Real Estate emerged from the DIY New York club scene sounding fully formed, dropping their self-titled Woodsist debut in 2009 to immediate buzz and blogosphere accolades. That momentum helped them sign with another top-shelf label, Domino, in time for their sophomore set Days in 2011, which cemented their status as a career band and national headliners. So, when the group entered Wilco’s fabled Loft studio in 2013 to track what would become their third LP, Atlas, they arrived with both a well-earned sense of confidence and the desire to expand their sound beyond its original descriptors—without losing the hallmarks of their early work.
In retrospect, the group’s seemingly quick rise through the indie-pop ranks was at least particularly a result of the founding members’ lifelong friendships, which dates back to their childhood days discovering music together in Northern New Jersey. Atlas was also well-received and expanded the group’s reach ever further—and during the past 11 years, the group has continued to expand and hone in on their sound, including on last year’s more direct, song-driven Denial.
In September and October Real Estate will celebrate Atlas on the road, performing on record in its entirety as part of dynamic show full of bust outs and setlist swaps. Before the run, singer/guitarist Martin Courtney and bassist/singer Alex Bleeker looked back on the recording of their third release, the recent departure of guitarist Julian Lynch—who singed on in 2016—and why at least one member of the group may have skipped out of tracking at the loft to attend a three-set Phish show.
Real Estate recorded Atlas at Wilco’s famed Loft. How did you find yourselves at Jeff Tweedy’s studio and can you describe how the studio’s feel contributed to the sound of Atlas?
Martin Courtney: We had been working on new material, and it finally got to the point where we felt ready to go to Domino and start talking about recording. We sort of half-jokingly brought up the idea of having Jim O’Rourke produce, or maybe we were completely serious, but we knew it was a long, impossible shot. O’Rourke remains the dream producer. We were talking about how we wanted the record to sound live, capture the band in a moment. Wilco came up as a band that consistently made great sounding records—one thing led to another.
There were a number of things that I think contributed to the sound of the record. This was our first time working in a studio in a city that wasn’t our own, staying together in Airbnb, working with a limited time frame. We were very well rehearsed and went in ready and expecting to just capture what these sounds sounded like as we played them live, with very few overdubs. And that’s what we did.
The Loft is conducive to this way of working because it’s basically set up as a rehearsal space/clubhouse that also happens to be a studio. We felt welcome and relaxed immediately. Tom Schick, their sort of in-house producer there was such a pro and so funny—the gear there was so awesome. It was full of insane guitars that I felt completely unworthy to be playing. Plus, lots of snacks.
Atlas was the first album Real Estate recorded after fully making it on the national touring circuit thanks to the success of Days. What do you remember about the pressures, if any, the band felt going into recording Atlas, as opposed to your first few releases?
Alex Bleeker: Honestly, I remember the writing and recording process of Atlas feeling a lot more chill than the previous two records. We had released a slew of well received and buzzy singles prior to our first record, and thanks to the birth of the blogosphere, it felt like we had a bit of a spotlight on us. It was literally hard to finish that first record because a lot of it was recorded in the bedroom of our friend Sarim’s house, and he would go AWOL for a few weeks at a time while he finished up his last semester at Rutgers. Then when we were making Days I really did feel this pressure to deliver—to prove that we had more than one great album in us. By the time we got around to Atlas, I think we had enough humility and swagger to just let our guards down and follow the process. We knew it was going to be good.
In retrospect, do you feel that the music on Atlas is a reaction or conscious continuation of Days in any specific ways?
MC: It’s a reaction in certain ways. There was a conscious effort on my part to try and write songs that felt classic, timeless. This mainly took the form of me adding bridges [Laughs]. Much to the chagrin of our drummer at the time, Jackson [Pollis], who said the bridge was always the worst part of any song—debatable!
A lot of the songs on our first two albums were very dependent on their arrangements. The guitars and bass worked together in a way that made a whole that was hard to replicate solo on an acoustic guitar. With Atlas, I was making a conscious effort to write songs that could stand on their own and then dress them in these sort of clockwork arrangements.
Production wise, there was a conscious moving away from the washy reverb that we sort of defined ourselves by on the first two records. Again, in an effort to make something that felt a little more classic and a little less stylized or trendy—or “indie rock.”
You mentioned a desire to capture the live feel. How much of the material on Atlas had you been playing live before entering the studio and, in what ways did you feel that you were able to use The Loft to channel the band’s proven live energy?
AB: We definitely wanted Atlas to feel like a “live in the studio” kind of record. We kept talking about how we wanted to capture the sound of “the band playing in the room.” Most of the tunes on there had already been worked out a bit on stage, but definitely not all of them. The outro to “The Bend,” for example, was totally a moment of studio magic. Still, we had been touring and playing together a lot before we got to The Loft, so we were ready to go. Most of the basic takes on that record are full-band ones.
