Don’t know how to feel about this one, but I like trying to write about music stuff. I don’t think I’m so good at it, but that’s not an invitation for praise, just something I want to think about. Give it a listen. Love and appreciation to Ren, who gave me a great gift. It needs more work but hey, it’s June. Also! I’m currently helping fund-raise for Migrant Support Collective. It is pride and immigrant month, apparently, and this is something very dear to my heart right now. If you want to toss a little money their way, I’m going to try and match some amount (PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VERY GENEROUS AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!), and will update later. Thanks for considering. I gotta go to my weird fundraising job now. xx

When Mar gives me the box, its for a silly senior year Secret Santa. There are at least ten slim black jewel-cased CD-Rs neatly packed in it’s collaged and painted cardboard. I still own it and out peaks her handwriting: “So much so it hurts I love those who love me so effortlessly in return.”

One of the CDs has “The Execution of All Things” printed in her good hand at the top and “Rilo Kiley” at the bottom. Who is Rilo or Kiley, I wonder? I pull it out afterI tire of the other burned albums that winter - Soviet Kitsch, Our Endless Numbered Days, Blue screen Life, probably.

I drive Mar to school a lot and probably wish I only drove her, singular, to school, but that’s not how it works. We don’t play “The Execution of All Things” in the morning. Someone is making someone else a mix CD or asks to put on Q101. The car doesn’t have a CD player and so I plug my CD through the aux cord into the tape deck. After school sometimes I’m in the computer lab putting together the school newspaper into the night, but mostly working at the bagel chain and hearing “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” for the seventy dozenth time.

Saturday nights she mostly stays out later than me - I almost always open on Sundays - she catches a ride with someone else from the diner, so it’s just me mostly throughout the winter and I click on the button that is REPEAT ONE and it cycles through the title track the entire drive back to my parents’ house.

It’s such a good opener to an album. It’s a great song to start right as the car does and you’re pushing the shifter nestled next to the Discman. Right after the bridge, the song cycles back into the first half of the verses before it takes a pause, goes quiet, and then Jenny Lewis’s voice breaks out of how it’s been produced so far, this affectation almost like someone on a phone line, a little whispery, a little faraway, going through a vocoder maybe, or a tape recorded left for someone to find many days later. It breaks away from the tinny snare and toy piano, the timid bits put together with twangy guitar.

When it shifts into kickdrum and stereo I flip the car’s volume knob up as far as it goes with my windows down in the night, swelling this sense of fury and desperation and something older than myself I can’t quite access. There was something right there in front of me, some adulthood I could see on the horizon. There was some future self that felt rooted in what it would be like to be a troubling or troubled woman, which felt inevitable, the future vision of cold nights in apartments like Mar’s sister had, some click into fierceness.

I’m right there and Rilo Kiley is playing the door I’m walking through into what’s real about the choices in front of me and what I want. This band playing waking up to realize none of it would come without vulgar desire and avarice, frayed convictions and virtues that were inevitable consequences of growing older. They knew it and shared it with only me. That’s pretty much any okay song or band, but Rilo Kiley and Jenny Lewis said it like you spun out your secrets at night. They spun it out like I blurted out how much in love I was over diner mint chip ice cream. They flicked open the edge when I sobbed and ached over it’s unrequitedness. All of these things are pretty much everyone’s, but not everyone writes it like this:

You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me
Maybe you’re right

They played this song second at their reunion show at the Chicago Theater on the penultimate day of May. Ren blessed me with a ticket, and it didn’t matter it had been sort of a tumbling month, my posessions in boxes and the 1st less than 48 hours away. I was not going to say no to this. We stood outside on State St. beneath the marquee after a handshake at Rossis, on a balmy May night. Have you been? they texted me the night before. I typed back OFC I used to work at the Active Transportation Alliance.

It’s funny, they said, You can clock everyone going to this show. Most of us were all early. A seated show, a proper hour, a careful warning. We walked in to a non-existent merch line and I panicked and bought the “More Adventurous” LP because I couldn’t commit to the very good t-shirts. I almost literally ran into someone I’d been seeing or something a coupe years earlier, and felt indifferent fondness.

When we sat down, I could see all the teenage girls (and guys, I’m sure) we had all come from. I don’t think I saw a single person under age 35. People remarking about their babysitters, couples in comfortable shoes, sleeveless denim and tattoos (me, too), NA beers and THC cocktails.

Let’s talk about all our friends who lost the war and all the novels that have yet to be written about them

They came onstage to a technicolor lit backdrop. Jenny Lewis has released several very solid albums after Rilo Kiley stopped making music in 2007. “Rabbit Fur Coat” and “The Voyager” are favorites. If I have stumbled into what the oughts formed me into now - I own a couple blazers these days and I’ll never return to wide leg denim - then Jenny Lewis has approached a form that feels like she could be some sort of deity to the seated sad sack Saddle Creek Records fans watching her, raptly. She is absolutely beautiful, playing a guitar almost languidly, almost casually, and smiling ruefully. She maybe said twenty words in comparison to her bandmate Blake Sennett’s kind and seemingly earnest happiness of being there.

They opened the show with “It’s a Hit” from More Adventurous, which in my mind came out when I started college but of course had not. I wasn’t caught up because the albums came out of Mar’s CD burner and then eventually onto the iPod I got for graduation. Jess drove us around Oakland in her Jetta with “It’s a Hit” and “Portions for Foxes” burned onto her mix CDs, and some way or another the entirety of their catalog at the time ended up in my hands.

It was the Bush years, I suddenly remembered as they played the song, as I went shhkashkkashkkashkka, deploying more troops than salt shakers alongside everyone else. I needed to listen to “The Execution of All Things” less in those years because the unrequited love turned into long-distance soup, with love letters and everything.

