the great millennial melt (Just Like Heaven 2025)

There is a wonderful feeling when you are introduced to a band through a contemporaneous album, and then you realize the album was preceded by several other great albums you have yet to experience. This is a feeling I felt in 2004 when, as a high school freshman, I borrowed a friend's CD copy of More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley, and then after that I got to listen to The Execution of All Things and Take Offs and Landings. Jenny Lewis was so immediately One Of My Guys that I can't tell you in good conscience love at first sight isn't real. Like Jenny, I liked a boy who was bad news, who was leading me down the pipeline of talking > touching > sex > no mystery left at great speed. Like Jenny, sometimes when I was on, I was reeeeaaaally fucking on.

For my 35th birthday last year, I ate a fancy dinner at the Sunset Tower Hotel with my husband Chris. I had a powerful martini with my chicken pot pie, and then a talkative man came over, poured us two watered-down vodkas, and talked about caviar varietals for a while. Chris drove me home from Beverly Hills and I requested Take Offs and Landings played at high volume. Jenny made "Pictures of Success" in her mid-twenties and I listened to it for the first time during adolescence, but its "Whats going on with mycareer" theme rings eternal. I sang along: I'm a modern girl but I fold in half so easily / When I put myself in the picture of success. Jenny understood earlier than all the other girls that there's no such thing as a dream job.

Buying a ticket to Just Like Heaven this year was non-negotiable. Rilo Kiley was reuniting and this was their first big show back together after a couple of smaller shows up the coast. One of my favorite bands of all time, back again, playing at the Rose Bowl, a convenient 15-minute drive from my house.

There are many music festivals happening in America these days. Just Like Heaven is the one for aging millennials. The first one was in 2019 (Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT, Beach House). The second one was in 2022 (Interpol, Modest Mouse, The Shins, M.I.A.) The third one was in 2023 (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT, Future Islands, Empire of the Sun, M83). The fourth one was last year (The Postal Service, Phoenix, Death Cab For Cutie, The War On Drugs). And this year: Vampire Weekend, Rilo Kiley, Empire of the Sun, Bloc Party, TV On The Radio. You picking up what they're putting down?

It was my first time at JLH. I'm medium pregnant right now and trying to pack in a bunch of shit before it gets...hard to walk, I guess. (If you're going to Kilby Block Party, let me know, I'll be there, bigger than before.) I love music festivals so much, even when they kind of suck. I just believe in communal music experiences so much! We've been doing them for so long, as people! Sometimes we screw up a little, but a touch of friction only enhances the gratification.

Of course, screw up too much—charge too much for concessions and water, let your plumbing malfunction, place two stages a mile apart on steaming-hot concrete—and you end up with legendary failure. Music festivals are miniature societies. A city gets built and destroyed in a single weekend. Human behavior writ large, set to the tunes of my old iPod whose charger I lost.

JLH was two stages at opposite ends of a cordoned-off golf course. The packed one-day lineup required a precisely timed schedule. Lotta 30- and 40-minute sets, and the larger stage had five-minute turnarounds, which was nuts. We got there just as elite podcaster Jason Stewart aka themjeans was wrapping up his DJ set, and then the "turnaround" was literal—they rotated him out of there and brought of Montreal on.

The weather was intense. It was 90 degrees by 11am, and closer to 100 degrees for a good four hours of the afternoon. A sensible person might have waited out the hotness. But of Montreal was playing at 12:30pm. Missing them was leaving money on the table. Kevin Barnes wore a patterned pink silk shirt and jaunty beret; there was no time for banter, just bops.

Panda Bear were scheduled for 30 minutes but only played for 20?? Not sure what was going on there. The theme of the day was "we're getting older so we brought in a nice young drummer." The other theme was "ZANY VISUALS." Hercules and Love Affair was a beautiful experience. The current non-Andy-Butler-vocalist Elín Ey has a lovely voice and there was a special feeling amid the sparse but dedicated crowd: we were here, we had committed to sweating it out together. Before their set started, I bought a frozen Minute Maid lemonade ($9) and eating it whilst dancing was perfect. Cold fruit desserts pair well with dance music overall. They should serve more popsicles at the club but I understand that would be messy...but dancing should be a little messy.

I hid in the shade for a while and we intercepted more friends as they arrived. I also talked to a nice person I met the previous night at the Richard Pictures show at Old Towne Pub—a fellow fan of the internet radio show Time Crisis, whose co-host Jake Longstreth plays in Richard Pictures (“the best southern california based grateful dead cover band in the world"), and whose other co-host Ezra Koenig plays in Vampire Weekend. Audio products...make the people...come together...yeah...

