Real Estate channel Jersey suburbs into sound

New Jersey indie poppers Real Estate’s eponymous debut was the sunset on the wave-washed musical summer of 2009. In anticipation of their Sunday show with Woods at the Duke Coffeehouse, Jake Stanley spoke with frontman Martin Courtney about the Garden State, lo-fi labels and Fleetwood Mac fantasies.

What did venturing out to Washington state for college—and then returning to suburban New Jersey—do for your music?

After being away for so long, you get this sense of being independent when you’re at college, then it all comes crashing down when you move home. That was mostly the influence on some of the songs. The reason we started the band in the first place was because we didn’t know what else we were going to do.

How did Real Estate come together?

We had all played in bands together before Real Estate, and had known each other since eighth or ninth grade, so over ten years now. Me, [Alex] Bleeker and Matt [Mondanile] went to college in different places, then we all moved back to the same town. I had some songs, so we started a band. We had played together many times before so it wasn’t really a weird thing to do.

On the record, you sound at once tired of suburban life and at home in it. What does suburbia mean to you?

It’s where I grew up, where all my memories are. The music is slightly nostalgic. The hardest part for me is writing the lyrics, to come up with words that fit the feel of the music, and for some reason I wrote a lot about where we grew up, because that’s what I was at the time. A lot of those songs were written right after college, right after we moved back. Also, it was just, like, I don’t know what else I’d write about. It’s all there is.

Your lyrics have a lot of great scenery in them, such as the chorus of “Fake Blues” and the one-liner in “Suburban Beverage”— “Budweiser Sprite, do you feel alright?” Are any of those scenes born of particular experiences you had?

We always make fun of chillwave, we think it’s really funny. I don’t think that really applies to us. I don’t know really what it’s supposed to mean. We get a lot of labels, though. At first it was kind of upsetting or off-putting, reading stuff about us. But I realized that obviously it’s just a good thing to be getting press as long as people are listening to the music. When you think about musical hotbeds, New Jersey’s not exactly what comes to mind right away, but there are a lot of great bands.

Where we grew up, it was cool because there were a lot of kids playing music, and a lot of people are still sticking with it. Real Estate is an example of that. We graduated high school with Cassie from the Vivian Girls, she was in our grade. I played for years in a band with Patrick Stickles from Titus Andronicus. We have so much experience playing in bands and writing songs in high school. I feel like we sort of had a head start. It was a really good music scene, just among our group of friends. Then there’s Yo La Tengo, who’s just a big indie band that happens to be from New Jersey, and then Springsteen, who’s like the Godfather, watching over everybody. Springsteen’s on the level of huge superstars, and it’s just cool that he’s from Jersey.

I read that you guys like playing house parties. What is that like, just playing in a random person’s house?

It’s way better than playing in clubs. A lot of time the clubs aren’t all-ages, and obviously a house party is, so that’s chill. We were supposed to play a house party in Nashville, we were talking to kids about having one after the show we were playing. It’s started to get weird, though, because the promoters for the actual show gets pissed off because he thinks people aren’t going to come to the show they’re promoting if we play a house party. They put the nix on that show. We were going to do an in-store at this record store called Grimey’s in Nashville, that got cancelled because of the promoter, and then he said you can’t do the house party either. It was really lame. But yeah, it’s really fun to do house parties, we like to do it whenever possible. Our first tour, which was this time last year, was all house parties. We booked that whole thing ourselves.

The record sounds like a throwback to old-style pop music. When you’re recording, how do you know when a song is complete?

Some of the songs were written as they were recorded. Other times, the songs are totally realized before we record them. But we don’t really record in a studio; we’re recorded a lot of the record in our friend’s house, and some of it just on a four-track. That gives you a little bit more freedom, there’s no time constraint, which helped because it was recorded over the course of a year. You wouldn’t have the same kind of time to figure all that out in a studio.

Yeah, literally time is money when you’re in the studio. I’d love to be able to record it a little better for the second record. The lo-fi thing is by necessity, I think it sounds cool but I would also like to record in a really nice analog studio or something.

How would that benefit the songs?

We have a collective dream in the band to sound like a soft-rock band like Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac, like really good and professional.

Would you be [Fleetwood Mac guitarist] Lindsey Buckingham?

No, actually I think I’d be Stevie Nicks [laughs].

You’re about to go to Europe, and are playing smaller parties, in churches and concert halls. What do you anticipate that being like?

We were in Europe in February, we played a lot of clubs like we play here. But we’re going to play the Primavera Festival [in Barcelona]. I think that’s going to be by far the biggest crowd we’ve played for. I’m pretty excited about that.

I’ll let you go, but I wanted to let you know Duke is full of Jersey kids.

Sick, that’s awesome.