Song 9: A Better Son/Daughter

A Better Son/Daughter - Rilo Kiley

Some bands get massive, most bands don't get near it and never look like they're going to, some bands it really is very hard to understand why they didn't.

Rilo Kiley were a California band who released four albums, who made college rock with pop tunes and sharp production, who had an attractive former child-actress lead singer, who appeared on 'The OC', who got talked up by the music press, who never quite made it, either commercially or critically.

Said lead singer, Jenny Lewis, has released two solo albums as well as an album with her singer-songwriter boyfriend Johnathan Rice, as Jenny and Johnny. Her Rilo Kiley co-bandleader and former boyfriend, Blake Sennett, has his own band, The Elected.

Rilo Kiley have now, according to Blake Sennett, ceased to exist, with a fair amount of bitterness and recrimination. Geez, this should be the 60s, man ...

Long-time fans of this blog, all two of you, might remember in 2009 that in my 'Songs with Imagined Encounters' entry (Number 53) I wrote a jolly little poem imagining an encounter with Jenny Lewis, which was, above all, about authenticity. You see, the problem with Jenny Lewis is/was you can't quite tell if she's "4 REAL" or if she's a Hollywood fake folk/soul/indie/country singer. She was in 'Golden Girls', for goodness sake.

OK. The link I've chosen for the song contains the full lyrics for the song. If you fancy it, read them. Reading lyrics can be a hideous enterprise. I'm not asking you to read them to judge their quality, I'm asking you to read them because, and forgive me for being naive, they're not phoney. If they'd been written by Kurt Cobain, or Thom Yorke, or Ian Curtis, or Richie Edwards, they'd be proclaimed as the darkest, bleakest, most profoundly "real" lyrics you could hear.

To me, this is a brilliant song. A shock to the core. A moving masterpiece. So there are my cards on the table. And I love Rilo Kiley. I think Jenny Lewis will struggle to be as good without the band and I think their second and third albums, 'The Execution of All Things' (from which this song comes) and 'More Adventurous' are peerless.

I actually once recommended this song to someone who was so inspired by it they wrote a song themselves. It's a very unusual song, for starters, in a kind of military band 3/4 time where Jenny Lewis starts off like she's singing underwater and a description of unspecified torment, till suddenly, the sound becomes crystal clear and she explodes "AND SOMETIME WHEN YOU'RE ON YOU'RE REALLY FUCKING ON AND YOU'RE FRIENDS ALL SING ALONG AND LOVE YOU, BUT THE LOWS ARE SO EXTREME THAT THE GOOD SEEMS FUCKING CHEAP AND IT BURIES YOU FOR WEEKS WITH ITS ABSENCE".

Oooooh, swearing and everything ... and suddenly I'm reminded of Kate Nash, you know Kate Nash, the attractive British singer who had a big hit with 'Foundations' with its clever, biting lyrics about a relationship breaking down. Except I didn't find it clever or biting, I found it absolutely insufferably awful. And now Kate Nash has gone to the US, dyed her hair and made a punk record. And been mocked roundly for it by people like me. And is Jenny Lewis just an American Kate Nash, and if so, why can I not see it?

Or is Jenny Lewis the new Joni Mitchell? And before you hold my horses, did you know that the Rolling Stone magazine of the era were far more interested in the fact that she was hopping beds/homes between Graham Nash, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, whoever, than the fact that she was making the most earthshaking, wonderful music which arguably has outstripped all her bedfellows.

Will you take me as I am, strung out on another man? California, i'm coming home.

So after that opening bit, with the swearing and all, it becomes a soulful version of Radiohead's 'Fitter/Happier' with a litany of instructions to self to make one a better/son daughter and a real friend and, eventually, happy. Sardonic and yet it is, ye doubters, extremely moving.

If you've heard a bit of Rilo Kiley and been turned off by something, thought it a bit clever-clever, or phoney or forced, do give them another shot, starting with this, maybe trying 'Pictures of Success' from their first album and then the title track of 'More Adventurous' and if you must get something from their overproduced last album, try 'Breaking Up'. Which is only what they gone and done, the young pups. Shucks.