Ike Reilly

“I’m the king of Music Row,” says Ike Reilly.  Standing on the stoop of his recording studio with his arms wide open, the songwriter claims the whole street as his musical kingdom.  For the former gravedigger and doorman, Music Row is just one house.  It’s the 100-year-old bungalow wedged between a nail salon and an insurance agency in Libertyville, Illinois. This is where Reilly now makes his records.  

Libertyville is about 38 miles north of Chicago, and it’s the hometown of Marlon Brando, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Adam Jones of Tool, Maureen Herman of Babes in Toyland, and many other successful artists and musicians. These folks have all fled town. Reilly never left. He has lived there his entire life, and he has churned out song after song, album after album, all the while maintaining a seemingly together family life and touring America both as a lone troubadour and while leading his greasy band, The Ike Reilly Assassination. While Libertyville certainly appears idyllic, the stories that Reilly mines from it, and from people and places all over the world, clearly are not.  Tom Morello, also a Libertyville native, says, “These homogeneous Midwestern towns like Libertyville can forge rebels, and Ike Reilly is just that.  He’s somebody who sees through the veil of bullsh*t, and you can hear it in all his songs.”