Real Estate Try Something New

Last Friday, Brooklyn-via-Ridgewood quintet Real Estate put out Daniel, their sixth and freest record yet. Four years ago, in February 2020, the band put out The Main Thing and then, as we all remember, COVID-19 lockdowns blanketed the United States. The band’s tour was cancelled, and Martin Courtney, Alex Bleeker, Matt Kallman, Julian Lynch and Sammi Niss retreated to their New York homes to regroup. Courtney made a solo album, Magic Sign, in 2022 and, a year earlier, Real Estate dropped an EP of Main Thing leftovers: Half a Human.

In many ways, Daniel is a rebirth for Real Estate—an album that germinated from the band’s desire to get back to basics and not linger too extensively on any of the songs. They made it in nine days—far quicker than any of the previous five LPs—and called on Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Sarah Jarosz) to produce. The result is a freewheeling project of 11 songs that never over-extend themselves in length. Gone are the jamming, psychedelic vibes of “Saturday” or “Two Arrows” or “All the Same”; in arrive stream-of-consciousness pop tracks. Tashian’s influence is all across the record, too, especially on the country-flocked sweetness of “Victoria” and the acoustic guitar-based instrumentation on “Haunted World” and “Say No More.”

Daniel is Real Estate’s most-bulletproof statement of musicality yet and, despite Courtney routinely talking about his mission to not take writing and composing so seriously on the record, songs like “Water Underground,” “Victoria” and “Flowers” are some of the band’s most precise efforts yet. Last December, I sat down with Courtney to talk about Daniel, working with Tashian and how releasing a solo album during the pandemic made him reconfigure his approach this time around. This interview has been edited for clarity.

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Paste Magazine: Since The Main Thing came out, there was an entire global pandemic. Walk me through what the comedown between that record and Daniel was like—as opposed to between it and In Mind. I imagine the lack of touring probably shifted things pretty steadily for you guys. How do you get mentally prepared for the next project when you don’t have the luxury of giving the previous outing its full due?

Martin Courtney: It was the fact that we couldn’t tour, and then it’s also the whiplash of having a whole bunch of touring booked and being like, “Oh, I guess we’re not going to be going on this tour.” The nature of the last record we made, we spent a lot of time on it—we worked really hard on it. I put a lot of mental pressure into it, wanting it to be something very special. It was our fifth record and it just felt like it was—for whatever reason, I was second-guessing a lot of things in my life and I was like, “Well, if I’m going to keep doing this band, if I want to keep doing music, I really need to make something that’s really important.” That’s where my head was at.

It was not fun to all of a sudden have that record just fizzle and to not be able to give it its due and not be able to connect with people. I don’t think I really realized how important or how much I had grown accustomed to having that as part of the life-cycle of a record—putting out the record and then playing it for people and connecting with the music myself over the course of several months of playing the songs over and over again. We didn’t really get that connection with it.

At the same time, I was kind of freaked out. I wanted to keep making music, I didn’t really know what else to do. And I was like, “I need to work.” So I was writing a lot, especially in those first few months of the pandemic. I started writing a lot of songs and then, as things dragged on, ostensibly I was thinking I was writing a new Real Estate record. I was like, “Well, if we can’t tour on this one, let’s just make another one right away and, then, by the time this is over, we’ll have something to tour on. We’ll have something to show for this downtime.” But then, as the pandemic went on, it was like a) I don’t even know if we can get together to record and then, once that became kind of a possibility, it was like, “Well, we could make a record right now, but we’re not going to be able to tour, really. It’s going to be the same thing that just happened with the last record.”

I made a decision at that point—because I didn’t want to just sit on this music—that I would make a solo record and it’d be a way of staying busy. Doing that—doing the solo record—really changed my approach to making music because, I mean, I had made a solo record in the past, but it’d been many years. I approached [Magic Sign] really differently and, obviously it was collaborative, there were a lot of people involved, but my approach to this was like, “I want to try and do as much of this as I can on my own.” I really wanted to take control of the songs, in a way that I hadn’t in the past few years with Real Estate—where it had become this collaborative effort in a really nice way. But I was missing the way I used to do things, which was doing most of it on my own.

I think, because of the pandemic and because things were so heavy and intense in the world, I just was like, “I want to make music that’s fun and I want to have fun making music”—especially because [The Main Thing], I had fun making it, but it felt very serious. [Magic Sign] was me not really thinking hard about any particular decision. I was just going to do what feels good, and I was happy with how that record turned out. So I took that mentality into [Daniel] where, again, I just wanted to keep moving. I finished writing those songs and, at that point, it felt like, maybe, it was the right time to start thinking about doing it with Real Estate again.

