Rilo Kiley

Magnet. Issue 57 (JAN/FEB 2003)

by Beth Wawerna

Los Angeles quartet Rilo Kiley gets called a lot of things. Spirited indie pop. Jangly rock. Sentimental folk. None of which seems too far afield, since at any one time in their lives, the band members have been obsessed with the Cure, Built To Spill, Modest Mouse, Liz Phair, Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith. Singer/multi-instrumentalist Jenny Lewis pares things down: "I just say we're a rock band." Fair enough.

After its self-released, home-recorded first album, Take Offs And Landings, was reissued by Barsuk Records in 2001, the band toured extensively, becoming fast friends with key players in the soon-to-be-way-cool Omaha music scene (Bright Eyes, Cursive, Good Life, Faint). Rilo Kiley then enlisted Saddle Creek co-founder/Lullaby For The Working Class member Mike Mogis to produce album number two, The Execution Of All Things (Saddle Creek).

"We did our homework for the first time ever," says Lewis of her introduction to a "real" studio. "We demoed the songs and talked about them and decided we wanted to bring our live sound to our recordings. With this record, we wanted to rock out a little more."

Fittingly, Execution is gussied up with colorful arrangements, Lewis' stately keyboard runs, the occasional pedal steel and even a few well-placed trumpets. Lewis can get her Tanya Donelly on as much as her Aimee Mann, and her lyrics are a comfortable mix of sentiment and snappy wit ("Soldiers come quickly, I feel the earth beneath my feet/I'm feeling badly, but it's not an attempt at decency"), and her voice can flip from saccharine to barbed in a snap (as heard on the bipolar "A Better Son/Daughter"). Guitarist/vocalist Blake Sennett sounds like Elliott Smith with a grin; he's an equal partner, even though Lewis sings the majority of the tunes. "When I write a song," says Lewis, "the person I really want to impress is Blake."

Rilo Kiley's songwriting team met as teenagers in Los Angeles. Both were child actors; Lewis was in Troop Beverly Hills, and Sennett appeared (albeit briefly) in such sitcoms as Boy Meets World, Family Ties and Growing Pains. (Comments Lewis: "Acting? Boo!") Lewis-- who grew up in Las Vegas, where her parents had a lounge act-- found Sennett unsympathetic to her early material. "I played him some of my stuff, and he was not impressed," says Lewis. "I thought he was pretty cool and he thought I was a big dork." But after she put down vocals to some of Sennett's recorded guitar parts, he changed his mind and they've been playing together ever since, chronologically: in living rooms, at L.A. clubs, across the country, with their heroes (Smith, Superchunk, Bright Eyes).

"So much has happened, it's like, 'Oh wow, maybe we're not impostors,'" says Lewis, who's also playing in a new group called the Postal Service (which includes Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel and Strictly Ballroom). "Sometimes I wake up and think, 'Oh my god, I've fooled them all!' We played music because we felt that we had to play music. We never thought we'd actually be able to pay our rent and stuff, which we still aren't."