Every parent has heard it. The car’s pulling out of the driveway, and a small voice from the back seat says, please, I don’t want to go today.
Riley Keough says she said it a lot as a kid. So did her little brother, Benjamin.
Riley is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter and the first child of Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child. In October 2024 she sat down with host Tonya Mosley on NPR’s “Fresh Air” to talk about her mom’s memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” the book Lisa Marie started and Riley finished for her.
Somewhere in that warm, wide-ranging chat, Mosley brought up the school run. “She drove you to school and you and your brother were like, please, we don’t want to go,” she said.
Riley didn’t play it down. “That was, like, all the time. It was a constant thing,” she said.
Now, most moms in that spot have a script. You’ll be fine, and I’ll pick you up at three. Lisa Marie didn’t really go by that script, and Riley explained why. Her mom, she said, “didn’t care for school at all.”
Longtime Elvis fans might be smiling already. Like father, like daughter.
If you want to see how Riley talks about her mom when the subject comes up, this CBS Mornings chat about writing the memoir and its pick for Oprah’s Book Club is a good one.
Riley Keough on writing her mom’s memoir
So what did Lisa Marie do when the kids begged to stay home?
She turned the car around.
“She would, you know, just turn around, take us to the toy store, take us to get ice cream, take us to the studio with her,” Riley said.
The studio was Lisa Marie’s recording studio. She was a singer and songwriter in her own right, with three albums out over the years: “To Whom It May Concern” in 2003, “Now What” in 2005 and “Storm & Grace” in 2012. So a day off from school with Mom could mean sitting in on the real thing, where the music got made.
And the ride there had its own soundtrack. This is the part Riley still remembers.
“She’d always play us her demos in the car and blast it really loud,” she said.
Demos are the rough early recordings of songs before they’re finished. In other words, Riley and Ben got a front-row seat to their mom’s new music, at full volume, on the way to wherever the day took them. Riley didn’t say which songs they were. Still, it’s fun to wonder.
It’s not exactly what the school counselor would recommend, and nobody’s holding it up as parenting advice. But Riley tells it as a happy memory, about a mom who’d rather spend the morning with her kids than drop them at the curb.
In the same interview, Riley described her mom as “one of the most loving people I’ve ever met.”
You can find the full “Fresh Air” conversation on NPR’s website. And if you grew up with a parent who bent the rules once in a while just to spend a day with you, this one might hit close to home.