Currently: Rilo Kiley

Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis, and The Postal Service

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This week, Rilo Kiley announced that they will play the Just Like Heaven festival this summer and promise a tour later this year. Long time readers of this newsletter will know that Rilo Kiley is on my list of bands I’d go anywhere to see but that I thought were never getting back together, so needless to say it’s a good day for me. I put together a primer of my favorite RK songs. Fun fact: I had the cover image for this playlist pasted in my locker in 8th grade.

It feels appropriate to start with the first Rilo Kiley song I ever heard. It’s not actually that indicative of their sound, but I think I really fell in love with Jenny Lewis’ voice immediately. She really has the range to do the quiet folk songs that appear later on this list and this song, which is maybe one of their most rock-oriented.

I listened to this song ten thousand times as a teenager. The Execution of All Things (2002) was my favorite RK record, although More Adventurous (2004) grows on me all the time now as an adult (complete aside: I’ve been having a parallel experience with Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone (2009), my canonical favorite Neko Case record, and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2008)—why is it that some albums seem to start making sense only later?) The new RK tour is named after a line in this song, which gives me great hope that they’ll play a lot of this album.

I saw Jenny Lewis on the On the Line tour in 2019, one of my first shows at the Fox Theater, where I’d later go on to work, and one of my first solo concerts. When she played this song, I was completely moved—it’s one of the only concert videos I go back to with some frequency. She and her band all gathered around a microphone and did it acoustic and I think I ascended.

Classic pop indie rock! Goes down smooth!

You can basically draw a straight line between songs like “Silver Lining” and “Dreamworld” and Jenny Lewis’ later solo discography. Where the early RK records were kind of angsty, Under the Blacklight (2007) saw them really lean into pop, which Lewis continued to do in spurts throughout her career.

So cinematic and descriptive. I get a rush whenever she says, “Your husband will never leave you / he will never leave you for me.”

I wish I had been not a child when they were touring this record. Sigh.

When the Postal Service played the Greek last season, I spoke to Jenny Lewis backstage briefly, which was basically like meeting an angel. Her friend had a dog and we were talking about how dogs know so many things, and retain knowledge from previous lives. It was one of the craziest fifteen minutes of my life. I doubt she remembers me.

During the pandemic I used to listen to this song while riding my bike through the neighborhoods to pass the time, slowly, taking in all the wildflowers in that first spring.

Currently trending in my brain: skiing, creative ways to get myself to stay hydrated, chocolate cherry oatmeal cookies (maybe my new favorite cookie), tabi mittens, checking out books from the library to get that new book rush, still buying new books, going for magnolia walks (they’re just starting to bloom!), going to my childhood friend’s CorePower class and knowing I’ll never let anyone else yell at me like that, deleting Instagram, rediscovering that I love to sing, volunteering in my community, having group chats with funny names.