A couple of weeks later, Jewel and I meet for brunch at Pacific Dining Car, which is noir in a touristy kind of way, a place you’d take a visitor if they insisted on recreating an L.A. Confidential bar crawl (and I’m not just saying that because L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy is actually here this afternoon). The place does everything in its power to distract from the fact that it’s 1 p.m. on a Sunday and downtown L.A. feels like a dry-roast oven.

While discussing his youth in Texas, I ask him about director Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which chronicles the life of an adolescent boy, Mason, who also grew up in Houston. “The mood of all of Linklater's movies that are in Texas [capture] exactly what it's like,” says Jewel. “In the movie, when the kid is photographing the lantern wearing brown corduroys and he's got the awkward skin—that was me in '94.”

Jewel may have identified with Mason’s disillusion, mistrust of authority, and artistic temperament, but his actual biography is less wholesome. He did not get along with his father, who he claims was tone-deaf and unable to hear music; in all likelihood, he was just partially deaf. Either way, the handicap required Jewel to learn sign language and use a teletype machine—a kind of primitive text-messaging device—to talk with his dad on the phone. In hindsight, Jewel figures that he gravitated towards music as some kind of psychological ploy against his father.

Despite showing little interest in academic achievement, Jewel claims his impressive test scores got the attention of nearby Rice University, but he preferred to freak out the squares. His high-school teachers saw enough potential to have him join a bunch of college-bound kids in submitting poems for a public demonstration at a local exhibit, where Jewel contributed dioramas made from hollowed-out books, with dead animals and scrawled missives about his parents stuffed inside. “My mom went and she just was weeping,” he recalls.

Jewel’s artistic self-actualization coincided with his father’s death and his subsequent move to Austin when he was 18. Though the actual name would come later, the development of Johnny Jewel as a persona begins here. At the time, he seemed more intent to follow the lead of artists like Bill Callahan and Jandek, admiring their capability to avoid the demands of the music press while making abstract music with an audience. He took on his first pseudonym: John David V, inspired by George Scott III of Lydia Lunch’s no wave band 8 Eyed Spy. “We looked the same and both played bass,” he explains. “I always loved the Roman numeral V, and my nickname in Texas was Johnny Five from Short Circuit.” Even now, Jewel still credits himself as "V" on his records.

While still dabbling in photography and painting, his early recordings ran the gamut between pop and experimental, and were abetted by Todd Ledford, who would later start the Olde English Spelling Bee label, specializing in oddball outsider sounds. “[Todd] gave me my first 24-hour recording space,” says Jewel. “He lived above a print shop, so my bed was this mattress on top of a bunch of Xerox machines.”

After living a “hand-to-mouth existence” in Austin for roughly two years, Jewel made a pilgrimage to Olympia, Washington in the mid-‘90s to see K Records bands like Lync, Versus, Unwound, and Dub Narcotic at the Yo-Yo a Go-Go Festival. He soon realized he wasn’t coming back: En route to Olympia, he had an epiphany inside Portland’s Greyhound station. “There was just this electricity in the air,” he says. “Something clicked.”

The timeline gets a little murky here, but that’s how things go with Jewel—there isn’t much distinction between days and months and years. Only the longview remains. But in the decade between his move to Portland and the founding of Italians Do It Better, Jewel and his co-conspirators somehow morphed from aimless noisemakers into post-punk professionals.

Glass Candy: "Warm in the Winter" (via SoundCloud)

Jewel met his first collaborator, Glass Candy singer Ida No, while working at a grocery store in Portland. “He looked really intriguing,” No recalls in a hand-written letter. She would hover around the store despite living on the other side of town, snooping in on conversations he was having with another employee. “It was pretty creepy, but I wanted to know everything about him,” she continues. “Finally I got desperate and went and introduced myself, which is crazy because I have social anxiety—I never do that.”

At the time, Jewel was going through a breakup that resulted in him being thrown out of his apartment. As Jewel remembers it: “I had a suitcase with clothes and five Moogs, and it was horrible. So the second time I hung out with [Ida], I called her and was like, ‘Can I move in with you?’ And she's like, ‘Uh, sure.’” Jewel describes No as his only friend in the city at the time and, soon enough, they started dating. “John said he wanted to be my robot,” remembers No, commenting on their musical partnership early on. “That was better than winning the lottery as far as I was concerned.” Eventually, their romantic relationship ended, but Glass Candy continued on.

Chromatics: "I'm on Fire" (Bruce Springsteen cover) (via SoundCloud)

A similar pattern emerged with Chromatics frontwoman Ruth Radelet, but with an important part inverted: “Johnny and I had been living together for five years before we ever worked together musically,” Radelet notes. Chromatics had existed in numerous forms before Jewel joined, and founding member Adam Miller recalls starting Chromatics solo as a minimalist, noisy pop act after seeing Glass Candy perform in Portland in 1999.

“We ran into Johnny downtown, and he was on a date and dressed in drag,” remembers Miller. “We had nowhere to stay that night, and he offered his apartment to us. He asked me if I had ever heard Here Come the Warm Jets and then returned to the room five minutes later with a blue Samsonite suitcase full of immaculately organized cassettes and then just dumped them from above his head onto the hardwood floor. We thought he was a total freak. The singer of our band wouldn't even stay in Johnny's house—he slept in the van instead.” By the time the band’s breakthrough, Night Drive, was released in 2007, Chromatics traded in punk slash for a moody synth haze with Jewel taking on the roles of producer, director, spokesperson, and label boss.