Rilo Kiley
The Anthem, Washington, DC September 10, 2025
When a neighbor offered up complimentary tickets for
Rilo Kiley at the Anthem, I joked that I would be able to relive my days as a teenage girl in the early 2000s.
Clearly for age, gender, and other reasons, I was not Rilo Kiley’s primary audience at the time of their initial run, but I did follow their work somewhat closely, and I own the three critical records the band released before their acrimonious breakup —
The Execution of All Things (2002),
More Adventurous (2004), and
Under the Blacklight (2008). But I wasn’t planning to attend their reunion show until a ticket fell into my lap, so I spent the night before reacquainting myself with their back catalogue.
I was reminded that, at their best, Rilo Kiley offered up both sturdy Americana-influenced indie rock with the cutting lyrics of Jenny Lewis, a consummate pro singer and laconic and insightful writer. As for her former co-leader and partner, Blake Sennett, well, you can see why she became a star when the band broke up, and he didn’t.
The Anthem was pretty full for a band that hadn’t really toured for a generation, since its breakup, and I think most of the audience was craving the opportunity to revisit a childhood or young-adult favorite, or to experience a band that they had only experienced on streaming services or TikTok. There were honestly more guys than I expected; I always thought of Rilo Kiley as the “girl’s” Saddle Creek band alongside Bright Eyes as the “guy’s” band, a simplistic rationale but not unfounded since so many of Conor Oberst’s songs were about being a terrible boyfriend and making bad and self-destructive choices, and so many of Rilo Kiley’s songs were about … dealing with terrible boyfriends and their self-destructive choices.
My take overall is that this was a purely commercial reunion. The band didn’t pretend to have new material to promote, and didn’t engage much with one another or with the audience, except for a few brief intervals. It was very professional, but I didn’t feel terribly engaged, even when I liked the material immensely. I mean, “With Arms Outstretched” and “Portions for Foxes” and “Silver Lining” are undeniably great songs, and they were performed and sung well. But did it ever feel like much more than a revenue opportunity? Not so much.
It’s always interesting to see how current audiences experience a band’s back catalogue, now that most listeners have encountered the band outside of the album context. “Silver Lining” from
Blacklight now appears to be the band’s most popular song by a sizable margin, but Spotify shows a surprising number of listens to the material from 2001’s
Take Offs and Landings, a record I didn’t really ever know — to me, they emerged with
Execution of All Things in 2002. And the 2002 and 2004 records still represented the lion’s share of the setlist — six each from
Execution and
More Adventurous — so I think the band’s own assessment lines up with mine.
There was no overarching theme that I could discern in the set: the band did its most popular and significant songs, starting on a high note with the eschatological “The Execution of All Things” and its witheringly cynical lines, “we'll go to Omaha to work and exploit the booming music scene (and humility).” They went back to their debut with “Wires and Waves,” a song I didn’t really know, and then did more from
Execution and
More Adventurous.
Under the Blacklight was first represented by “The Moneymaker,” not only an aggressively bad song but perhaps the worst piece of music Jenny Lewis has ever released. I remember when
Blacklight was released and the reviews of utter bewilderment and dismay, none moreso than for this song, a leaden and heavy-handed takedown of the music industry that was intended to be subversive as it was Rilo Kiley’s major label debut. It flopped for the obvious reasons — it’s an objectively bad song — but also because of its meanspiritedness and disdain to its audience. “Silver Lining” ended up beloved by contrast, but the track from
Under the Blacklight that really succeeded for me in the performance was the gleaming indie disco jam “Breaking Up,” which never seemed like more than a trifle on the album but really shone live.
But despite a few
Blacklight highlights, the bulk of the set — and my favorite moments — were all mostly from
Execution of All Things and
More Adventurous. Lewis was in fine voice throughout but only showed more than professional engagement with the audience on a few occasions; Sennett spoke with the audience just once and sung lead on just one early song.
The main set closed with a group singalong to “With Arms Outstretched,” “A Better Son/Daughter,” and “Portions for Foxes” — all indisputably great tunes, and not coincidentally among the band’s most popular over subsequent decades. And the chorus from “A Better Son/Daughter” gave the tour its title, “Sometimes When You’re On, You’re Really Fucking On.” But what was interesting to me was the encore, starting with the title track from
More Adventurous (not a song I really resonated with) and closing with
Take Offs and Landing’s “Pictures of Success,” but in between was “The Frug,” the one single from the band’s earliest days in Los Angeles, truly one of the great weird songs, an indie-doo-wop ode to awkward embarrassing adolescent sexual discovery and dance moves. The
video (from an utterly ignored teen movie in 1999) is a time capsule to the radiantly gorgeous younger Jenny Lewis, the band’s doofus guys, and a melody so utterly simplistic it almost mocks the idea of being considered a song. Mirah, Allo Darlin’, and El Perro Del Mar have all done simple/dumb/profound songs along these lines, but none of them sell out the Anthem 25 years after their debuts.
The opener for Rilo Kiley was
Dean Johnson, whose country-indie set was utterly unmemorable if inoffensive.
T-shirts I saw at the Anthem, other than Rilo Kiley?
Bright Eyes, lots
Willie Nelson
Springsteen
The Faint (someone doing a big Saddle Creek homage)
I wore a 10,000 Maniacs
Our Time in Eden shirt and one of the Anthem ushers reacted positively to it.
Setlist:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/rilo-kiley/2025/the-anthem-washington-dc-35bc94b.html
