In the fall of 2008, Woods multi-instrumentalist Jarvis Taveniere saw Real Estate open for R. Stevie Moore at a small show in Brooklyn, N.Y. That somewhat-chance encounter has blossomed into one of the most enduring and productive collaborations in the modern indie-rock world: Woods took Real Estate out on the road for a few critical, early tours, Taveniere has helped the band out in the studio and Woods frontman Jeremy Earl even released Real Estate’s self-titled debut on his Woodsist label. However, it wasn’t until a few years later that Taveniere started a true group with a member of his brother band.

Between work with his primary group, Taveniere started knocking around ideas with Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney in 2013, which resulted in Many Moons, a set of power-popinspired songs that owes just as much to The Kinks and Big Star as it does to the DIY scene where Woods and Real Estate first made their mark. Though the album came out in October under Courtney’s name—his first release outside his breezy indie-pop band—the project is a true collaboration, with Taveniere serving as the album’s producer, bassist and occasional cowriter. (A few other familiar faces help out on the album, including Woods drummer Aaron Neveu, Real Estate keyboardist Matt Kallman and Julian Lynch, while Sharon Van Etten collaborator Doug Keith is part of the live band that will support the record.)

Many Moons arrives during a surprisingly busy off-season for Real Estate. Band co-founders Matt Mondanile and Alex Bleeker released albums with their side projects Ducktails and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, respectively, and have spent the fall on extended tours. Courtney is also in the midst of his own juggling act, balancing his solo career with Real Estate and a new baby daughter. “Once I knew these songs weren’t going to be for Real Estate, I feel like we were writing in a different style,” Courtney admits during a wide-ranging conversation with Taveniere, while rehearsing for his first solo dates. “In my head, it was kind of like a poppy, more straightforward sound.”

The Beginning

Martin Courtney: I think we met at a show in 2008.

Jarvis Taveniere: I went to see R. Stevie Moore play, and I was friends with Matt through his Ducktails project. Matt had just started playing shows. I was waiting for R. Stevie Moore, and Matt came up to me and said, “You’re here! Sick. My new band is playing!” And I remember thinking how good you were. It was Real Estate and Matt’s college friends.

MC: He might have been in his child-predator, shaved-head phase. That was early on. We really, really shitily covered The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.”

JT: I remember watching it and expecting one thing because of how your cover looked, and then slowly being like, “That guy’s got a good voice. The bass player’s got a really good vibe, and Matt’s a really good guitar player.”

The Montreal of New Jersey

MC: I went to elementary school with [Julian Lynch], but he and Matt Mondanile were a grade above me, so they’ve been friends since kindergarten. I met Julian through Matt. They played in a pop-punk band together, Paperface, which was named after a Weezer demo. Julian has been a good buddy since then. I have a lot of good friends from high school that continue to play music—Julian, Vivian Girls, Big Troubles. Titus Andronicus were from a town over, but I played in a band with a bunch of those guys. In high school, I didn’t write songs yet, but all my friends were writing songs, and I was playing bass in a bunch of bands. At the time, Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade and all these bands from Montreal were big, and everyone was talking about this Montreal scene. And I thought, “We have one here, too! Someday we’ll be recognized. All my friends are super good at writing songs— one day, someone’s gonna know about it.”

JT: Well, you weren’t wrong.

MC: Yeah, but there’s no Arcade Fire of the bunch. Titus—they’re very good; people love them. It’s not my cup of tea 100 percent, but it’s fucking undeniably so good.

The Genesis of Many Moons 

MC: This project came about in early 2013, when we jammed out a little bit. But then, we didn’t do anything again for six months.

JT: It’s funny how it seems so easy sometimes to collaborate with your friends, and then you see your schedules up against one other. And it’s just the way the momentum works for a creative project: You get things going, and if you don’t sustain it, it’s just gone.

MC: I had some half-songs and so did you. I’m sure you went out on tour, and then Real Estate made a record for six to eight months [2014’s Atlas]. So the fact that we got back together and kept working was good—it easily could have not happened. It took us close to two years to finish the record, but we did it. It’s hard to follow through on something like this.

JT: We both wanted to do it enough.

MC: Also we were able to get together whenever we had time. We lived in the same city, but between our two schedules, we weren’t here at the same time that often. And then when we were here, you were recording other bands, and I was doing my thing—whatever that is…

JT: And you had a baby in the midst of this—and had a Real Estate record.

MC: Yeah, I found out my wife was pregnant before we even started working on this thing in earnest. So that whole process happened, and then Alice was 14 months old by the time we were done with the record.