[Daniel] was me being like, “We’ve spent the last several albums trying—for me, at least, as a songwriter—to one-up myself. In my own head with songwriting, I’m always trying to out-do myself. I’m trying to come up with new melodies. You’re always thinking “I don’t want to do something that I’ve done before,” and I think things got to a point where, yeah, they were getting complex and the layers were starting to add up. I think [The Main Thing] is very dense and messy in a way that I liked, and I was aware of it as we were making it. I was like, “This is a really dense record.” And I was just like, “I want to go in the complete opposite direction this time [on Daniel] and make something that’s super open and welcoming, even down to the instrumentation. I’m gonna play acoustic guitar the whole time on this record, so that it feels very open and spacious. And I want the songs to be really welcoming and poppy cut straight to the point. The melodies are strong, and there’s not too much going on.” That was the mentality going in, and I think it is a direct result of the way things went over the last few years and the shifts I went through in how I approach music.

Something that interests me is that Daniel was recorded at RCA Studio A in Nashville, mixed at Noble Steed in Muscle Shoals and then mastered at Sterling Sound in New Jersey. Does having songs come to life and completion in different places like that add any resonance to the work itself—when there’s this feeling that these tracks have gone on their own tour?

It’s funny you say it like that because, I mean, we were obviously present in Nashville for the recording—and that in itself was huge and really fun, because we’ve made records in all these different cities. We’ve recorded in LA and Chicago, New York, but this was our first time recording in Nashville, and it felt like that meant something. It’s fun to be in a new city—a city we haven’t spent much time in that also has a very robust musical history. So that studio, in particular, has a very rich history in country music, but we weren’t making a country record. There’s plenty of indie rock that gets made in Nashville, obviously, but not where we were recording. Where that studio is, it’s called Music Row and it’s the old-school country music core of Nashville.

Even the people we were working with—Phillip [Smith], the engineer, and Daniel Tashian, the producer, and Craig [Alvin], the other engineer—work on lots of country records and so, for them, this was a very interesting process. With country music, bands come in and it seems, to me, that the process is very fast. They’re tracking three or four songs in a day. They come in, they’re super well-rehearsed and they know what they’re doing.

And, with us, it’s always been a much slower process of taking our time. We’re rehearsed, but we’re also wanting to experiment and try things. So, from the perspective of the Nashville guys, we were moving very slowly. But, from our perspective, we tracked this whole record in nine days. But, by that eighth and ninth day, we were already starting to mix. It was a very fast record for us, in an awesome way—in a way that was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to not think too hard about anything. I wanted to just blast through it and come up with something that felt very vital and off-the-cuff.

I do think it’s nice to have the music go to different places. Craig was in Nasvhille with us, he was engineering the whole thing. He’s responsible for how good everything sounds. He’s an extremely talented dude. And then, he ended up mixing the record at his studio in Muscle Shoals, where he lives. We weren’t present for that—that was a process of him mixing it song-by-song and sending me those mixes. We’d listen and send notes back, but it didn’t require a lot of notes on our end.

Greg Calbi mastered the record in Jersey, and he’s done every album of ours for Domino. They used to be in Manhattan, but now they moved to Edgewater, New Jersey. Every record that we’ve done with him, I always attend the session. I want to be there while he’s mastering it—because it feels so celebratory, it’s the last time you’re going to touch the music before it’s released. I like to sit there and talk to Greg, who has been doing this for almost 50 years. He mastered Marquee Moon. He has a lot of stories to back up that history, so it’s fun to just sit there with him. It’s always a special experience. It’s funny, though, how you put it that way. It does feel like the record bounced around a lot before we finally finished it.

Nine days, give or take—how does Daniel compare to how quickly or how slowly a record like Atlas or Days came together?

It’s the fastest one. When we made Days, that was a stretched out thing where we didn’t really have—we honestly started recording that album before we had finished writing it. We were writing it as we went along, and that was probably a six-month process of going into the studio for a weekend here and there. It wasn’t really a concentrated effort. But then, the next two albums after that, Atlas and In Mind—I’m not even counting [Real Estate], because it was home-recorded in our parents’ basement—we wrote the songs and hung out in a practice space for months, especially with Atlas and rehearsed the songs, got them ready. Then, we went into a studio for two weeks and tracked it and then, similar to Daniel, afterwards we mixed it.

