With Arms Outstretched

"With Arms Outstretched" is built around a guitar line that is somehow both simple and irreducible — you couldn't change a note of it without ruining the whole feeling. Rilo Kiley are operating in a sun-damaged country-pop-indie space here, and Jenny Lewis holds the center with a voice that carries warmth and a faint, structuring sadness underneath it, like a photograph that's starting to fade. The song itself is about surrender in the best possible sense — opening yourself to something bigger than your fear, about showing up without your defenses arranged. Lewis delivers this with a lightness that disguises how serious she is; the cheerful strumming, the slight country lilt, the almost breezy tempo all serve to make the emotional core land harder when you finally let it in. It's a road trip song and a breakup song and a reconciliation song and none of those things precisely. It sounds like late afternoon in a moving car, dust coming in through an open window, the feeling of having decided something important without being able to say exactly what.