Reunion Brings Rilo Kiley Back to Nashville

Rilo Kiley’s distinctive twee-adjacent indie rock is just about the epitome of awkwardly cut bangs and early-Aughts nostalgia. The last time Middle Tennessee saw a performance from the group was Bonnaroo 2008. Before that, the most recent time they graced a stage in Nashville was in September 2005 at bygone amphitheater Starwood supporting Coldplay.

Two decades of that pent-up indie-rock longing flowed through The Pinnacle on Tuesday as Rilo Kiley jolted back into existence for a triumphant return and a high-octane show as a part of their reunion tour, dubbed Sometimes When You’re On, You’re Really Fucking On. The show was also a homecoming of sorts for frontwoman Jenny Lewis, who lived in East Nashville for about six years before heading back to Los Angeles. 

Tuesday’s opening act was Omaha, Neb., dance-rock outfit The Faint. The group came to prominence in the early 2000s as signees to Saddle Creek, the label best-known for launching writers of emotionally wrought songs like Conor Oberst. When the lights dimmed and the opening notes of “The Execution of All Things” began, the five-piece incarnation of Rilo Kiley strode onstage, Lewis appropriately adorned in polka dots and Mary Janes. It was a slow buildup into a spunky, magnetic performance, as if the band never parted ways more than a decade ago. 

In between performances of “I Never” and “Close Call,” guitarist Blake Sennett and Lewis shared that the thought of a Rilo Kiley reunion tour first occurred to them here in Nashville. 

“Me and Jenny were both living in Nashville,” Sennett said. “Jenny was like, ‘Hey, will you come over and help me change the battery on my alarm?’ And she walked me to my car. It was the first moment that we were like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, do you think we’d ever do a Kiley tour again?’”

The night’s set list bounced around the band’s discography. It spanned the evocative storytelling of 2001’s Take Offs and Landings and the following year’s The Execution of All Things to the punchy undertones and heartbreaking ballads of 2004’s More Adventurous, as well as the dark groove-inspired sound of the band’s final LP, 2007’s Under the Blacklight. 

Anthems of loving, longing and mortality — songs about leaving a place or person and starting anew — are all what made Rilo Kiley a genre-defining group of the early 2000s. Fans in the Nashville crowd did not appear to have forgotten any of this. During the second verse of “A Better Son/Daughter,” the audience chanted the lyrics along with Lewis in a raw, freeing release of emotions. As the band played “With Arms Outstretched,” hundreds of hands instinctively rose in the air as Lewis sang: “I visit these mountains with frequency / I stand here with my arms up.”

When it was time for the encore, Lewis sat down on the stage to gently sing “A Man/Me/Then Jim,” which was followed by a rendition of the boppy tune “Frug” from the band’s debut self-titled EP. They then took an audience suggestion to sing “Breakin’ Up.” Lewis quickly obtained a cowbell, and switched the opening line’s reference to New York City with a nod to Nashville: “It’s not as if Music City burned down to the ground once you drove away.” 

A defining factor of Rilo Kiley’s music is a sense of coming of age. Much of their music has the keen ability to place you with a feeling that you’re on the precipice of something great, or at least something better — a sense that times of suffering or anguish will soon end, a hope that something new is just around the corner. 

The band embodied this with the night’s closer “Pictures of Success,” which exuded a sort of bitter wistfulness. The outro repeated, “These are times that can’t be weathered / And we have never been back there since then,” words that float in the air as both eerie and beautiful in light of the group’s reunion. They represent a way of saying that things will be OK, things will pass, and some things just take time.

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