The saga of everyman and everywoman
You suck. You are a failure at relationships. Your career is in a state of advanced entropy. And you just can’t seem to get your shit together.
This might be your life. Rilo Kiley feels your pain.
The saga of Ben Rilo and Stephen Kiley
It was 1909 in a small mid-western town. The protagonists were Ben Rilo and Stephen Kiley. Each an aspiring football player, and they were in love. The bright lights of their possible future somehow didn’t diminish the loneliness of their present lives. On a railroad, they bound their bodies together, with arms of flesh as their sole support. The conductor didn’t see them until it was too late. The momentum of the train was too great, as it cascaded through the ties that bound the two lovers, silently standing together, silhouetted as one.
The validity of the story above is questionable. However, of all the stories associated with the origin of Rilo Kiley’s name, this one is arguably the most interesting.
Being romantic is hardly a sin
On 14 July 2011, Rilo Kiley had officially split up. Blake Sennet attributed “deception, greed, and, betrayal” as the factors behind the end of the band. Journalists suggested more neutral speculations, such as Jenny Lewis’ side projects and the loss of Jason Boesel to Bright Eyes. In an interview, Sennet stated that, “I would say that if Rilo Kiley were a human being, he’s probably laying on his back, in a morgue with a tag on his toe. Now, I see movies where the dead get up and walk. And when they do that, rarely do good things happen.” It is safe to conclude that the saga of Rilo Kiley ends here.
Their legacy however doesn’t just end there. Many fans, including me, mourn their demise. Just as every mourning always comes with a salute, I intend this writing to be my salutary remark to Rilo Kiley. As I scouted the net, I could not find a single piece of text dedicated to analyzing the band’s body of works in depth. All I found were news, interviews, and live reports. Those are useful as historical documents, but not sufficient to portray Rilo Kiley as an artistic force, which they deserve to be. I hope this article could fill that hole a little.
It is easy to dismiss Rilo Kiley as a band for the romantics. To some extent, the stereotyping is true. The band’s body of works is filled with ballads, which are considered by critics as modernized torch songs. In the old days, a torch song is a sentimental love song, usually jazz or blues, in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love. The term torch song comes from the saying “to carry a torch for someone”, or to keep aflame the light of an unrequited love. Throughout the band’s lifespan, the theme of love is revisited again and again in their four albums. Adding to that is the band’s aural packages, with which Rilo Kiley updates the old niche with pop-folk-rock tunes and hip stream-of-consciousness lyrics. The general consensus is that Rilo Kiley seeks to please their audience with bountiful hooks and sappy lyrics, hence the stereotyping of the band as consumption of the romantics.
On the other hand, I share the view of the stubborn minority, that is the romantics. Being romantic is hardly a sin. Romance and reality are too closely intertwined to be considered as opposites. If truth is something that you invent to live, isn’t being a realist is just the same as being a romantic? Living life as reality dictates is just the same as imposing your ideal views on your surroundings. In the former you choose to limit yourself, while in the latter you choose to limit reality. Both require selections, which are intricately tied to you as a human being. Thus, no matter how romantic Rilo Kiley’s songs are, they too speak about the profound truths that we encounter every day.
I believe there are two sides to romance. First, there is a world associated with happiness, security, and peace. The focus is usually on childhood, or an innocent pre-genital period of youth. Such world is called the idyllic, which brings to mind images of spring, summer, flowers, and sunshine. The other is a world of adventures, which involve separation, loneliness, humiliation, pain, and the threat of more pain. In the literary circles, this world is often called the demonic. Because of the powerful polarizing tendency in romance, one is usually carried directly from one to the other. Rilo Kiley’s version of romance, however, is not of the extremes. The band resides in the gray area, in between beauty and melancholy.
In more practical terms, the gray area is the gap between what one is and what the other expects one to be. It is either the becoming or the unbecoming of an individual. Thematically, such existential dilemma has become the hallmark of Rilo Kiley’s works. I take this as a sign of the band’s intelligence as songwriters. By this, I of course refer to Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennet, the band’s primary songwriters, even though Lewis would dominate the band’s later works. There are certain philosophical depths behind the surface of Rilo Kiley’s songs, which somehow go against the grain of what critics often say about the band. Rilo Kiley is not just a bunch of well-dressed indie kids, drunk on high doses of love-free-or-die-hard romanticism and too-cool-for-school cynicism. They are definitely more than that.
Modern life and old-fashioned feelings
A closer look on the Rilo Kiley’s discography would reveal the thematic development throughout the band’s career. This analysis is helped by the fact that all Rilo Kiley’s albums are tied to an overriding concept, even in the seemingly random Initial Friend EP (1999). In their first musical offering, the band reflects on love and life through a collection of bouncy pop-folk songs. All of the songs narrate tales of a protagonist stuck in a crumbling relationship. The protagonist has all these ideals about the relationship he or she is in, but finds the truth out of tune with his or her expectations. While complaining about how things should have been, the protagonist keeps on doing things the way things been going on for some time. In existential terms, the protagonist is caught in bad faith. The protagonist not only lies to others, but also to his or her self. Thus, the disappointments and the heartbreaks.
