{"id":14174,"date":"2018-03-01T05:29:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T10:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14174"},"modified":"2018-03-01T05:32:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T10:32:07","slug":"everyones-for-tennis-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/01\/everyones-for-tennis-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone’s for Tennis, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wife-and-husband team Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are Tennis, a sort of 21st<\/sup> century answer to Captain & Tennille. Across four albums and two EPs, Tennis has carved out a place on the pop landscape, combining a retro aesthetic with modern (sometimes characterized as lo-fi) production values. The duo’s latest collection, We Can Die Happy<\/i>, was released in November, and Tennis scheduled a 20-date U.S. tour for January and February.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Music technology changes at a very rapid pace. In what ways has the technical end of making albums changed for Tennis between the making of Cape Dory<\/i> in 2010 and the We Can Die Happy<\/i> EP, recorded this year?<\/b><\/p>\n

Alaina Moore:<\/b> Technically speaking, we knew very little about engineering. We engineered and produced Cape Dory <\/i>alone with our friends. But we were on such a budget, we did it ourselves. That was a really big learning curve for us.<\/p>\n

We’ve definitely progressed on that side from having the opportunity to work with other people. We worked with Jim Eno, and Patrick Carney, and Richard Swift on Ritual in Repeat<\/i> [2014].We got to watch them engineer, and mix, and learned a lot. We were able to apply all of those things that we\u2019ve learned when we made Yours Conditionally<\/i> [2017] and most recently, We Can Die Happy<\/i>. So now we feel extremely competent doing this alone. And we\u2019re actually building a home studio.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve grown as a band, Patrick and I have evolved into roles that suit us better as a collaborative team. I’ve taken the lead more with songwriting, and his contribution to the band, increasingly, is as an engineer-producer. He chooses the sounds and re-envisions everything sonically for the songs that I’m writing. We’ve set ourselves up so that we can both do what we do best.<\/p>\n

Tennis’ earlier efforts found you both performing all of those duties, correct?<\/b><\/p>\n

Right. In the early days, we wrote together. And then as time progressed, Patrick and I would write separately and then combine what we\u2019ve done to form the record. He would write half the album and I would write the other half.<\/p>\n

\"\"But by the time we got to this EP, I did a lot more of the songwriting and he did a lot more of the producer-engineering. It just makes more sense as we\u2019ve grown as songwriters, because he doesn\u2019t sing or write melodies at all, and he doesn\u2019t write any lyrics. So it was extremely tedious for me to turn what he would write into songs. Patrick is a guitarist who writes interesting things: rhythm guitar parts that aren\u2019t suited to any vocal cues, and not in any particular key that suits me as a singer.<\/p>\n

He’s the thing that keeps Tennis sounding unique, and he helps us avoid the pitfalls of sounding like just a throwback band. He works really, really hard in mixing; he’ll be like, \u201cOkay, we wrote a Carole King [style] song, but what if it sounded like Yes recorded it?\u201d He\u2019ll do that to keep it sounding fresh somehow, but still having that sense of timelessness of ’60s and ’70s production that we love so much.<\/p>\n

I hear echoes of pre-Beatles brill-building pop and early- to mid-1970s AM radio pop in your music. The songs don\u2019t overtly evoke a specific era, yet they still have a nostalgic feel. So that’s intentional?<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad that you notice it; it\u2019s absolutely<\/i> intentional. We work so, so hard to study and channel our songwriting idols, but we really, really, really<\/i> don\u2019t want to write a worse version of a Fleetwood Mac song or something.<\/p>\n

The way art and culture works, it\u2019s very self-referential. That\u2019s normal, and part of the whole process. But I want what we do to stand alone and not be derivative. So we\u2019re always trying to think of two antithetical artists that we really like. I\u2019m channeling one \u2013 usually as a piano player or a singer, and it\u2019s usually a female artist like Laura Nyro or Judee Sill \u2013 and then Patrick will try to imagine it in the context of a band. Like, recently for the song \u201cI Miss That Feeling\u201d on our new EP, I thought, \u201cWhat if Karen Carpenter was in a cooler band?\u201d<\/p>\n

To be continued…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wife-and-husband team Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are Tennis, a sort of 21st century answer to Captain & Tennille. Across four albums and two EPs, Tennis has carved out a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14153,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,49,51],"tags":[3348,3349,3347],"class_list":["post-14174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-new-release","category-pop","tag-alainna-moore","tag-patrick-riley","tag-tennis","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14175,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174\/revisions\/14175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}