I liked doing it that way. But then, with The Main Thing, we went back to the same studio we made Days in and we worked with the same guy and we had a very similar experience—but this time, instead of six months, it was pretty much a full year of going into the studio every once in a while, for a week here, a couple of days there. I think we spent probably two months in the studio. It was nice to have all that time to tinker but, like I said, I think I recoiled against that in the end. That was one of the things I laid out when we first started talking about making [Daniel]. I was like, “I want to record it fast.”

I also think, just because of all of our—speaking for myself—life circumstances, they make it harder now for me to spend a lot of time away from home. It’s like, if we’re going to make a record, we’ve got to do it quickly. It’s both logistically better but, also, I’m happy with the results of doing it that way. It’s easy. The catch is that you need to put a lot of work in on the front-end, too, so that you’re prepared when you’re in there. And we were pretty well-prepared by the time we went in to make this record.

The idea of Daniel being your pop record—what was pushing you and the band to that emotional and sonic place, and is there something that makes a track like “Talking Backwards” or even “Saturday” not a pop song to you, at least not to the mark you set out to meet on this album?

I think those songs are—that’s kind of the mark I was looking for. I look at our previous records, there’s a few pop songs on each one—classic verse-chorus pop songs. It’s really about the structure, in my mind. That’s how I’m defining it and, obviously, there’s no set formula, but I think about those songs a certain way. “It’s Real” is another one. There’s a bunch sprinkled throughout our previous records, but I think I looked at those records as a mix of songs like that and also wandering, sprawling, less-direct songs. So I was like, “What if we made an album that was just the pop songs and we didn’t do the other stuff? And then we make another record later and it’s just the weirder songs?” I liked the idea of exploring that side of our songwriting, so that was one reason.

With everything that went down with COVID, I just felt like that was the kind of music I wanted to make. For the entire year that I was writing sons, I was almost exclusively listening to R.E.M.—specifically Automatic For the People. That album, I just really, really loved how it sounds. It’s very acoustic and it’s definitely a little more sprawling and weirder than what I was trying to make, but the sonic palette of that record was really inspiring to me. The idea that they had been a band for so long at that point and they took this turn in their sound—that album feels really good to me to listen to. So I was just like, “How do we make something that feels like this, that makes people feel the way this record makes me feel?” That was a huge part of it. I talked about that album probably a little too much going into making [Daniel], but it was a huge, huge part of what I was thinking about. And it’s a tremendous album. One of the best.

This is Real Estate’s first post-quarantine record, and everyone in the band now has a family to tend to and, on this album, your writing does go off into some places where you’re questioning how to keep the momentum moving forward when there’s so much isolation and cynicism everywhere. The Main Thing really leaned into more complex themes growing up, and this one feels like the natural “what comes next” record. Was there any sort of internal deliberation over whether to just do what Real Estate does best and make catchy, good tunes like always, or was there an obvious and quick understanding that Daniel would embrace the bleakness?

In terms of lyrical content, I’m responsible for it. We don’t really talk about what the songs are going to be about, it’s really about how they’re going to sound. And, on that end, we did almost exactly what you said—this thing that [Alex] Bleeker kept saying of “Let Real Estate be Real Estate.” Let’s not do anything too weird. On previous records, we weren’t being weird for the sake of being weird, but definitely trying to see where we could push ourselves, sonically, in terms of trying out new styles—which is, again, it’s fun and I think it makes those records rich and cool. But, on Daniel, it was like, “We’re gonna just do what feels right every step of the way. We’re gonna let the songs dictate how the arrangements need to be.”

But the lyrics, I think that’s where my head was at. Honestly, I would have preferred for this album to be optimistic. I wanted to make an optimistic-sounding record. And I think the lyrics are acknowledging the fact that things are tough. How do you get through that and get to a place where things aren’t so tough? I wanted to make a record that felt, hopefully, joyful to people.

For you, as a songwriter, what weren’t you able to hone in on on The Main Thing that, this time around, you had the resources and the hindsight to really go all-in on?

Taking the songwriting less seriously, while also taking it seriously to a certain extent. I wanted the songs to be good—and I was definitely thinking about what I was doing, but definitely not wanting to labor over these songs. And I think that came through in the lyrics, as well, where I didn’t want to spend all this time trying to make these lyrics perfect. A lot of the lyrics for the songs came from stream-of-consciousness. I would just sit and try and get anything written to finish the song and then I’d go back and, if there was anything that was glaringly dumb, I would change it. But doing it that way, I ended up keeping more than I thought I was going to. It also makes the songs feel, in a certain way, like they’re less mine—because I spent less time laboring over them.

