Maturity makes for prime Real Estate sound
There’s a few reasons why you might give your new album a quirky title like “Daniel.” Maybe you love the Elton John song of that name. Maybe you have friends and family named Daniel, or even a record producer. Or maybe you just thought it was a cool and interesting thing to do.
In the case of East Coast indie-rock mainstays Real Estate it was all the above, but mostly the latter. In fact when they did their albumrelease show in New York last month, they only invited people named Daniel and Danielle, and the set both opened and closed with them playing the Elton song (which isn’t on the album). “As you probably gathered there isn’t one reason for the title, we just wanted to give it a proper name,” bassist and sometime singer Alex Bleeker said this week. “We pretty much invited the Elton John association, but I do have an older brother named Daniel, so that song always resonated with me.” The band hits Royale next Wednesday, April 17.
Fans have pegged the album as Real Estate’s “maturity” record, coinciding as it does with some bandmembers hitting 40 or having children. But in Bleeker‘s view, that’s what they’ve always pushed for. “We probably said that on our second album (in 2011) — ‘this is the mature Real Estate, forget the last one.’ We always felt like we had to prove ourselves—like we’re 13-year-olds trying to show how mature we are. Maybe that’s the chip on our shoulder that keeps us going and drives us creatively.”
He says that especially happened on their last album, “the Main Thing” in 2020. “We were always hearing people say, ‘Yeah, Real Estate, they’re good but they only do one thing.’ So we said ‘We’ll show ‘em’ —and we made this really long and dense record with a lot of different instruments, kind of telegraphing that we’d matured. But with the new one, we just said, ‘Let’s make an album of clear and concise pop songs that don’t sprawl at all.’ We were trying less to demonstrate something, which I guess is what real maturity is all about.”
The other Daniel involved with the album was producer Daniel Tashian, who hails from Boston music royalty (his father was Remains leader Barry Tashian) but has since become a hot Nashville producer. “He had a light touch but still really situated himself as a producer. He brought us into RCA Studios in Nashville (former home of Elvis and other luminaries), and since we’re all music heads we loved that. You can definitely feel the presence when you walk into that room.” The band’s music fandom extended to their naming a favorite Neil Young album (“Harvest Moon”) in one song, and Bleeker referencing the Kinks in his tune “Victoria.”
The band’s sound was unique from the start, based in rustic Americana but with a few dashes of loops and electronica. “When we came up we were connected to a certain Brooklyn scene, one of many movements in New York’s musical history. We came up with people like the band Woods, and Kurt Vile who we came up with. There was a connected sonic aesthetic, even though we all felt we were doing our own thing. It was a good New York alternative scene, but you never realize that till it’s over.”