I wasn’t old enough or jaded enough for some of the other songs on the album. They felt like songs for the type of adult I wasn’t, yet. Or of course I was an adult: I was planning on getting married, I outgrew Camel Lights, I had phone sex, I drank black coffee. There would be some dingier parts of adulthood I could surely avoid, I thought.

They played those songs, too: “Does He Love You?” which Lewis just fucking killed. All of us just watching her croon to the front row of the audience, telling this story that when I look at the liner notes I can see is written as a letter. Dear friend, it starts. I guess it all worked out, there’s a ring on your finger and the baby’s due out, starts the second paragraph, and it kills me a bit. How she ends the song live eclipses the howl that’s on the album, ending the song with a dramatic cliffhanger of some strings, and the audience sings along:

Let’s not forget ourselves, good friend
I am flawed if I’m not free.

That’s a lot of it for me about Rilo Kiley and why I remember I still very much love them. Their songs about aches in comings and goings, in not being able to hold onto things because maybe the secret is you don’t want to, and that’s a hard lyrical row to hoe. Maybe you desperately want to have and hold, but whatever the burn is, it’s probably the wrong thing. There’s no escaping the sorrow of it and you have to try it anyway.

I picked and chose those songs in those years. Mar put “Go Ahead” on my birthday mixtape when I turned 18 and I cried the first time I turned it on. I’d done as much work as I could to find people I really loved, and I really needed to leave town anyway, because that was the only thing I wanted for so long.

If you want to find yourself by traveling out West, or if you wanna find somebody else that’s better, go ahead.

These were things I thought about friends I loved so much when now it just seems like the shrugging nature of so much of relating since then, trying to find love, or a soft bed, or in secret, in secret, the ring on your finger, the economies of scale, the Blundstones next to you, holding your hand at the Chicago Theater on the Rilo Kiley reunion tour. The bounty of new and tender love and loyalty almost feels quaint now. Impossible. Instead the way to go through it is to hold fast and care as much as holding true to if you want better things, then I want you to have them.

Go ahead, I wish you would. All of us just waiting for someone else to pull the trigger, and then crying into our friends’ beers on patios when we’re surprised we’re wounded.

They didn’t play that one. They played “Ripchord”, which I like a lot more now that I’m older, and “Silver Lining”, “So Long”, the interstitials about Alaska from “Execution”, “Portions for Foxes”, and “With Arms Outstretched”, a song I’d long forgotten about. I loved that “Execution” ended on that and “Spectacular Views”, outros ending as the gift I got having gone through so much bullshit from heartache. It felt like the sunny feeling someone is going to come after you, the adventures you have driving around in a Jetta in San Francisco or making your way through DeKalb house shows in summer heat or stumbling onto the Blue Line at Cumberland to get to someone’s first shitty apartment.

Ren told me they were going to go to the show and cry, and I said yeah, me probably too, and the time came for the song you can’t help but grow into which is “A Better Son/Daughter”. So the whole room did, the front of weeping through the vows of the whole damn thing, which I think was a fair amount of mornings entering dark swings of my and anyone else’s life. The weight, crushing down on your lungs, you hope someone will save you. It didn’t make me cry but I felt close to it and grateful Rilo Kiley made the song I did grow into. The other one is “A Man/Me/Then Jim”, which I won’t speak to, right now.I find it a bittersweet comfort, and very kind.

In the liner notes there’s photos from that specific indie rock time, where all these bands I didn’t know came out of Omaha, Nebraska, alternatives to the ones pouring out of Brooklyn¹, when I could put their specific songs to tell secrets on CDs for my friends, or just how much I loved them. Those years full of television shows about young people with entire soundtrack supervisors picking these specific songs ²for disaffected characters we all fell for, plot lines we were probably going to live, right?

There’s probably photos of me and the people I loved out there just like those. I’m not nearly as beautiful as Jenny Lewis, but there sure were a lot of young lissome women my moony, indie boy friends yearned over, who I liked very much. There was smoking in fingerless gloves in snowstorms, there was the capture of what you looked like piled up on a couch or someone’s twin bed, of laughing very hard in peacoats outside gas stations. They look young and happy, and I know we were young and sometimes happy too.

The Chicago stop on the Rilo Kiley reunion tour was tight and they closed the second encore with the song that did make me cry. Takeoffs and Landings was never my favorite. I mostly avoided it, other than “Go Ahead” which didn’t count because it was on my birthday mix CD. Then one year when I was going back and forth from California to Chicago, when my friends were considering returning to the countries they came from because it was so bleak, when people had died and I was missing my best friend who was on study abroad and considering cheating on the long distance boyfriend (again) and feeling too adult for anything with people I loved in hospitals or abusive relationships, I fell on “Pictures of Success.”

I don’t know if anyone in the auditorium loves it as much as I do, if it was expected. People had gone for the exits by then but I cried silently from the time she sang Because I’m not scared, but I’d like some extra spare time. It doesn’t come up on my mixes or radio, or get played on my stereo, because I don’t listen to the album. It does come up on the very specific going to California playlist I have maintained since leaving the state, where I find it very important to listen to (mostly on the airplane, but now it’s been included in drives from end to end.)

The need to go, or the small feeling of it is not gone. I have outgrown some of the feelings Rilo Kiley managed to verbalize when they were unlocked as I shot out of being a kid, and I’ve mostly winnowed the other ones into what they are now, a couple decades later.

These are times that can’t be weathered and we haven’t been back there since then.

The lights went up around all us adults and we quietly made our way down the stairs and into the street, sobered and settled, and I caught the bus and went home, ready to go, again, if only a few blocks over.

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Won’t include an audio link - go listen to your favorite thing from the year 2004 or 2005 for me, from this version of me back then.