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| [The Walkmen w/ Japandroids & Tennis] [Saturday, 9 p.m.] [Waiting Room, Omaha] [$13] mp3: "Marathon" Listen to their Sept. 23 session on Daytrotter |
The duo out of Denver, known as Tennis, decided to release a few of their songs on an EP with the small label Underwater Peoples. Their tracks "Baltimore," "Cape Dory" and "Marathon" became all the music-blog-buzz. The success led them to sign with a bigger label, Fat Possum Records, for their debut album in 2011.
The two are thrilled to be playing with one of their favorite bands at The Waiting Room in Omaha on Saturday.
"We're so lucky to be playing with The Walkmen," Riley said. "That's literally my favorite band and one of Alaina's all-time favorite bands. So it's definitely a dream come true."
I was able to talk sailing and the new album with Riley. The band starts touring again this week.
What's it like to make music and tour with your wife, Alaina? It doesn't seem to be something too many musicians get to do.
Alaina and I's relationship is definitely really good. We started off, and we were best friends. So it's essentially just touring with your best friend. A relationship kind of came secondary, so that's kind of how our relationship was built. And if you put it that way - we know each other so well, I mean, we have such similar tastes. But yeah, it's been absolutely amazing. I'm very, very fortunate.
What did the both of your lives consist of before Tennis?
Well, we were both just recently graduating from the University of Colorado with degrees in philosophy, and so, philosophy is probably the most pointless degree to get if you're looking to make money. So the only thing you can think of is going to graduate school, however, aside of all that, I had been saving my money for six years to go on a sailing trip. So the whole tentative plan, I guess, was to go on the sailing trip, come back, make money and then go to graduate school. But what it turned into is more of the truncated sailing trip and then coming back and being, like, I don't know, so nostalgic for it that we ended up writing music. And that kind of overwhelmed the prospect of graduate school.
What exactly prompted your change from Underwater Peoples to Fat Possum for your new album?
I mean, if you're trying to make a living off of music, which is what we're trying to do now, those small labels are amazing when you're just doing things kind of for fun, but the second that you want to make it a job, so to speak, there's certain limitations with smaller labels that you can't deny. Like Underwater Peoples is an amazing, amazing label, but the distribution is really hard to compete with when you put them up next to bigger labels and their networks and connections and everything like that. But on the personal side of things, it is definitely the way to go. Small labels are the best way to introduce yourself to music, I guess.
Can we expect some of the EP songs to be on the new album?
Yeah, it's kind of a funny story so - this has all happened really fast. We wrote those songs, and those were demos to us. But it was people, like Underwater Peoples, that thought they were good enough to be released. We never thought so many people would hear them. We thought like, "Oh, that's cool, we'll release a 7-inch, a few hundred people might buy it." But there's billions of people in the world, so I think that's OK. And so those demos - is what we're treating them - they were part of like a whole story. Our full-length is a concept album. In a lot of ways, it's just like a documentation of our trip. And so, those songs are really, really key parts during the trip. So it would be a little bit silly to leave them out and have huge holes in the story. But yeah, we re-recorded them and they actually sound quite a bit different I think.
So you said your new album, which is going to be released next year, correct?
Yeah, correct.
It's going to be a concept album with your guys' sailing trip. So were all of the songs written while you were out there, or did you come back and write some more for the new album?
It was kind of both. I mean if you put time aside, uh, it was definitely written during the trip, but if you put time in place, we're just sketching out the songs during the trip, and we definitely had all our ideas in place - but it wasn't until we got back. It's hard to explain. Because when we got back, we were literally just putting ourselves through our imaginations, just going back to the trip and all the experiences we had. And we kept a pretty comprehensive blog of everything that happened, so it was easy to put on the shoes of a sailor while you're land-locked in Colorado to try and re-create the stories musically.
Were you guys surprised of what came out of that sailing trip? Had you planned to do music writing all along?
Not at all. It was very fortuitous. Alaina and I didn't really know that our styles of play would go together so well. It's really hard to start a band - I've played in so many bands growing up, and it seems like every single one had their struggles. But for us, it just came really, really naturally. So it was really, really lucky that we just kind of sat down and decided to do this, because if we didn't, we definitely weren't planning on doing it.
So are you guys planning to do another big sailing trip after the album comes out, when you're kind of on a break?
Yeah, definitely. I'm hoping we can make money to where we can do that. Before this took off, we were gonna take another trip. We had worked another year, just straight saving, and kinda bought ourselves another year to do whatever. We were planning on just going sailing, but we were lucky enough to have our music kind of go the way it's been going. But yeah, if it goes well, we're going to try to do another trip; if it doesn't go well, it will happen some other time in the future.
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