Last year was a big year for Real Estate with the release of the album Daniel. I saw that you even got to have a conversation with Elton John, whose song “Daniel” you covered. What was that conversation like?

MC: The whole thing was over Zoom or FaceTime or something. We were on the road in southern Colorado and didn’t have great cell service. We decided to try and do the call in a Starbucks, but when we walked in, we realized it was way too loud in there. We had just enough service in the parking lot outside to make it work. So I talked to Elton John from the back of a sprinter van in a parking lot in Colorado—normal. The conversation was sort just standard interview stuff, but he was very nice and complimentary about our music and we’re best friends now. [Laughs.]

Daniel was also something of a return to the more direct songwriting of the band’s earlier days. Was that a conscious decision and how does Atlas fit with that sonic development? Real Estate has always balanced pop hooks and more artful songwriter-material quite well.

MC: Daniel was really the first record since Atlas that we went into with a fairly specific idea of what we wanted it to be in the end. With both records, the goal was for it to be relatively stripped down and live sounding. The difference is Daniel was really much more tailored to be a collection of straight pop songs, Atlas has some tunes that meander a bit more, though still mostly fitting into a classic-pop structure. 

Sadly, Julian is stepping away from the band this fall. Can you talk about some of the things he contributed to the group during the past 10 years and even before?

MC: Alex and I have known Julian since we were kids. Julian and I went to the same elementary school, though he was a year ahead of me. Him joining the band always felt like the most obvious, natural step—”We need a guitar player, let’s ask our brilliant, gifted friend who is not only an absolute shredder on the guitar but a writer of incredible soulfulness and depth.” I’m not exaggerating, I think the man is a genius, and what he brought to the band was the perspective of someone who has known us forever but could see what we were doing from the outside and could help us to evolve and introduce new textures and sounds that we would never have thought of on our own.

Before he joined the band, before the band ever existed, before I wrote my first songs, back when we were in high school and college, he was the guy we looked to as the best songwriter among us. I leaned a ton about songwriting by playing bass on his songs in earlier bands like The Enormous Radio and Lese Majesty. It’s very inspiring to be friends with someone with such a clear musical voice at such a young age.

AB: Even before Martin and I were in Enormous Radio with Julian, he was in another band that always shared local bills with us in our local ska/punk scene. Julian’s been foundational to my musical development—we have always played together and I know that we always will.

Julian was actually on Atlas as well. Can you talk about how he ended up contributing to the LP?

AB: Like I said, Julian’s been a part of Real Estate’s musical fabric even before its inception. He was living nearby at the time, and it only felt natural for him to come and hang out in the studio for a few days. He wound up playing sax on the album’s last track, “Navigator.” And because I know this interview is for the Relix crowd, I’ll drop the little nugget that the working title of that song was “Phil 72.”

Who does the band plan to have fill his spot this fall and what were the conversations like when you discussed finding a replacement, temporary or more permanent?

AB: Our good pal James Richardson, who some of you may recognize as the guitarist from MGMT, is going to be filling in on the road. James is a deep head and a real mensch and a great player so we are super stoked to have him. He splits his time between the Hudson Valley and California, which made him a total shoe-in for our outfit.

Real Estate dropped a rarities compilation this year. What was the process like of sorting through that material and deciding what to include?

MC: We’ve never been the type of band to end up with 20 leftover tracks at the end of the album making process. Usually, we’ll go into the studio with a few songs more than we need, and then we’ll see how they shape up in the studio and pick the ones that flow together best to be on the final LP. Sometimes the leftovers get finished, sometimes they just fall by the wayside. It was only after our 7^th LP that we turned around and realized there’s enough unreleased stuff here that we could probably make a record out of it—and people might be interested in hearing it. I don’t really spend a lot of time listening to our recordings, and I have a tendency to think, if a song didn’t make it on the record, it probably wasn’t very good to begin with. Listening back to these recordings, however, I was very happily surprised to remember how good these songs are. It was nice revisiting these songs and being like, “Damn why didn’t we release this earlier?”

We ended up treating the comp like an LP and choosing the songs for how they flowed together, rather than putting them in chronological order. There are still a few more tracks that may see the light of day down the road.

Martin, next year will mark the 10^th anniversary of your solo debut, which was your full-length follow-up release to Atlas. Do you see a sonic throughline between those two records?

MC: I always forget that I started recording Many Moons only a few months after we completed Atlas. I don’t think Atlas was even out yet when Jarvis [Taveniere] and I started working on that record. They were just made under such completely different circumstances. Many Moons was sort of a reaction to certain frustrations I felt during the final steps in the process of making Atlas—creative friction in the band. Jarvis and I were friends and our two bands [Real Estate and Woods] had toured together and shared countless bills in NYC. We had talked about making something together, so we did.

I don’t really see a lot of a through line between Atlas and Many Moons—Atlas was made in collaboration with a band that had already been together for years, and the songwriting on that record was sort of intentionally genre-less and open. Many Moons is very much a collaboration between me and Jarvis. It really feels to me like a power-pop album in the vein of Big Star or the Kinks—not power-pop, but still. It was never meant, in my mind at least, to be a solo record—Jarvis was the one who encouraged me to put it out under my own name.

I’m super proud of both records. I think Many Moons is pretty special and dare I say, underrated? [Laughs.]

In addition to playing all of Atlas, you have promised catalog material and deep cuts. Are there certain “eras” of the band you are going to focus on in addition to the Atlas tracks, especially since the band recently released a rarities comp?

AB: We’re 100% digging into that rarities comp for setlist inspiration, and I think the crowds can expect more than one bust out on this tour. We also hope to be working out some new tunes out there because we’re always looking forward to new music!

MC: We’re definitely looking to expand the live repertoire a bit from what we’ve been playing for the past year or so on this tour. We’re doing a couple B-sides from the Atlas era, plus the “new single” from the compilation, “Pink Sky.” We may even debut a couple new, unreleased songs. As always, we’ll switch the set up every night—the difference obviously being there’s gonna be a 10-song chunk in the middle or every set that does not change.

Real Estate released a big record, Daniel, last year. As you revisit Atlas for this run, how do you feel those two records relate to each other?

AB: We were kind of channeling Atlas a bit when we set out to record Daniel. We were in Nashville and were guided by a similar vibe in the studio. It was very direct, on both records we really just wanted to capture the sound of the band playing good songs, live. The next one is bound to be a little different.

Have you started working on any new Rela Estate material since Daniel and, if so, do you think it will follow a similar blueprint to that record?

MC: I have been writing, and we did some rehearsing last month—where we spent some time on the new stuff. I’m pretty stoked on how the new record is shaping up. The songs feel different from Daniel, maybe a little less stripped down, more ornate. We have a plan for recording that is unlike anything we’ve done before. It’s all very exciting, hopefully more on that soon.

I remember there were a number of B-sides and unreleased songs from around Atlas, including my personal favorite “Easier That Way,” which was an early “jamband song” from Real Estate. How much material did you record that is still in the archives and do you plan to dust some of that off live?

AB: That’s the tune I was referring to earlier, the one Tweedy happened to catch in the studio. I really don’t know how to play that song anymore—[Laughs.]—but it would be fun to play it again. We definitely still have a few unreleased tricks up our sleeves.

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