Rilo Kiley Issue #33

It’s hard to make sleaze sound sweet — unless you're Jenny Lewis

By Laura Leebove
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Rilo Kiley’s signature formula has always involved dark lyrics sewn into sugarcoated pop rock, energized by Jenny Lewis’ dreamy vocals. The L.A. band’s fourth album, Under the Blacklight, is no exception. “We’ve always kind of had a brighter- or cheerier-sounding musical side with a darker lyrical subtext,” Lewis says on the phone, slightly distracted by the English muffins she was making with guitarist Blake Sennett. “If you listen to even our earliest recordings and songs, there’s a little bit of that going on.”

It’s been three years since the release of More Adventurous (Brute/Beaute), but the band members haven’t slowed down. After touring and promoting for the album, they took a year and a half off from Rilo Kiley responsibilities, in which Sennett released his second album with the Elected (much of which he recorded in the back of Rilo’s tour bus), drummer Jason Boesel recorded with Bright Eyes, and Lewis released and promoted her glorious Southern-rooted solo debut, 2006’s Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love).

The motivation behind Blacklight was experimentation and breaking new ground, which the band achieves both musically and lyrically. “I think we’re a band who’s restless and operates best under stress, so we try to challenge ourselves to do things we haven’t done before,” Sennett says. “We recorded a lot of songs — finished, like, 25 songs — and just kinda pieced together the best record out of those songs.”

The 11 songs that made the cut are not only different from one another, but completely unlike anything Rilo has done in its nearly 10-year career — “Breakin’ Up” starts as disco but ends with a gospel feel; “Dreamworld” sounds like it was written in the ’70s, and “15” has a horn-heavy country twang. Blacklight uses danceable guitar riffs, bleeping synthesizers, and huge, soulful choruses to give it a richer, more complex sound than the band’s first three releases.

Blacklight is Rilo Kiley’s first major-label release — the quartet signed to Warner Bros. in 2005 — but Lewis says the label wasn’t involved creatively in making the album. “We just presented the record to them when we were finished, so the difference will be in how the record gets out there,” she says. And clearly, the label not only trusted the band with the music but also with the subject matter. Under the Blacklight’s songs are about the seedier parts of L.A., which Lewis says comes more from observation than from personal experience. “Unfortunately, my life isn’t as exciting as some of the characters portrayed in the songs,” she says, “but maybe I can sort of live vicariously through them.”

Several of the album’s characters are involved in the sex industry, most obviously in “The Moneymaker,” Blacklight’s first single. The music video features a nine-minute casting session of porn actors who thought they were auditioning for a porn flick. When the music starts, the film cuts back and forth between the band and the actors, all taking place in what appears to be a sex–shop–turned–strip club.

In the interviews, we learn that the video’s young female stars fled from home to Los Angeles for a shot at movie stardom. Like countless others with the same dreams, things didn’t go as planned, which is exactly what Under the Blacklight is about. As part of the L.A. entertainment industry, the members of Rilo Kiley are used to seeing people who crave fame and fortune fall fast and hard to temptation.

Though, thankfully, they didn’t end up in porn, Lewis and Sennett are also not strangers to the screen. They both grew up acting — Sennett played Ronnie Pinsky in Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts and the weasely Joey “the Rat” Epstein in Boy Meets World, while Lewis appeared in TV shows like Growing Pains and Brooklyn Bridge. Sennett says the move from film to music wasn’t too difficult. “You just stop going to auditions and you just start writing songs. It’s not that hard, transitioning, it’s just harder believing in yourself sometimes, in anything,” he says. But, like the aspiring movie stars who turned to porn, Sennett and Lewis took a chance. In their case, however, it worked to their advantage. “You gotta just jump off the bridge sometimes,” he says.

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Alexis Owens contributed to this story.