God, It Felt Good to Be a Millennial at the Rilo Kiley Concert

On Monday, September 8, I took the 5 train to the Upper East Side, a part of the city that, even after living here for 13 years, still feels intimidatingly sophisticated. Usually, I only venture past 59th for grown-up reasons, like catching a show at the Guggenheim or seeing a medical specialist. How cultured! How “needs the expertise of a podiatrist!” But that evening, I was walking through the UES to get to Central Park’s Summer Stage, in order to fully regress to my teenage self. Rilo Kiley, 15 years after they’d called it quits, was performing their first batch of shows in New York City in over 17 years.

The air held the faint promise of fall, perfect weather for rocking the type of layered outfit I would’ve dreamt up in the early aughts. Perhaps it was our collective ages (millennials and Gen-X’ers who once naively thought George W. Bush would be the worst president of our lifetime) or the fact that it was a Monday evening, but the energy was less a frenzied electricity and more a grounded glow—radiating from bodies softer than the ones we squeezed into American Apparel bodysuits twenty years ago. A full moon lit up the sky, and there might not have been an audience more appreciative of that fact. Whispers of “Wow, look at the moon” peppered the evening.

 

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The Los Angeles-based indie band formed in 1998 and released five studio albums, ending with their most commercially successful album, Under the Blacklight, in 2007. Bandmates Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennet, Pierre de Reeder, and Jason Boesel are all definitely Gen X, but their sentimental and often twee folk, with deep-cutting and spirited lyrics, were solidified in the early aughts, an era when millennials were forming their yet-to-be mocked identities: earnest and a bit self-indulgent. Shortly after Blacklight, the foursome went their separate ways for the typical reasons —creative and personal disagreements, romantic mishaps, exhaustion. But in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, they said they found themselves all together for the first time in 2020 at a backyard barbecue, and a lot of the thorny dynamics of their youth had smoothed over. In February, they announced the Sometimes When You’re On, You’re Really F*cking On tour. I set an alarm on my iPhone to buy tickets, an object that did not exist when I started listening to their music.

When they took the stage, there was an undeniable swell of spirit, with that grounded glow levitating a few feet in the air. Lewis wore a navy polka dot dress—flirty and retro, it would have made my knees buckle if I’d found it at a thrift shop when I was 16. At 49, she looked impossibly chic. My friend whispered, “God, Jenny Lewis is the coolest woman alive,” as she started singing the opening of “The Execution of All Things,” the titular song from their sophomore album, Soldiers, come quickly/I feel the earth beneath my feet. There we were, the millennial and Gen X soldiers in Central Park, ready to fight for our right to revel in a night of nostalgia—except, in that moment, it wasn’t nostalgia. It was something very real and right in front of us.

I started listening to Rilo Kiley around 2005, my developing teenage brain latching onto their third album, More Adventurous. Songs like “Does He Love You?,” “I Never,” and “A Man/Me/Then Jim” played on repeat as I got ready for school dances or sat in the backseat of friends’ cars, aimlessly driving around. Listening to their music before the ubiquity of the internet felt like one of the first ways I was able to see beyond myself. Lewis’ lyrics mapped out a version of a cool, complex womanhood, and I cherished how she adopted new personas in her songs: a woman with a married lover, a grieving friend, an optimist. I, too, was trying on a profusion of pretenses.