I know they’re mine, I know they came from my head, but it almost makes me like them more, because it feels like I channeled them rather than try really hard to make them happen. It feels good to do it that way. I tend to get self-conscious—just in general, I can be very worried about how my songs are going to be received and worried about sharing my music with other people, even to this day. So it helps that whole feeling of self-consciousness when it feels like “Well, this song just kind of happened. It just came out of me.” The record, it felt better that way.

My favorite Real Estate record, for the longest time, was always In Mind. And maybe that’s because of “Serve the Song” and “Saturday.” But Daniel is so properly portioned. Each track clocks in around three minutes, until the finale “You Are Here.” Was there an active, deliberate choice to cut the songs down to these radio-sized timestamps? Or was the writing and arranging just so streamlined that they organically remained so in the end?

It’s kind of the latter. Even some of the songs feel longer to me, like a song like “Airdrop” or “Interior.” Some songs feel more substantial to me, and I would have assumed they were around five minutes, or something. But then I looked and it’s three-and-a-half minutes long, maybe pushing four—but it just happened that way. And, I think it was partially a choice of trying to keep the songs concise, but also trying to not have any unnecessary [elements]. I was trying to do a certain type of song and a certain type of thing that Real Estate has done in the past, where there are jammier songs on our previous record and then there are these concise pop songs. And I was just like, “I want to write the concise pop songs this time.”

And even “You Are Here,” when I wrote it, that’s the one that changed the most from my initial idea of the song to what ends up on the record. It’s the same chord progression, but I was playing it twice as fast. It was like a punk song. We kind of felt funny playing it, because it was very different from the rest of the songs. We were like, “What else could we do with that?”—because we liked the song. So we explored some other ways of playing it and it ended up that way. And it felt good that way. It felt like a nice endpoint for the record. But, for the most part, that’s just the type of song I was writing, these three-and-a-half-minute songs.

Working with Daniel Tashian, who helmed Golden Hour—arguably—the best pop-country album of the last decade, what does that collaboration look like? I Imagine the best producers in the game can work in any genre, but the idea of there being a common denominator between Kacey Musgraves and Real Estate is something that to me, personally, is really incredible to think about.

First of all, I was almost shocked by how fun and outgoing and hilarious he is as a person. As soon as we started the sessions, I was like, “Oh, this guy is really funny.” I don’t know what I was expecting, because I had talked to him on the phone a few times. And seeing pictures of him, he’s buttoned-up and looks like a serious guy. He was fun to talk to on the phone, but I just figured he’s a professional. I mean, he is a professional, but I wasn’t expecting the personality that I got. He’s so positive. We were in a big, live room and he’s over there—through the glass in the control room—just dancing and jumping around, waving his arms and trying to get us hyped up. That vibe was really welcoming and nice and made us feel like we were having a great time.

But then, on a more granular level, we went song-by-song recording this record. We would finish it and then move on to the next one and, as we were starting each song, I would sit down with him—and I mean, this was a totally new experience for me—and just play the song for him a few times on acoustic guitar. And he’s just sitting across from me at the table, taking notes and charting out the song. Then, he’d be like, “My favorite part was this chord, what if we played this one chord a few more times?” or “Does this part really need to be here?” Things like that. We would prune the song and then we’d relearn it as a band. And, sometimes, I would be like, “Yeah, I don’t know about that” and we wouldn’t do it. But, pretty much always, we would at least try it—because I was like, “We’re here because we want to work with this guy and we want his input, so let’s try it.”

Daniel is an insanely smart, musically talented guy. He’s the kind of guy that’ll sit down at the piano and then, all of a sudden, he’s playing your song—but it sounds 10x better than you’ve ever made it sound. He’s got a beautiful singing voice, he’s just a very talented musician and performer. But, he also just has this feel for pop songwriting. Some of the backup harmonies on “Water Underground,” he’s sitting there in the control room and he’s like “I keep hearing this line” and he sings “fall on me” and we’re like, “Yeah, we should do that.” He’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know what the lyrics should be, but I think that melody sounds great.” And I was like, “Let’s just do ‘follow me.’ Why not? I keep talking about R.E.M. anyway, let’s just try that.” He’d toss these little lines in here and there.

To me, that was a big part of this record. That was the first time we had really worked with a producer where I was like “We’re working with this guy because I want his input. I want him to be a sixth member of the band.” And, in the past, I think I’d always really shied away from that. I really didn’t want anyone else’s fingerprints on the songs. And I think that was just part of me being less precious about it and more open to criticism and other people’s ideas. It felt good to do it that way. It was like “We’ve never done this before, so we may as well try it. This is our sixth record, let’s just try something different.”

Watch Real Estate’s Paste Session from 2020 below.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.