Blake Sennett Rebounded From Rilo Kiley Split by Resurrecting the Elected

There was once a time when Blake Sennett wasn't sure he'd ever make another record. After frontwoman Jenny Lewis called for an end to Rilo Kiley in the wake of 2007's 'Under the Blacklight,' the guitarist took a step back from the music industry, including his other band, the Elected. And if it wasn't for a pal sending Sennett back into the studio in 2010, 'Bury Me in My Rings' might never have surfaced.

"My friend Jason [Cupp] said, 'I'm coming to your house and we're going into the studio and we're going to record for a week, or two weeks,'" Sennett tells Spinner. "I was sort of balked at first and then I was like, 'What the hell? This is great, it'll be fun, I haven't played music in forever. Let's do it.'"

Sennett embraced the stream-of-consciousness method to penning songs, a new approach that excited him. "I would record a drum beat or a guitar part, or something, and start building a song around it," he says. "And I've never done this before, writing the songs as they were recorded. It was really exciting and slightly complex sometimes, because three days later, you'd be like, 'Oh s---, that song should have a bridge ...'"

While there are obvious advantages to crafting a record without much thought to the final product or what's going to become of it, Sennett admits it was helpful once the project became a little less open-ended. "There's a certain kind of pressure that you almost need," he muses. "Once you've got the label, once we knew we had a release, that's an added pressure that's like a positive one, where you know it's coming out."

Listen to the Elected's 'Babyface'
The Elected may have seemed like a side-project from the outset ("the stuff that didn't make Rilo Kiley"), but it was never intended as such.

"I don't think the term 'side-project' was ever in mind, necessarily. I mean, maybe that was a term Jenny needed to hear, but I don't know," says Sennett, noting that he and Lewis are on good terms ("She's my buddy, she's a good person, a good friend -- she's my homie").

Now back in the saddle, there's no question that Sennett is re-energized. He and his bandmates are busy exploring new sounds and getting acquainted with instruments that are a little more exotic than, say, a guitar.

"We've been doing some groove-based, world-instrument stuff and that's really exciting to me. Like that steel drum up there or that djembe -- I used to have such contempt over djembes because I associated them with Phish and drum circles and things that kind of pissed me off, but now I'm proud to be an owner of a djembe!