Rilo Kiley's “Takeoffs and Landings” Ten Years Later

Jenny Lewis is, as far as I can tell, pretty happy now. She lives in Laurel Canyon or somewhere like it with Jonathan Rice and they make twee surf rock and Elvis Costello comes over for coffee and everything is probably great. I haven't listened to her new band Jenny & Johnny much, but I hear “Big Wave” in Forever 21 sometimes and it's fine. I'm happy for her. But I also really miss the Jenny Lewis we had in 2001, the one who sounded really, deeply unhappy, the one who sounded so fucking miserable that she was maybe/probably losing her mind.

Suffering is good for art and bad for artists; Chuck Klosterman wrote a whole book about that problem. I remember seeing an interview with him once where he said it would have been great for their career if the Rolling Stones had all died tragically in the mid-70s, but it wouldn't have been great if they wanted to, like, eat a pizza. That's what is at issue here. We like sad art, so we elevate sad artists, and we punish with irrelevance the ones who stop being sad. (This mostly only true for the “real art” sphere, as distinguished from whatever makes Kim Kardashian famous. Reality stars and tabloid celebrities drop dead and are forgotten—their life and art aren't separated enough, so they have no legacy. Heath Ledger died within a year of Anna Nicole Smith—who will you remember longer?)
Takeoffs and Landings was released by Barsuk Records in July 2001. There's a lot of plane crash imagery on the album—Jenny Lewis (with guitarist Blake Sennett) was one of dozens of songwriters with eerily prescient releases that year (Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot features songs like “Ashes Of American Flags” and lyrics like “tall buildings shake” and “skyscrapers are scraping together” and features two towers on the cover. Less remarkably: Jimmy Eat World's record Bleed American was hastily retitled Jimmy Eat World, and an Everclear album with an inverted American flag was pulled from the shelves and redesigned. Also: for a detailed explanation of how Radiohead's Kid A sonically predicted 9/11, read the aforementioned Klosterman book, Killing Yourself To Live)—but plane crashes here are the emotional kind. Successful takeoffs and landings are (at least partly) a metaphor for successful adult life, which Lewis sees as sort of impossible.

So yeah, Rilo Kiley songs aren't exactly “sad”--they're more like “stressed-sad.” Jenny Lewis sounds stressed out in a compelling, attractive way. There's a blue-collar “how are we going to make ends meet” theme running through this record, which is convincing even though Jenny Lewis was a child actress who grew up in Hollywood. She SOUNDS like a working-class chick, so when she sings “but I'd like some extra spare time,” you feel it. Or—I felt it when I was fifteen years old. Because it's important to note that this is not like, Rosanne Barr's standup comedy; Jenny's not raising kids in Ohio or whatever yet. The root cause of the blue-collar-y problems is mid-twenties ennui.

(When I was sixteen I dug the hell out of hearing about mid-twenties ennui. Movies, music, TV shows,--I ate that shit UP. What's weird is it doesn't really resonate with me now, now that I am really experiencing mid-twenties ennui. Maybe with music we always aspire a decade ahead? If that is the case, why did I like Rod Stewart when I was five? What does that say about him? Or me?)
Jenny Lewis learned to be an objectively better singer eventually—listen to “I Never” on More Adventurous (a vocal track she, legend has it, recorded while completely naked) for that— but here, on songs like "Science Vs. Romance," and "Always," she sings like she's about to shriek. It's unsettling without being upsetting, and it's weirdly consistent, too—this isn't an album chronicling a downward spiral, it's the sound of someone hovering just above one. Jenny Lewis is also really good at swearing; the way she sings “Mexico can fucking wait” on “Pictures of Success” is sublime. (But she got even better at it: “A Better Son Or Daughter” off of The Execution of All Things is probably the best time anyone has ever sung the word “fuck” in the history of indie rock. Disagree? Come at me bro.)
Here's an anecdote into which you can read a lot about Jenny Lewis's psyche, not that to do so would be correct: I saw Rilo Kiley play in Burlington, VT some time (as in, quite a bit of time) after More Adventurous, the penultimate RK album, was released. In “Portions for Foxes,” there's a line that goes “And the loneliness leads to bad dreams, and the bad dreams lead me to calling you, and I call you and say... COME HERE!” On the original record, Lewis screams those last two words. During certain live performances from just after the release, like on Conan maybe, she turned it into a terrifying roar (it was terrific). By the time I saw them, she imply cooed it. “Come here,” as opposed to “COME HERE!” She was cooling off, like molten lava. And okay, people are allowed to do that. But part of me (a dumb, fifteen year old part of me) resents that they do.

After all, Rilo Kiley never became the second coming of Fleetwood Mac (Lewis and Sennett used to fuck, by the way) because they all pulled themselves together (emotionally) and made a dance-y pop record (in 2007) that sucked and then went their separate ways. Jenny Lewis did the “sluttier Emmylou Harris” thing for a while and now it's the aforementioned surf rock. I saw Blake Sennett's band The Elected play a (Unitarian) church basement in Philadelphia and they blew the doors off the place; they've got a new record coming out. Drummer Jason Boesel is a jack of all trades, laying down beats for Bright Eyes, Jakob Dylan, and both Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett (dude has probably heard a lot of stories). He also started writing and singing (with the encouragement of Conor Oberst) and put out a pretty great solo record with the even better title Hustler's Son. And bassist Pierre De Reeder is probably doing stuff too? I don't know. But I assume he's just fine.

So okay, we will always have Takeoffs and Landings, that moment where Jenny Lewis averted her nervous breakdown (at least until her next record) by singing about it. There are a bunch of great songs on it (“Science vs. Romance,” “Don't Deconstruct,” “Wires and Waves,” “Bulletproof,” “Go Ahead”) and a few marginal ones (“Always,” “August”). It has a base-level indie rock sound that people seem afraid to replicate these days (except maybe the dudes in Throw Me The Statue) but that I always appreciate. The more reasonable part of me is willing to let these things that we have and will always have be enough.