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Spotlight

Bands to Watch – Rilo Kiley

JennyLewis and Blake Sennett are two of the most successful child actorsever. Consider the following: Neither one is an irredeemabledrug-addled lout. And Tina Yothers never made an album as good as More Adventurous,the third from Lewis and Sennett’s Los Angeles–based quartet, RiloKiley. “I should be in rehab,” Lewis jokes. “Or at least wandering thestreets, barefoot, looking for Corey Feldman!”

On MoreAdventurous (recorded, like 2002’s The Execution of All Things, withBright Eyes producer Mike Mogis), the 28-year-old Lewis (Troop Beverly Hills)cements her status as the indie-rock Loretta Lynn, singing gorgeous,countrified pop songs about love, war, and love as war. MeanwhileSennett (Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts), bassist Pierre”Duke” de Reeder, and drummer Jason Boesel act as able stagehands,shifting from radio-ready bombast to intimate folk and electro. For “INever,” Lewis actually stripped naked in the vocal booth in order tosound more exposed.

Sennett had an exposure problem of a different sort:suffering through a Midwestern winter. “Other bands seem to go placeslike Jamaica to record,” he says. “We always go in the freezing winterto a city run by U. of Nebraska kids who yell ‘Fag!’ out the window.It’s like, ‘Whatever you say! Just let me make my music!'”