The Solo Album Vs. The Real Estate Record 

MC: We had already started [Many Moons], and we still had five or six months before the [Real Estate] record came out, let alone all the touring. So from my perspective, these were all bonus songs— they didn’t have to be Real Estate songs. I just kept writing, so I decided to put it toward a different project. Once we had about six songs, it was like, “OK, we’re making an album.”

Also, any song can be for any band. The kernel of the song is just the chord progression and vocal melody, so the fact that Jarvis was playing bass on it and there’s a different group playing it live makes it different from a Real Estate song. It changes the vibe of the song. I feel like any of these songs could have been Real Estate songs, but I wasn’t writing Real Estate songs at that point. We talked about how it was going to sound different from Real Estate and how we were going to switch it up. In the back of my head, I said, “Well, I’ll try different styles and strum differently—maybe have more bombastic vocal melodies or something, have it be just a little more rocking than Real Estate generally is.” It’s a hard thing to actually accomplish, to do something different than what you’ve done in the past.

JT: You have a very particular way of writing songs and chord progressions. For me, there was a point where I thought, “OK, how can we make this different from Real Estate so it’s worthwhile?” But then, I just chilled out about that. Martin writes the songs he writes. What’s more interesting to me is how we filled the space that his bandmates fill with other things and how the songs came together between different people. I thought, “Since the Duck [Matt Mondanile] isn’t here to play guitar, now Martin is writing string parts for that space. Interesting!”

MC: Anytime I had a conversation about what we should do next or even just thought to myself, “What do I want to do with this project to make it different from Real Estate—make a ‘70s power-pop record or something,” that ended up going out the window at some point. It’s hard enough to make something that you’re comfortable with and that you think is good. Then to add the next layer of “and it’s going to have this limitation set on it or this mold to fill” is difficult.

JT: You just have to follow things that excite you.

The Possibility of Another Album

JT: Every record I make, I see the mistakes more than anything. It may seem sad or pessimistic, but it’s what keeps me excited about making music. I thrive on that, so doing a record like this, I am immediately thinking about what I can do better next time. That’s what I do with Woods—we make a record and I’m like, “Why did we do that?” And it doesn’t mean that I’m not happy with any of the records, it just means I can’t wait to get back at it. That’s why it sucks as an engineer or a producer to only work with a band once because you’re just getting warmed up. I love the new Quilt record, and I like the first record I worked with them on a lot, too. But the new one—it’s like we broke the ice and could go deep. We could be so honest with each other and we thought, “We are gonna make the best fucking record we can possibly make!”

MC: You could say shit that would normally piss somebody off and not be worried about it.

JT: Yeah, and it was great. Sometimes, you have to read the room, but sometimes, you can’t do that on a first record or the first time you’re in a studio together because you’ll slow down the vibe and you will never make any—you might say something [wrong], and then there’s no second batch of songs. But then you build some trust and get into it.

JT: Everything I’ve heard from you before we made this record has been you with the band [Real Estate]. So I hear the way the band interacts, and it’s one whole thing.

MC: You hear [my songs] after they have been “Real Estate-ified.” You’re not hearing me bring the kernel of the song.

JT: Right, well, I’m hearing everybody get better. After I heard [2011’s] Days, I knew there wasn’t really a drummer, so for a few songs, it’s you and Matt taking turns, trying your best. [Ed. Note: Original drummer Etienne Pierre Duguay parted ways with the band before most of Days was recorded and the other members of Real Estate played many of the album’s drum parts.] It sounds great, but when you hear it with Jackson Pollis and the whole thing opens up. Everybody got better at their instruments. So I never strictly thought, “Yeah, Martin’s songwriting is getting better.” It’s all getting better. Atlas is my favorite Real Estate record.

MC: Yeah?

JT: But “Snow Days,” off the first Real Estate record, is my favorite song.

MC: “Snow Days” is your favorite song? Everybody likes fucking “Snow Days.”

JT: It’s the first song I heard from you where I knew you were an advanced songwriter.

MC: An advanced songwriter?

JT: Just the way the melodies and the chords worked. The whole record is pretty lo-fi, and hearing that song—it’s so sophisticated, and you don’t cut corners. You don’t make aesthetic decisions based on having no money like other bands were doing—like Woods did—where maybe the idea is sophisticated, but you dumb it down by thinking, “We’re fucking recording in a living room; no one will even hear this song.” But the fact that you executed it in this lo-fi manner—this beautifully written, developed song—was really impressive.

