260. Song No. 3,884: “Go Ahead,” Rilo Kiley
Take Offs and Landings, 2001

If you want better things
Then I want you to have them…

Gooooood, there is nothing like old Rilo Kiley and the associations riding in with it. This album especially sounds like my freshman dorm with the windows thrown open to the springtime, sometime after my roommate got kicked out mid-semester and I was still relishing the novelty of a sudden single and being able to play whateverthefuck music I wanted whenever I wanted to. And it also sounds like lying on the floor of that same dorm room and staring at the ceiling, overwhelmed with all kinds of too-big emotions that felt like epochal shifts at the time and have since harmlessly settled into just being one more part of a multi-faceted, foundational and appropriately metamorphic life experience.

This song is ultimately kinder than I was 20ish years ago, and because we see things not for what they are but as we are, my 18-year-old self heard a much more sarcastic, sardonic intent underneath this track that pairs a breezy permissiveness with an absolutely astonishing willingness to accept whatever is best for the object of this song, even if that means losing them to distance, separate paths or the freedom to find somebody else that’s better. It displays such a gobsmacking capacity for loving someone so much you’ve made peace with setting them free that my still-very-much-not-an-adult-yet self could not fathom leading with such effortlessly extended freedom and utter lack of bitter resentment in the face of diverging paths without that generosity of spirit being either a test or a trap.

In the years since this album introduced me to Rilo Kiley, there’s been so much to love about the music and side projects and solo albums that band and its members put into the world, and so many new reasons to find some personal connection to them. But this one has shifted with me, not so much changing itself but rather reflecting how I’ve evolved into a less-shitty person and could see its truth and true nature a lot more clearly without my own immature and defensive bullshit obscuring a vision of a much better world and a much healthier way to interact with the people in it, starting with letting multidimensional people with rich inner landscapes come and go and live their own lives without my malice or possession putting an ugly capstone on a story that deserved a better ending.