Features

Group At Work: Tennis

Photo by Takeshi Suga

Sophomore Album of Freshman Tales

When a group draws inspiration for their debut album from their experiences while sailing along the Eastern Seaboard, one wonders what type of adventure will influence their next one. “I struggled for a while trying to decide what the songs would be about,” says singer Alaina Moore, one half of the Denver-based couple that formed Tennis. But considering that in just a year’s time, Moore and her husband Patrick Riley have gone from working nine-to-five jobs to playing in one of the most buzzed-about indie bands in the country, the source material seems obvious.

“I decided to use the lyrics in the songs as a medium for me to be able to process a lot of things that have come up for me personally in the last year,” says Moore. “[Things like] becoming a band out of nowhere, going on tour for the first time in our adult lives and quitting our normal jobs to pursue what feels like a really juvenile dream.”

After accumulating a nearly deafening level of blog buzz last year and selling out prominent venues across the country, the couple returned home, holed up and started on a new batch of songs. “We wrote these songs with the intention of other people hearing them,” Moore explains. “With [our 2011 record] Cape Dory, all of those songs were written for Patrick and I—we had no intention of sharing them with anyone. I think that was the biggest change: writing music for the sake of making music instead of to commemorate some extremely personal event.”

The direction is noticeably different on the recently released new long player Young & Old, which Patrick Carney of The Black Keys produced. While the songs still carry a certain familiarity, the group mostly strays from the throwback ‘50s surf vibe that comprised much of their sound on their debut.

“We didn’t want to take such a dramatic leap that no one could recognize us anymore,” explains Moore. “[But] we wanted to try to challenge ourselves and also highlight some of our strengths, [which] we didn’t do with Cape Dory because we weren’t even aware of what our strengths were yet.”