Such bad faith is explicitly displayed in the track Glendora. The chorus goes like this, “I cry, cry, cry, then I complain. Come back for more, do it again.” One could sense the circular regret enclosed around the protagonist. Yet one could also see how the protagonist keeps on returning to the same heartbreak, over and over again. The more playful version of the conflict could be found in the track Frug. The female protagonist makes references to some classic dance moves, before linking it to things that she must do in order to get through the relationship she is in. The dance moves become the conventions of her relationship, which she struggles to fulfill. The track Asshole narrates the neurosis of a male protagonist in a post-coital situation. The clue lies in the line “How can I change you?” in the middle of the song, and the line “There I go believing you again” in the end.
The theme of love would undergo an update in Rilo Kiley’s first full-length album, Take Offs and Landings (2001). Here, the band pits love in the age-old battle against money and time. The clue lies in the opening of the track Pictures of Success. In her bittersweet vocal, Lewis sings, “I’m a modern girl, but I fold in half so easily. When I put myself in the picture of success, I could learn world trade or try to map the ocean.” The focus now is on modern life, the setting in which the protagonist struggle against. According to social scientists, modern life is what happens when humanity begins to fiddle with the idea of rationality. Everything is calculated to the tiniest detail, as civilization seeks to promote clock-based reality and erase sentimental uncertainty. The standard of life therefore is defined by office hours and pay slips. Humans are only as good as their productive capabilities.
In Take Offs and Landings, Rilo Kiley longs for old-fashioned feelings, which are rendered incompatible by modern life. They bemoan the lack of human touch in the track Science vs. Romance, “Text versus romance. You go and add it all you want. Still we're not robots inside a grid.” They curse the tyranny of distance over human relationship in the track Wires and Waves, “There are oceans and waves and wires between us, and you called to say you're getting older.” They point out the capitalization of leisure times by work in the track Pictures of Success, “I'm not scared, but I'd like some extra spare time. I'm not scared, but the bills keep changing colors.” Last but not least, they criticize how psychology oversimplify human emotions in the track Don’t Deconstruct, “I'm not that basic, I swear. I've had enough of breakdowns and diagrams.”
Of course, there are some tracks that recall the naivety of Rilo Kiley’s previous effort. There is Always, which cheekily retells a girl-meets-boy story. The girl calls the boy a “phantom”, for pretending to be a man that he is not. She misses the real him, but she still loves him anyway. There is also Small Figure in a Vast Expanse. This time, the protagonist is a boy, who is trying to get over a girl. However, old habits die hard. He always winds up coming back to her, because it is what he knows best. In the end of the song, the boy sighed, “It's supposed to be real life. So let's pretend that we're not bored, and that we exist and we're resolved.” Again the gray area, the gap between what one is and what the other expects one to be, rears its head.
The years of loving dangerously
By their second full-length album, The Execution of All Things (2002), Rilo Kiley had achieved maturity. The record was a far more challenging record than the band’s previous efforts. Expanding on their usual fare of guitars, percussions and pianos, Rilo Kiley incorporated heavy electronica sampling to their repertoire. Musically, the record has a rather upbeat tone. Lyrically, it is often dark and morose. The reference to modern life continues, as Jenny Lewis asks the listeners to “get together and talk about the modern age” in the opening track, The Good That Won’t Come Out. Things however get more out of hand than before. There is no such thing as naive love. Here, love is a form of warfare against self, reality, and significant others.
Like in Rilo Kiley’s previous works, the protagonist of The Execution of All Things is stuck in the gray area. She (since the songs are mainly sung by Lewis) has all these ideals, but could not shake the fact that reality is tough to box with. As a solution, she turns into dreaming, creating pieces of editable reality in her head. Such existential spirit is perfectly embodied in the titular track, The Execution of All Things. The lyric shows that the protagonist is “feeling badly”. Reality is just too hard for her to bear, as she “rather not celebrate [her] defeat and humiliation” with the people around her. Therefore, she begs “soldiers” and “God” to take her away, and “crush all hopes of happiness with disease” for the people around her. “It’s not an attempt at decency,” she claims. She’s just paralyzed.
In less apocalyptic-minded tracks, such as A Better Son/Daughter and Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You, the protagonist resorts to pretending or putting a happy face. Tough times however are still happening around her. In the ballad Capturing Moods, the protagonist finds herself racing against time. She composes an imaginary timeline of her relationship and plays it forward. She sees “the laughs and fun up where the conversation flows”, “the coldest winter of [their] time”, and “[their] goodbyes”. At the same time, she reminds her significant other that “moods don’t command” him. There are works to be done and a life to be lived. She “[doesn’t] mind waiting” for him to return.
