Interview: Real Estate
[caption id=”attachment_8172” align=”aligncenter” width=”450” caption=”Photo by Masao Nakagami”]
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I sat down with Martin Courtney, the frontman for Real Estate, before the band’s recent show at Club Dada. Real Estate is currently touring to support their latest release, Days, along with fellow New Jersey natives Big Troubles. We chatted about touring, how the music video for “It’s Real” came about, and persevering through Infinite Jest.
So, what time did you guys get here?
C: Like, half an hour ago. We’re running a little late. We were chilling in Austin. The other band’s, Big Troubles’, van got messed up so they’re going to be pretty late but I think they’re going to make it. They almost were going to sell their van today and get a U-Haul and finish the tour. It was kind of bleak, but their van came back.
Did you like playing in Dallas?
C: Yeah, actually this is the third time. Last time we played here [Club Dada] and a similar place, a weird place downtown, kind of sucked.
Weird, I wonder where that was.
C: Actually it didn’t really suck. There was actually a good amount of people there. Downtown is kind of weird. I don’t like it as much. This place is cool though.
You recently released the music video for “It’s Real”. How did you come up with the concept?
C: Have you ever seen the video for “This Must be the Place” by Talking Heads?
I don’t think so.
C: It’s them hanging out in a house with a projector watching home movies of themselves from back in the day, and it’s really nice and they have their girlfriends and wives there. Then it cuts to shots of them laughing while looking at the videos. We were trying to recreate that. Then the original idea of the video was that, in the second half, they go downstairs and play live. Our idea was that we meet up at a house then watch videos of ourselves, lightning strikes, and it turns into Clue and somebody is dead and we try to figure out who did it. But we were convinced that that wasn’t a great idea or that it would be weird, so we got onto this weird dog thing. So we’d be watching videos of ourselves and there’d be dogs there and it gradually becomes more and more dog-centric and get more and more excited and there are still shots of us posed with dogs and then a dog goes downstairs and it’s us playing to a room full of dogs watching us attentively. But obviously you can’t get dogs to do that in real life so it ended up being much more free form. It’s a good video but it’s kind of weird. When we watch it, it makes no sense, but it’s still pretty good.
Do you guys know Big Troubles, since you’re from the same parts?
C: They grew up in the same town as me, Matt and Alex. I didn’t really meet them until two or three years ago because they were three or four years behind us in school. I would see them around, but we weren’t really friends or anything. It was awesome the first time I heard their music because I didn’t know that they were from Ridgewood [New Jersey], and then we became good friends with them.
Did you plan the tour like that on purpose?
C: Totally. We wanted to tour with them for a while. It always seemed like on our big headlining tour we’d take them with us.
How’s the tour going?
C: Good. Really good. The shows have been great.
How many shows have you played so far?
C: I don’t even know. It’s been a month today. We started in Europe without Big Troubles and did 8 shows there and then we’ve only had a few days off since Halloween. Like 20 shows or so. A lot.
How did you like Europe? Did you get to explore or was it strictly work?
C: It’s always great because there’s a lot of stuff to see, but you never get to hang out, a lot of time is spent in the van. It’s like the States, except that over there we had a tour manager/driver since it’s easier then trying to drive on the wrong side of the street. We’ve always had somebody helping us. And he did our sound. We’ve never had a sound guy before. Mostly we don’t get to explore the cities. You’re there for a few hours and then leave. But it’s at the point where we’ve played these cities so many times before, London and other places in England, so we have friends there now, and it’s cool getting to see people that you only get to see once in a while.
Has this tour been very different from the one you did to support your self-titled?
C: Yeah, we did a bunch of tours for the first record, and a lot of them were touring with other bands. Our first tour ever, we started off supporting Girls for a while and then we finished off the country by ourselves. It was kind of a headlining tour except nobody knew who we were. That was the first time we played Dallas. It was surprising because the shows were usually pretty empty, but in Dallas maybe a hundred people came. It was pretty awesome.
Unexpected.
C: No idea why. This tour has been bigger venues and better crowds. Some of the same venues actually. We’ll play a venue that we played before but there’s way more people there then there were before.
Have you seen any good live shows recently?
C: On tour, mostly just bands we’re playing with. I’ve seen a lot of Big Troubles shows. You get kind of showed out.
I’ve been enjoying Days a lot—it seems like the recording process for it was pretty different.
C: It was, in every way. Our first record we did by ourselves or with friends in houses. This time we had a real studio with a professional producer. It’s not a fancy studio—it’s in a barn. It sounds amazing even though it feels kind of ramshackle. It’s like this guy with all his shit, but there’s a method to his madness. It feels kind of natural or organic as opposed to going to a really nice studio in Manhattan and being surrounded by shiny lights. It’s not our style. It felt like a natural progression. Spending so much time on each track or sound and getting it to sound exactly how we wanted to was definitely a change for us. Usually we rush through things. What our producer, Kevin, did for us was get us to slow down. First day we’re in the studio we were like, “Let’s do drums!” and he was like, “Dude, you need like five days to test the drum sounds.” We kept trying to rush him and in a way we did. He was pushing against us but it worked out well in the end.
I had this literature professor who always talked about the writing process being like a kind of “controlled chaos.” Is that what recording an album feels like?
C: Kind of. You have a plan and for the most of the songs, every part is written and then you have time when all of that is recorded you can spend time coming up with ideas from thin air and coming up with cool shit. I think it mostly depends on the band. For us it’s not so much a chaotic things since we know where we stand. I know there are some bands that go into the studio and are like “we’re going to create!” I’m sure Animal Collective does that kind of thing. It’s not what we do. We write songs and record them. I actually do want to go to a studio and just jam for a couple of hours. We do sound check and we jam and do stuff that we really love and wish we could record that before we forget it. So I want to do that one day, just improvise and come up with cool stuff. Make an EP out of it or something.
We’ll look out for that.
C: In the future.
I was watching the video you guys did for The Line of Best Fit.
C: I haven’t even seen that yet.
It turned out well. My favorite part is when you’re playing and then it cuts to Alex reading that Bret Easton Ellis book and that made me want to know what you kind of books you guys read.
C: I’m right now reading Infinite Jest. I’ve never read it before. I actually haven’t read that much in the past few years since college. We played the release party for the Marquee Moon installment of the 33 1/3 series. We all got a copy of the book and we all read that. It’s pretty interesting. I read the Neil Young biography, a lot of music stuff.
Why Infinite Jest?
C: I don’t know. I just got an iPad so I wanted to get some book to read for the tour, and I’ve always been intrigued by that book since I’ve read about it and David Foster Wallace. It’s pretty dense for the first couple hundred pages. You really have to persevere.
I always thought you should get some kind of award for finishing Infinite Jest.
C: It takes a while for it to become compelling. In its own way, each section is compelling and then you get thrust into something seemingly unrelated, but I have a feeling eventually it will all come together and be really satisfying. But I haven’t gotten there yet.
I’ll pick that up sometime.
C: Yeah, when you have time for 2500 pages.
Exactly. Any exciting plans for the next few months?
C: Touring. Possibly recording. I’m trying to write some songs and maybe an EP in the next few months. And we’re planning our tour schedule for next year; it’s kind of crazy. We have to draw the line somewhere.
Are you going to continue with Big Troubles?
C: Yes, on this tour. We have about a week left with them and then we don’t know. Switch it up. Try some other stuff.
