{"id":14176,"date":"2018-03-02T05:30:25","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T10:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14176"},"modified":"2018-03-01T05:31:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T10:31:42","slug":"everyones-for-tennis-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/02\/everyones-for-tennis-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone’s for Tennis, Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One…<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill Kopp: But Jack Daugherty’s production style for the Carpenters was nothing like the sound of Cape Dory<\/i>…<\/b><\/p>\n

Alainna Moore<\/strong>: Our earliest records were soaked in reverb, but it\u2019s nice for me to explore other production techniques, to see how they make me sing differently. I love the production style of really dry, tightly doubled vocals like Harry Nilsson and Karen Carpenter. I like how it makes the song instantly more confronting and personal, right there in your face.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s been something we\u2019ve been experimenting with lately. This is still really new to me; having a song with no reverb on my voice was totally life-changing. But I’m sure we won\u2019t live there forever; we always change and find something else. These are all the things that we\u2019re thinking about; we’re trying not to get too comfortable with one way of doing things. We’re using different production techniques as ways to elicit new approaches to songwriting, because you hear a song differently when you change the way it\u2019s recorded.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You mentioned you’re building a home studio. Are you using old or new technology?<\/b><\/p>\n

We have lots of out-of-the-box stuff. We have a real tape delay, and we use that a lot. We have analog compressors and things, but then we actually record into our computer on ProTools. We do<\/i> use a four-track; sometimes we just bounce a thing to tape after it\u2019s been recorded. Or, we\u2019ll record one thing to tape and then put that into a ProTools session and build from there.<\/p>\n

We really like the sound of analog. Sometimes we\u2019ll just put the drum take to tape, then we\u2019ll put it into ProTools, and then we will build a loop so that we can have it set to a grid. Since I already write in such a classical [pop] style, we\u2019ve worked really hard to use a lot of modern recording techniques. Because sample culture has influenced popular music so much.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something really interesting about us creating our own samples, so to speak. There\u2019s something about a drum loop that makes it more trance-like, instead of like a performance.<\/p>\n

Speaking of drums, one distinctive feature of most Tennis recordings is that the drums often end up sounding like a drum machine. So you actually do that on purpose?<\/b><\/p>\n

Absolutely. We start [recording] every song with drums first, unless it\u2019s a ballad. The drums are the most important part to us, and also the hardest to get right. Our goal is: if we enjoy the drum performance and tone in the session first \u2013 if we can like that unmixed with nothing else there \u2013 then we already know that we are on track for the song.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How has playing live these last several years affected your approach to making records?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s forced us to write more diversely. If we could, we would write almost exclusively mid-tempo, melodic, vibey songs. But then live, we would notice that with one song after another of that kind, we just started to lose the crowd.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve actually been forcing ourselves to speed up our songs. For this EP, when we wrote \u201cNo Exit,\u201d we were just like, \u201cThis has to be 120 BPMs. We have to write a faster song.\u201d And the same with \u201cDiamond Rings.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we went to play \u201cNo Exit\u201d live, it was still<\/i> too slow, so we sped it up about 5 BPMs. On record, it\u2019s 120, but live, we play it more like 125. And we were laughing, because considered speeding it up when we were recording it. We were like, \u201c125? What is this madness? We couldn\u2019t be faster!\u201d And now [we realize] \u201cOh, we really could\u2019ve sped that song up a little more.\u201d<\/p>\n

How would you describe the relationship between live performance and studio work?<\/b><\/p>\n

It’s definitely a complex relationship. But [live performance] does have the positive effect of re-calibrating our headspace of what we want to write when we go home. Since our attraction to songwriting is so engineering- and production-based, sometimes we end up writing songs that are wholly dependent on the sounds and the mix. And I\u2019ve since realized that while those are lovely to listen to, the reason why they might not hold up live is because the songwriting is lacking. So we\u2019re really, really trying to push ourselves to write songs that work no matter how they\u2019re played or heard.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s something that playing live has taught us: noticing when the crowd responds and when they don\u2019t. Because you don\u2019t get the opportunity to witness that when people are listening alone at home to your record. You don\u2019t know which moments are connecting and which ones aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Playing live helps me understand what\u2019s working and what doesn\u2019t, and I\u2019m often surprised. Like, a song that I will think would connect the most most just falls flat night after night. An example of that is the song \u201cIsland Music,\u201d the last song on Yours Conditionally. <\/i>We thought that that would be a really great live song \u2013 really intimate and emotional \u2013 and we tried it several nights on the last tour. And it felt like we lost the crowd every night<\/i>. It was too heavy, a little too dark, a little too somber, and it didn\u2019t work the way we thought it would. So we retired it from the set.<\/p>\n

That’s interesting that you take into consideration feedback from the audience. Not all artists do that. Some take an attitude of, \u201cThis is what I want you to hear, and this is what I\u2019m gonna play.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

I will never<\/i> have that attitude towards shows, ever. I mean, [the audience] paid to be there.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m definitely not a dancing monkey. Sometimes people are like, \u201cPlay my favorite of your song that nobody else wants to hear,\u201d and I\u2019m like, \u201cWell, sorry. I\u2019m not gonna do that.\u201d I definitely don\u2019t want to be at the mercy of their demands, but if I\u2019ve lost the crowd on the same song a few nights in a row, it\u2019s usually because the song doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Much was made of the fact that you and Patrick took a six-month sailing trip as a way to inspire material for Conditionally Yours<\/i>. How did that manifest itself in practical terms?<\/b><\/p>\n

Without it, I don\u2019t even know if we would\u2019ve made the record. We were very, very burned out. Writing felt like a huge chore that was very unfulfilling, and promoting the record felt soul-sucking, just schlepping around from city to city saying, \u201cPlease, like my music.\u201d It felt so disgusting and not the point of it all. So we went sailing with the mindset that we would write [only] if we wanted to.<\/p>\n

We were testing the waters to see if we would even miss music when it was out of our lives. We only brought the most minimal possible setup of any instruments at all, because our boat is really small, and salt water is not a friend to recording equipment. We didn\u2019t write at all \u2013 or even consider writing \u2013 for a couple of months into the trip. But the last month, we found a really tranquil anchorage deep in the Sea of Cortez. And after so many months off, we did miss making music. We thought, \u201cWe\u2019ll write songs for fun, and we don\u2019t really care what comes of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

We ended up writing half the record in about a week; normally, it takes us months. Once we went home, we rented a house in the mountains, brought our own studio equipment up there with us, and hired a couple of friends to help us out. We recorded over the course of about two weeks, and that was that. It was the most joyful album-making experience I\u2019ve ever had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… Bill Kopp: But Jack Daugherty’s production style for the Carpenters was nothing like the sound of Cape Dory… Alainna Moore: Our earliest records were soaked in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14152,"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-14176","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\/14176","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=14176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14177,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14176\/revisions\/14177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}