Whether sung, spoken or drawn, ideas burst from Jeffrey Lewis like an overstuffed suitcase – strange ones, funny ones, poignant ones, usually a mixture of each. Wearing a T-shirt and baseball cap, clutching a beat-up stickers-plastered acoustic guitar, this New York anti-folk cult hero and comic-book artist is a wordy force of nature, whether strumming reflective observational odes to birds, breakfasts or long bus journeys, or narrating one of his trademark "low-budget films"– comic strips beamed from a projector, tonight storying all from the history of communism (part 6: Vietnam), to a surrealist orgy involving a nerd, a whale and a "barely legal seagull".
After recent solo tours, and tours with his occasional band the Junkyard, and with veteran Manhattan beatnik Peter Stampfel, Lewis's latest collaborators are the Jrams – bassist and keys player Caitlin Gray and drummer Heather Wagner. They're a naturally easygoing foil for their highly strung leader, be it assisting Lewis in kicking out ramshackle fuzzbomb jams such as Slogans, or just hanging back and grinning as much as anyone in the room during solo numbers.
The neurosis of the struggling cult artist becomes a theme between Support Tour – a reflection on the vicious cycle of exploited opening bands eventually becoming exploiting headliners – and fans' favourite Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror, a darkly hilarious fantasy about Lewis cornering Oldham on the subway demanding enlightenment, only to be brutally assaulted.
But Lewis's furiously overactive mind is at pains to place the apparently futile scratchings of his existence in some kind of grander political-cosmic context – at best during the brilliant What Would Pussy Riot Do? – a righteously angry spoken-word piece hailing the Russian punk-rock protesters as deities of the counterculture universe. Throw in an ability to simply knock you sideways with his sadness with a song such as Broken Broken Broken Heart, dropped in late by audience request, and it's difficult to imagine how any couple of hours spent in Lewis's company couldn't prove inspirational.
• At the Deaf Institute, Manchester, 23 August. Box office: 0844 858 8521. Then touring.
