Have you started working on any new studio material?

MC: We’ve been recording some stuff right now with a friend who has a lot of nice equipment and we’re trying to get it to sound a little more hi-fi. The drum sound we were going for the really tight, compressed stair sound—almost ‘70s sounding. One of our newer songs sounds a lot like Fleetwood Mac. So if anything, we’re moving back in that original direction. It is hard to write in a certain style or for a certain genre.
It kinda influences the way we think about our music, but when we start writing a song it takes on its own vibe.

You mentioned the Grateful Dead as an influence. In the past few years the Dead has started to influence a whole new generation of bands that play music more often described as psych-rock or freak folk than jamband music. Is the Dead a new influence on your songwriting?

MC:: For me it is a more recent influence. But Alex is the resident hippie of the band. He got me into Phish, and we went and saw Phish shows together. In terms of the Grateful Dead, I had listened to American Beauty but I wasn’t a huge fan. On our first tour, our friend Todd Ledford, who runs this small label, burned us five Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to in the car. That’s when I got really that amazing music. And that definitely made our music a little more spacey or brought it out there a little bit more. But it was definitely more recent that I got into the Grateful Dead.

We try to play with the arrangement of our songs live. Once the chord progressions and the melodies are there we’ll take a section of the song and stretch it out and sorta jam on it for a while. That is where all of our collective jamband influences came in. We wanted to be a jammier pop band. I dunno if you ever listened to the band Woods, we toured with them just recently and they have a similar idea. They have these pop songs and then they go off into these jam segments and then go back into the pop song. For us, it is a little more structured. But that’s the general idea—to sound really loose.

AB: I was really into—like super into the jamband scene in high school. And like I saw a bunch of Grateful Dead reincarnations like The Dead and The Other Ones. I would always go to shows like that. [I’m still young] so the first Phish show I saw was the very first post hiatus on New Years Eve’s show at the Garden [in December ‘02]. I saw them as much as I possibly could during that time period—I was super into them and I would go out and see String Cheese a bunch of festivals. I always thought Relix was really cool so this is kind of a surreal moment for me.

But I always liked indie rock too and more underground music. I don’t know, there’s this sort of this weird stigma that comes with like jamband culture—especially in the world of like indie rock that gets you picked on in some circles. Except lately I found a sort of like resurgence of this pseudo-jam-hippie, ‘cause psychedelia is really popular indie rock and there’s all this cross over. I have all these friends that play in indie bands who used to be into the jamband scene. Jeremy from Woods is la super, super, super Deadhead—like really hugely influenced by them. It was weird to like reconcile that earlier on, when you felt like you had to identify with a certain genre or whatever. I was never embarrassed about the scene and when to these jam show but now it like cool again for some reason. I think maybe ‘cause a lot of us are coming from the same place. Phish is sort of like a postmodern band, they’ve got all these different styles but they blend them all together. I’m psyched to see them again this summer, I’m going to try to go to a couple shows.

Do you feel that growing up playing music together has helped Real Estate as a band age quicker?

MC: We’ve gone through a lot of changes together. In high school Alex and I played in a band that played all covers. We’d do indie songs and also play Phish songs. I also played in an indie band and a ska band—we’d play anything we could. I played bass back then and all our friends played music so we’d all play together. I was in at least twelve bands in high school—I was the bass player in a lot of different bands. In college, I was in a straight-up indie band—we sounded like Pavement or something. Bleeker’s thing was always more folky. So we’ve all played in a dozen different types of bands. This band definitely didn’t have a specific idea of what we were going to do. It was kind of like we know each other’s style so well it was just a matter of what happens.

AB: It is funny ‘cause I always had an interest in jam music. I was responsible for getting Martin into it, and he definitely had a period where he was like heavy into Phish but then sort of like grew away from it. Then when we were first getting this band together we all sort of agreed that like there were elements of that style that we wanted to incorporate into our style that were cool. Also, what I think was so appealing at a young age is just the sense of community even. Like you go to a show and there’s all these people and there seem to be these sort of traditions which are really exciting and just never seen something like that before. You feel like you’re part of it.

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