Rilo Kiley began to show signs of restlessness in More Adventurous (2004). Musically, the record is an amalgam of styles, as the band switches genres from track to track, from country ballads to to new-wave pop songs. Thematically, Rilo Kiley broke new grounds by referencing politics in It’s A Hit, the opening track of the album. At the time of production, various media sources indicated that Jenny Lewis was preoccupied with the war in Middle East. “Any chimp can play human for day,” sang Lewis in the beginning of the song, referring to the president and the gap between his true identity and his public image. Then, she followed it up with ramblings on war, sorority girls, Greek tragedy, writer’s block, God, and showbiz. Through the ramblings, the president is transformed from a chimp, to a sheep-wolf, then a camel. Human identity is indeed transient.
In the rest of More Adventurous, Rilo Kiley took their existential prose even further. The body-and-soul dilemma is thoroughly explored. In the track Portions for Foxes, the band created a spiritual sequel for their early hit, Glendora. The protagonist finds herself in a crumbling relationship, yet ends up being a war of head against heart throughout the song. Her head thinks the relationship is bad for all the parties involved, since she uses him only as “damage control for a walking corpse like [her]”. They just use each other for sex, with no feeling involved. Yet her heart craves for him, since the physical relationship “offers [her] another form of relief” from whatever loneliness she’s going through.
In the ballad A Man/Me/Then Jim, the band narrated similar existential dilemma through a triangular love story. It is about the reunion of two former lovers in a friend’s funeral. Together they talk about “the slow fade of love” and how it hits their deceased friend, Jim. The song is composed of three perspectives: a man’s, a woman’s, and Jim’s. The change of perspective reveals how the characters slips into “a gradual descent into a life [they] never meant”. The woman sees “living as the problem”, since she tries to survive by “selling people things they don’t want”. The man and Jim see life as a collection of painful memories. Both go through life cursing how things might have been. The difference is: the man bears on living unhappily, while Jim doesn’t. Upon seeing the woman, his “ex first love”, the man confronts her and reminisces about the past. On the other hand, Jim commits suicide upon seeing his “old lover’s house”.
Rilo Kiley’s dissection of the human condition peaked in the track The Absence of God. The title says it all really. Through lines such as “Planning’s for the poor, so let’s pretend that we are rich” and “We could be daytime drunks if we wanted, we’d never get anything done that way”, the song brings forth a godless reality, where humans are merely flotsams in the great sea of life. Without the idea of some omnipotent objective being watching us, humans’ action would mean nothing. Therefore, failures in life should not be regretted, since they are our “training grounds”. As Lewis sings the line “Just as your back’s turned, you'll be surprised...as your solitude subsides, everyone at some point in their life fails, so there is no need to worry. The Absence of God marries poetry and philosophy in such beautiful and accessible manner, that I believe the song is one of their best efforts to date, if not the best.
Happiness is a warm gun
Days of Rilo Kiley unfortunately were numbered. By the next album, Under the Blacklight (2007), the band had been divided, as its members were involved in some side projects. Jenny Lewis released Rabbit Fur Coat (2006), her debut solo album, which outsold every record Rilo Kiley had ever released. Blake Sennet released two albums with The Elected: Me First (2004) and Sun, Sun, Sun (2006). Under the Blacklight would be Rilo Kiley’s last act together. Technically, the record is Rilo Kiley’s. Spiritually, it is not. Lewis became the band’s de facto leader, as she controlled most of Rilo Kiley’s creative proceedings. Sennet and co was merely her support group. Critics speculated that Lewis was trying to design the record as her platform toward stardom. The validity of such speculation however still needs to be verified.
Despite the creative disparity, Rilo Kiley still sounded like a cohesive unit. In favor of new wave disco, the band ditched most of their country leanings and indie posturings. The glamorous package serves as complementary soundscape to the topic dissected in the album: sex. Here, Lewis sang a lot about sex, bad sex in particular. There is a tragic girl-gets-money-for-sex story in the track Close Call, hints of pornography in the The Moneymaker, the spoiled virginity of the protagonist of the track 15, and a saga about threesome in Dejalo. Despite all the humpings and physical contacts, as the lyrics suggest, happiness is awfully hard to find. None of the characters in the songs are satisfied with their lives. In this respect, Lewis is actually making a statement on the body-and-soul dilemma, which is apparent in practically every aspect of human life. If life is a game of chess, then happiness is a different game altogether.
At this point, I’d like to end my article by recalling a trivial event in Rilo Kiley’s carrer. When interviewing Jenny Lewis back in 2002, a journalist quoted Ernest Hemingway, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." Lewis sighed then smiled. "There’s a certain amount of comfort in that, isn’t there?"
-Naturally, a manuscript on Rilo Kiley. Inspired by and dedicated to Joan Lumanauw, a Rilo Kiley fan who once claimed that she could spend nights talking about her favorite band. Pictured above is Jenny Lewis (right) in PLEASANTVILLE (Gary Ross, 1998), her best acting to date, albeit in a small role.
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