Professional whistler Molly Lewis is the old-school Hollywood hero we need

This pro whistler is taking the indie world by storm. Leonie Cooper meets her in her hometown of Los Angeles for a martini or two

‘It was fun to surprise some people, but I didn’t in any way think it was a possible career,’ Lewis says ( Logan White)

One of the greatest remaining bastions of Hollywood’s golden age, Musso & Frank has been beloved of everyone from Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe to Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones. The latest star to call herself a regular at the storied restaurant is North America’s premiere whistler, Molly Lewis. It’s a fitting match, as Lewis’s unique, wryly camp confection of tiki-bar blues is quite unlike anything else that’s been released since the heady days of the 1950s exotica boom. Lewis’s high-pitched birdsong is endlessly fascinating, sounding not unlike ear-piercing coloratura soprano Yma Sumac, who was the whistle-toned Ariana Grande of her day. Want a musician who seems like they might soundtrack Quentin Tarantino’s next movie? Molly Lewis is your woman.

I meet Lewis on a sticky summer’s evening at the infamous Los Angeles hideaway, ahead of the release of her second EP, Mirage. She regularly performs at her own fabulous “Cafe Molly” club nights, where she’ll whistle spaghetti western soundtracks, Bond themes and her own compositions, as well as share the stage with the likes of actor-musician John C Reilly and slacker rocker Mac De Marco. But just how did she end up as a professional whistler, not least one who has collaborated with names as varied as Dr Dre, fashion house Chanel and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs?

The answer, says the 32-year-old, is by accident. “My friend Nora was putting on a performance art night,” she explains, lifting a martini to her lips. “Whistling was something my friends knew I did well, and she asked me to do a song. I was like, ah…” Lewis actually didn’t take too much convincing. She’d already appeared at an open mic night at the Kibitz Room, a low-lit bar in the back of the LA deli Canter’s, and was up for giving it another go. “It was fun to surprise some people, but I didn’t in any way think it was a possible career,” she says. “It was just something that I loved doing.”

Yet what seemed like a novelty turn quickly became a serious proposition. “Every little thing would lead to something else,” she says. It wasn’t long until her occasional appearances caught the eye of independent record label Jagjaguwar and in 2021, she released her debut EP, The Forgotten Edge. Six tracks of hypnotic, Ennio Morricone-inspired originals, it turned her otherworldly whistle from quirky sideshow to headline talent.

Despite her American twang, Lewis was born in the small town of Mullumbimby in New South Wales, Australia. When she was a child, her parents moved to LA to pursue careers in the movie industry – before she was born Lewis’s father had helped French high-wire artist Philippe Petit scale the World Trade Center, a fantastical feat later retold in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire. Lewis, however, was largely oblivious to her starry upbringing. “It’s funny growing up in Hollywood,” she explains. “I was too young to really know certain things. David Lynch was a father at my elementary school, and I was like, ‘whatever’.” When she was 13, the family moved back to Australia, and there Lewis became strangely enchanted by a 2005 documentary Pucker Up, which warmly detailed an annual International Whistling Competition in North Carolina. She would eventually attend as an eager wannabe whistler in 2012. Yet it would be almost a decade until she’d be able to call herself a pro. Upon graduating with a film studies degree from the University of Sydney, she spent her early twenties in Berlin.

“I made the mistake of telling a journalist once that those were my techno years, but I was joking and they wrote that up!” Rather than endless raving – or even occasional whistling – Lewis was babysitting, working at a cafe and enjoying the aimless drift of the city. “But after a certain point I was like, what am I doing apart from having cheap beers in the park?” Lewis relocated to Los Angeles and got the kickstart she was craving. After working in the legal department of American Idol, Lewis scored a job with a commercial director and began to embed herself in the artsy underworld of the city. “At that point there were things going on every night – so much fun stuff,” remembers Lewis.

But it was the release of The Forgotten Edge that really changed the course of Lewis’s life. What was once an underground eccentricity was now a cult concern and the debut EP also brought with it a host of outlandish international appearances. “I get some very strange requests in my DMs – but not from boys,” she says of the direct messages she receives via Instagram. There have been invitations to perform Handel’s “Sarabande” with the Orchestre National de Paris at French lingerie shows while surrounded by BMX bikers, and offers to entertain the glitterati during Chanel dinners at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s even been a trip to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai where she performed draped in Gucci. “I felt like a pop star,” beams Lewis.

Somehow, in among all the globetrotting – a peek at her Instagram shows that her last performance was a candlelit concert on a ridiculously scenic Greek island, as well as recent turns at vintage Mexico City dance halls – Lewis found the time to make a second EP. Mirage transplants her dreamy sound to a fabulous fictional land, this time with accompaniment by master South American guitarist Rogê. “When we were making music together I was thinking of it as being from this imaginary place, this island in between our musical worlds,” explains Lewis of the Brazilian-inspired compositions. “I love fantasy,” she adds. “For a while, I wanted to have a Lord of the Rings-style map on the back cover.”

Alongside a cover of 1940s jazz standard “Nature Boy”, the release offers an idiosyncratic look at Lewis’s varied interests, including the peculiar fringes of popular science; the atmospheric “Dolphinese” draws on her obsession with the controversial John Lilly Dolphin House experiment of the 1960s. Lewis is also able to delve into her fascination with film, crafting elaborate music videos on a shoestring budget, including a spy thriller-like promo for “Cabana de Mel”, for which she snuck into LA’s ritzy Bonaventure Hotel, location for Nineties blockbuster True Lies.

“There’s double-crossing, there’s an underwater scene, there’s a helicopter, there’s guns,” she explains. The video for “Miracle Fruit”, too, is a living tribute to another classic Hollywood moment. Alongside a floppy-haired “hunk”, Lewis salsas on a floating platform in a soft focus fever dream, using body doubles in tribute to Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in Naked Gun 2½. “There’s a scene in that where they kind of go off into the background a little and he throws her in the air and she goes between his legs and flips around and I thought, ‘Let’s do that!’” And with that, Lewis drains her second cocktail and heads off to the Hollywood Bowl for a night of Dvorak. Whoever said old Hollywood was dead?

‘Mirage’ is out on 16 September digitally and on vinyl and CD on 28 October

Molly Lewis plays Joe’s Pub in New York on 24 September and Laylow in London on 3 November