Was Jeff Tweedy present for any of the recording sessions and, if so, did he give any feedback on the material the band was developing?
AB: A lot of people don’t know that Tweedy initially wanted to produce the record himself, and we turned him down. Looking back, I don’t really know why we did that. I mean, we are all big fans, and he’s a legend. I think we were young and scrappy enough to feel like we wanted to “do it on our own” and that we didn’t want it to be pegged as “Jeff Tweedy’s Real Estate Album.” I guess we’ll never know if that was the right decision or not. He did stop by the studio one day just to say hi—he was on a day off from this big tour Wilco was doing with Bob Weir and other legends. [Wilco took part in the AmericanaramA tour that summer.] We were in the middle of tracking a big jammy song that didn’t make it on to the record, and he made a big deal about it. He said that the inherent psychedelia of the thing totally blew him away. There’s got to be tape of that somewhere, but I haven’t heard it since then.
If I remember correctly, you were working on Atlas at The Loft in Chicago during both the Pitchfork Music Festival and a famed Phish run that included a truncated show due to weather as well the bust out of “Harpua.” Alex, I believe you attended some of those events as well. Can you share some fun memories of those scenes coming together at a time when they felt much farther apart than they do today?
AB: I definitely took off from tracking a little bit early to go and catch Phish—only for it to be rained out during “Prince Caspian” in the second set. I was super stoked the next day when they announced that they’d be playing three sets and consequently took off even earlier that evening. [Laughs.] I’d also been to all three nights of the SPAC run just before we left for Chicago, so I was definitely feeling the improvisational spirit in the studio. The band all went to check out the Pitchfork festival that weekend too, which always was a good time. I think Rob Mitchum and I might have been the only two people in Chicago who went to both events that weekend. As far as the enduring legacy of Phish goes, I’ll say this—Pitchfork fest doesn’t exist anymore and Phish is doing avant-comedy sketches as the cast of Seinfeld on one of the most popular TV shows on Netflix in their downtime between three gigs at the Hollywood Bowl. I’ll leave you to do the indie-x-jam math on that one.
Martin, Real Estate released Atlas around the time you became a father and now you have three daughters. Do you feel that the album captures some of the uncertainty and excitement that comes with starting a family?
MC: Well, I remember clearly finding out my wife and I were going to have a kid right at the end of the process of making this record—during the time that we were mixing at the Magic Shop in Manhattan. So, that didn’t necessarily play into the songwriting in a specific way, but I do think I was in a traditional time in my life for sure. I had just gotten married and was starting to take things maybe just a little bit more seriously.
Atlas was also the first album to feature Matt Kallman and the first record since the band brought on a full-time keyboard player. How did Matt come to join the group and how did having a full-time keyboardist in the studio expand the range of material you were able to write?
MC: Real Estate had always had keys on our records, mostly played by me and mostly pretty rudimentary stuff. I always knew that I wanted to have real keys on this record—organ, piano, Wurlitzer. We knew Matt as the keyboardist in the great band Girls. He was living in Brooklyn at the time, as we all were, and we’d see him around a lot. Girls ended up breaking up the spring before we went to Chicago to record Atlas. We asked him to join the band a couple weeks before we were scheduled to start. He practiced with us a few times, then we went to the studio and got started, and he joined us a week later.
Having a keyboardist who could actually play really opened things up moving forward. I could articulate to Matt what I was hoping to hear, and he’s always been able to nail it and add his own unexpected flourishes.
Though I have fond memories of being 11 and 7 months old, it is not the usual round anniversary that bands celebrate when it comes to their albums. What made you guys decide to revisit Atlas on this upcoming tour?
AB: I mean I think it’s pretty self explanatory, really. 11 years and 7 months—right on the precipice of 12—it’s a milestone in the lifetime of any timeless piece of art. I can’t imagine doing these shows at any other time.
Real Estate still plays most of the material on Atlas live, which is a testament to its longevity. As you prepare to perform the LP in full, how do you feel playing the tunes in the album’s sequence changes their flow and feel?
MC: It’s been really fun rehearsing this record from front to back. The majority of these tunes have remained in our live repertoire over the years, but there are a few that we haven’t played in a long time. And there is definitely something nice about playing them in order, bringing the record to life. I’ve been having flashbacks to our tiny rehearsal room in Brooklyn, working these songs out all those years ago.
In 2021, Real Estate performed Days in its entirety on tour. Looking back, how did you feel that performing the tracks in order brought some new life and a different energy into them?
AB: We play a lot of the songs from Days live in our sets, as we try to mix things up and play tunes from all of our records if we can. But there is something about playing an album in its original order that feels totally different. It transports me back to a time and a place and a feeling, and I’d imagine that’s what the audience is in it for too.
No Comments comments associated with this post