There’s a version of Jenny Lewis that never made it past the More Adventurous era, and that’s fine, because Skin — the Rilo Kiley EP that snuck out on Brute/Beaute in 2004 between that album and everything that came after — is the version that stayed up too late and meant it.
Four songs. Twenty-two minutes. It doesn’t announce itself.
The Room It Was Made In
Skin was recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, that same cavernous, reverb-blessed room where the Doors cut L.A. Woman and Prince laid down Purple Rain. It’s a studio that has a sound whether you want it to or not. Producer Mike Mogis — who was deep in his Bright Eyes run at this point, building out that Omaha indie infrastructure with Conor Oberst — understood how to use a room like that without being swallowed by it. He’d done Lifted the year before. He knew when to let silence sit.
The band here is the full More Adventurous configuration: Lewis on vocals and guitar, Blake Sennett doing what Blake Sennett does, which is write melodies that feel like they’ve always existed. Pierre de Reeder on bass, Jason Boesel on drums. This is a band that had learned to play like a unit rather than a project.
Boesel in particular is underrated in every conversation about this era of indie rock. He plays behind the beat just enough.
What the EP Actually Does
The centerpiece is the title track, eleven minutes of slow-building confession that doesn’t resolve so much as exhale. Lewis sings about bodies and damage and the particular loneliness of being known. It’s not a breakup song. It’s more uncomfortable than that — it’s a song about being present for someone’s unraveling and not knowing what your responsibility is.
The string arrangement that comes in around minute seven is not showy. That’s the point.
“It’s a Hit” is the other track that gets cited, and deservedly — it’s the sharpest piece of cultural criticism Rilo Kiley ever put on tape, a song about the music industry’s appetite for female pain delivered in the sweetest possible voice. Any chimp can play human for a day. Lewis knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.
The production by Mogis is warm in the way that Sunset Sound is warm — there’s analog tape in there somewhere and you can feel it, the way compression breathes on the drums, the way Lewis’s vocal has room to move without being drowned in effects. Engineer AJ Mogis (Mike’s brother, his constant collaborator through the Saddle Creek years) kept the low end present without making it heavy. This is a quiet record that sounds expensive.
Skin came out the same year as More Adventurous, which means most people filed it under supplementary material. That’s a mistake. The EP is doing something the full-length doesn’t quite attempt — it’s unhurried in a way that only a project with nothing to prove can be. No single, no tour push, no radio consideration. Just four songs that needed to exist.
Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis had been in a relationship for years by this point. It was ending. You can hear that, if you want to hear it, but the record doesn’t require you to know it. Good songs don’t.
Put it on after 11pm. Don’t skip “Skin.”