Juliette Lewis stopped by The Kelly Clarkson Show on Wednesday (March 29) and regaled Kelly Clarkson with a story about the time she met Bob Dylan.
During a game of Musical Memories: First and Worst, the frontwoman of Juliette Lewis and the Licks named the folk legend as the first musician she was ever starstruck around.
“The story is even better,” Lewis told the host. “I’m in New York City, I’m working. I walk into an elevator that’s the size of a shoebox, only three people can fit in there. And I look up: It’s Bob Dylan.
“And your heart goes [makes exploding noise], and all these things happen,” the Yellowjackets star continued. “And then he says, ‘You know Bob, huh?’ Bob De Niro. ‘You were in that movie,’ he says to me,” referencing Lewis’ teenage role alongside Robert De Niro in the 1991 Martin Scorsese thriller Cape Fear. “And I’m like, ‘And you’re Bob Dylan.’ And then my little brain was like, ‘Say hi, how are you?’ ’cause I was gonna faint.”
Lewis then revealed she kept one of Dylan’s songs, 1965’s “She Belongs to Me,” on repeat “for months on end” during a particularly challenging time in her life and characterized the icon’s lyrics as “biblical.”
Meanwhile, Clarkson said her own starstruck moment was a tie between meeting Aretha Franklin — whom she called “literally my favorite singer on planet Earth” — and Trisha Yearwood. Turns out she met the Queen of Soul at an event through American Idol judge Randy Jackson, even though she insisted at first that she’d rather “look from afar.”
Watch Lewis’ heartwarming story about meeting Dylan below.