A Girl, Me, and Then Them

Before I ever saw Jenny Lewis onstage, I smuggled her into my bedroom on a burned CD.

It was the early 2000s. My friend Chloe handed it to me in the halls of our high school, and I slipped it into a case to bring home. In my household, music needed my father’s approval. A blank-looking disc offered a small loophole: someone would have to listen to the whole thing to know what I was getting away with. I was counting on nobody having that kind of time.

My bedroom was my sanctuary. That CD made it feel a little less lonely.

I was an angsty teenager who desperately wanted to fall in love. I wanted to know what it felt like to be chosen by someone who didn’t have to choose me. When “A Man/Me/Then Jim” entered my life, I fixated on Jim’s devotion to Dianna.

Would anyone ever feel that strongly about me?

But Jenny gave me the other side, too. The closed door. The person who could hear how much you loved them and still refuse to let you back in. The woman who felt difficult to live with, for whom living itself had become difficult.

I didn’t understand every story she was telling. I recognized the feelings.

Her words had room for thoughts I hadn’t figured out how to say yet. The lines didn’t always rhyme or land where I expected them to. A phrase would hang there a little longer, and I would stay with it, turning over something about love or loneliness or myself. She trusted me to sit with the uncomfortable parts.

Eventually, I followed those words out of my bedroom.

In 2007, I ran around Los Angeles looking for secret tickets to see Rilo Kiley. The search eventually led us to Eagle Rock Lanes, where we watched a private show that felt like it belonged just to us.

I still have the poster.

It has never been framed. It’s gently rolled up, just as it was in 2007, and it has followed me through dorm rooms, homes, and every state I’ve moved to. For a few years, I thought the Myspace logo on it was corny. Now I love that it’s there.

It dates the whole thing so perfectly. An artifact from an internet we were still figuring out how to inhabit. Secret tickets, a bowling alley, a band you loved, and a website that could somehow bring all of you together. Younger people can read about that internet, but my peers and I got to be there.

The poster has outlasted the version of the internet that helped put it in my hands.

I kept going, traveling around the Bay Area to watch them play. Somewhere along the way, I met Jenny in a bar. She looked at me, noticed my hat, and complimented it.

That was it. She couldn’t have known what that tiny interaction meant to a girl who had spent so much time listening to her alone in a bedroom.

I felt seen.

It’s strange, the weight a stranger’s acknowledgment can carry when their words already occupy so much of your life.

The last time I saw Rilo Kiley before their long absence was in Oakland in 2007. Years later, I saw them together again at Red Rocks. By then, I had lived through enough to hear those songs differently. I understood more about the losses inside them. I also knew how much life the girl listening in her bedroom had gone on to live.

Yesterday, I saw them at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t know it would be their last show for now until Jenny told us.

I was back in my home state, in a park where I’ve watched so many musicians play, in a city that helped raise me. After everything, I was beginning to feel like myself again.

I know their timing had nothing to do with mine. Still, standing there, it was hard not to feel the connection. Jenny found me when I needed words for being young and lonely. The band returned when I needed a reminder. Now I was watching this chapter close somewhere that already held so much of my history.

Then Jenny sang “A Better Son/Daughter.”

My anthem.

The song I put on when I need help getting out of bed.

From its first words to its last, that song has carried me through experiences I sometimes couldn’t imagine surviving. I have returned to it exhausted, ashamed, overwhelmed, and unsure how to begin again. Each time, there was room for me to come back imperfect. To try. To show up for people. To keep offering whatever love and words I still had in me.

Yesterday, I sang it with one hand on my heart and the other around a stranger I had just met, both of us screaming the lyrics.

I hadn’t expected that moment. I hadn’t known I needed it.

There is a slow sadness in watching an era end, even when you’re ready for whatever comes next. I felt it there. But underneath it was something else.

For years, I had heard my own hurt in Jenny’s voice.

Yesterday, singing back to her, I could hear my strength, too.

Almost as if the music were saying: You’re okay. I believe in you. You’ve got this.

Thank you, Jenny. Singing with you yesterday felt like healing the last little piece of my younger self still hiding in that dark bedroom.

She was ready to come home.