show, but I had heard people say ‘Molly the Whistler,’ which obviously sticks in your head,†he says. (Ronson isn’t the only one who referred to Lewis this way — she has seemingly become so ubiquitous among a certain type of L.A. person that saying “the Whistler†in casual conversation requires no further explanation.) He says he was “really blown away. It transported me.†So much so that when he began work on the soundtrack for Barbie a year later, he insisted, despite budget concerns, that Lewis be flown out to whistle a rendition of Billie Eilish’s Grammy-winning song “What Was I Made For?†“We tried some other whistlers because someone asked, ‘Well, aren’t there other people who can whistle in New York?’†explains Ronson. “And I said, ‘There is no one who whistles like her!’ That’s like asking, ‘Isn’t there someone else who sounds like Stevie Wonder?’â€
Before Barbie, Lewis had been releasing EPs through her label, Jagjaguwar, for a small but dedicated listenership. After her name appeared on the score, things changed. “It all happened really fast,†she says, wiping the sweat off her brow with a Spa Palace T-shirt. She’s releasing her first full-length album, On the Lips, in mid-February. It spans ten instrumentals, all of which are carried only by Lewis’s whistling. She explains that the album is thematic but doesn’t have any narrative or story behind it: “I just wanted to make something that felt like how it feels to go to a live show. You dress up, you go out for the night, you have a martini, and there’s candles on the table.â€
That very morning, she tells me while playing with some hot stones, she found a rental in Brooklyn. “There’s just so much happening in New York,†she says. For instance, a campaign, championed by Reilly and backed by Ronson, for her to slot into a residency at the Carlyle hotel. “I think it could really invigorate the place,†says Reilly. Despite all this, Lewis says she doesn’t think a career in whistling has longevity. She fantasizes about becoming a marine biologist, she says, and having her colleagues at the aquarium whisper behind her back, “Did you know that Molly used to whistle?â€
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