Back to Basics

MC: Early on, what you may mistake for ambition was just naiveté—me just not knowing anything about song structures, which is a good thing. I thought, “Oh, I’ll just add a five-minute outro or something.” There is a lot of that on the first record, where the songs are amorphous and don’t have the standard verse-chorus-bridge. Ever since then, [I’ve felt like] I needed to write songs and write bridges and be a classic songwriter, and I want to go back to that. That’s kind of what Bill Callahan does now. His songs are so cool. They start at point A and end at point B; there’s not much that repeats and there often aren’t choruses. He seems to have a shitload of ideas.

JT: But one reason why people responded to the first Real Estate record, in addition to the songs being really good, is that, for a lot of bands at the time, home recording was kind of the thing. And a lot of those bands were doing minute-and-a-half songs and not letting the song develop.

MC: Super fuzzed-out or super reverb-y, which we also did a lot of—embraced lo-fi-ness.

JT: I still love all that stuff.

MC: Definitely.

JT: But I think people worked in anti-song-structures, in addition to anti-recording-studios.

MC: Real Estate was never anti-recording-studio, we just didn’t have any money. That’s why we said, “Jarvis should record it!” But then, with certain songs, we thought, “Oh, this sounds pretty cool on a cassette.”

JT: I definitely felt sort of liberated saying, “I don’t need a recording studio! Fuck it, we’ll record in the living room. And fuck it, we don’t need the song to repeat the chorus three times with a solo in the middle.”

MC: I still feel sort of chained down by that. I like having the structure because it makes you feel like you’re writing a classic pop song or something. You can never really [go back] though, but you can at least have the intention of doing that and see where it takes you.

JT: I feel like it’s never, ever good when artists try to go backward. You’ve heard so many interviews with bands—“We made this new record, it’s stripped-down like our old stuff”—and it’s just kind of corny. It happens all the time.

The Many Faces of Real Estate 

MC: It works perfectly—Real Estate is on tour, but between tours and when we’re on tour, Matt is almost always working on Ducktails. It worked out the same way for Days. [Matt and Bleeker] were making other records while we were touring, so as the Real Estate tour cycle is winding down, they are ready to put a record out. Then they go out on tour and I have time to be home and be with my family and also write another record. That’s what’s going on now—I’m writing another Real Estate record but also doing stuff with this record, but I’m not going to tour that much. It works into it perfectly: The writing time for Real Estate is the promo time for the side projects. You keep constantly going, which is good because if that wasn’t there, being in a band would suck. You tour for a fucking year or whatever, and then you’re done touring, and—especially if you’re not the songwriter in the band—what do you do? Just hang out until it’s time to go on tour again? Go work in a restaurant or something? So this way, hopefully, we’re able to sustain a career in music without having to have day jobs and keep it going by having different outlets.

Live Testing 

JT: I measure music in terms of comedy, and I love listening to interviews with comedians and the process they have when they develop material the way rock bands used to develop their songs—live, basing things off crowd reaction. These days, in the music world, it is more about studio nerds saying, “I think this sounds cool.” If you tour a song for a year, it’s better. It’s always better. And comedians still do that—it hasn’t changed for them. They go on tour and then, by the end of the tour, they film their special.

MC: You have to see what people react to. Animal Collective used to do that. I remember going to see them when Sung Tongs came out, and they were playing all new shit. But they always did that. You go see Animal Collective and they’re probably not going to play anything you want them to. Which is cool, but I can’t do that. I’m here to please. [Laughs.]

JT: I remember seeing Real Estate, and Days hadn’t come out yet. Bleeker said: “We’re going to play all of Days start to finish,” and I was like, “That’s amazing.” When I saw you guys play the whole record, it was inspiring. Woods started as a recording project, so we can’t let go of that 100 percent. There’s plenty of songs we play live, but there are a lot of songs we can’t play live or we tried and we’re like, “Eh, it’s not really happening.” Even at the last Woodsist Fest, four months ago, you came back and said, “I think we should play the first record in its entirety.” I was like, “Does the whole band even know how to play the first record?” And you said, “Yeah totally.” I was thinking in terms of Woods: “We don’t even know how to play the most current record in its entirety.”

MC: That’s because it was Woodsist Fest, and the last time we played Woodsist Fest, Atlas was already out and we didn’t have anything new this time. It’s pretty much the same people at Woodsist Fest every year, so it was like, “We can either play the same fucking set for all the same people and show we haven’t written any songs in the last year or, because its Wood Fest, we can play our entire Woodsist record.” I will say it was a pretty good idea.

JT: A lot of bands can’t do that backstage— “Hey, let’s play our first album in its entirety,” and everyone says, “Yes!” No pep talk— that’s faith that you have in the band. That’s rare.