A sojourn to the A Club Called Rhonda tent, a dance zone sheathed in white fabric and decorated with sculptures of antiquity. Here the pandering became personal and Chris and I were able to make wide eye contact and yell the names of various songs, along with their producers, their remixes' producers, etc. THE DFA REMIX OF DECEPTACON! THE SOULWAX REMIX OF WORK IT! THE A-TRAK REMIX OF HUSTLER? NO, THE ORIGINAL! If there's anywhere I can be this annoying, let it be at the millennial music festival. I was also happy to catch some of Dances' set, one of the best internet follows around, he even posted his set after which is très generous:

TV On The Radio played at 5:40, the last gasp of the days' full heat. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone both look amazing, with Kyp kitted out in great Palestine-supporting attire. TV On The Radio played at my college in 2011, back when I had a point-and-shoot camera and loved taking terrible blurry pictures w/ no flash.

Food break. Chris got pad thai, I got a double cheeseburger, and we split 'em. Burger was NICE. Hot day, hot beef. I'm into burgers right now. I'm a little low on iron, so the doctor pretty much prescribed me burger. Shout out to the Burger Diva newsletter.

Logistics check as the sun set: the grounds were of a manageable size. The food lines weren't too terrible. Bathrooms were amazing—no lines, toilet paper for everyone. Didn't try all the branded activations but special shout out to the Ritual Zero Proof stand which was slinging reasonably sized free samples of fake cocktails, with ice. The standard water for sale was gross? It was called DRIP and it tasted like ass. I drank one can and then held onto the same can for the whole day and refilled it at the plentiful water stations. It's not a real festival if I don't have at least one emotional support beverage clutched in my woman claw.

I digested my burger during Slowdive. They ripped. I'm not a shoegaze girl by nature but in a live context, I think I "got it." To me, good shoegaze is like a wedge salad: more about texture than about flavor. And this was solid texture. A pile of tumbled gemstones, a scoop of ethereal chocolate mousse. I will explore Slowdive's catalog further soon...

We realized we were standing on the perfect place from which we could enjoy Rilo Kiley's set: a subtle but distinct hill, undulating house right of the Stardust Stage. "Great military strategy, get the higher ground," said my friend Mitch. I was worried we'd be surrounded by chompers, like I was at the Postal Service's Kilby Block Party set last year, but as soon as the muted tones that precede "The Execution of All Things" kicked in, the crowd was nothing but reverent. I extend a hearty thank you to all who stood near us on The Hill. Zero yapping, your gleaming report card is in the mail.

Rilo Kiley!!! Jenny Lewis looked fabulous in a minidress, tiara, white ankle socks and Mary Jane shoes; she had a can of Modelo onstage, with a straw in it (bless!) Blake Sennett had a great look too, West Coast Art Dad. The band struck the perfect balance between "wink wink you know you missed us" and "holy shit this is a big deal." I can say I'd be thrilled to hear literally any combination of songs from their catalog, but I was happy to experience the More Adventurous tunes I'd last seen live in Burlington in May 2005 again, and also happy to hear Under the Blacklight songs (they never did come back to Vermont before they broke up) and very happy to hear "The Frug" which included Jenny Lewis pouting and folding her arms when she sang "I cannot do the Smurf." Everyone outstretched their arms for "With Arms Outstretched." I cried a little!!

By the time Vampire Weekend closed out, the remaining crowd was loose and happy, if a little exhausted. The day's sun had melted all remaining inhibitions and people were free to collapse on their picnic blankets or hop in small circles to "A-Punk." If there was a dominant drug on tap, it was simply marijuana. Smoking weed when all these songs first came out was such a god damn hassle—buying it, finding smoking accoutrements, hiding the smell in your dorm room. Now it's as optimized as ordering a Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl on your phone. "Gen X Cops" is my favorite new Vampire song, I'm a sucker for the double-time "That Thing You Do!" beat in all forms. Bonus points for an absolutely shredding violinist onboard. Do you know who they were?? Tell me.

I like to explore new experiences and get out of my comfort zone. That's what helps me grow and change. But sometimes the comfort zone does what it says on the label. All day I was listening to music I loved from my youth, surrounded by people who remembered life before the computer was on the phone. It felt good. You know what made the festival work? Everyone was old as shit and wore their most comfortable shoes. Barely anyone was was fucking around with Temu cowboy boots or fresh-out-of-the-box Docs. We all knew our limitations and were determined to get around them, if only for a day. After all, amateur hour ended somewhere between the "Blue Jeans" video and Kony 2012. They say California is a recipe for a black hole–I say I got my adidas Ultraboosts on...I'm ready to go.

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