Real Estate singer Martin Courtney on new album 'Daniel,' recording process, fun gimmicks

The recording process for Real Estate’s latest album, “Daniel,” turned out to be a vastly, and purposefully, different experience than their last record, 2020’s “The Main Thing.”

Real Estate, an indie rock band that formed in 2008 in New Jersey, is on the road in support of the new album, on their Infinite Jangle tour, with a stop on April 13 at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale.

Singer/guitarist Martin Courtney, in a phone interview from New York, said Real Estate wanted to make something “substantial (and) monumental” with “The Main Thing.”

“We were like, it’s our fifth record, we’ve been a band for 10 years. This has to be our statement, like this is our best record,” Courtney said. “So we put a lot of pressure on that record to be really good or really saying a lot and full of ideas. That is what it ended up being. It’s this really messy, big messy record that I like, but I also didn’t really want to do that again.”

After all the internal pressure inherent from that album — which was recorded in bits and pieces over the course of a year — the pandemic hit and Real Estate couldn’t tour, leaving a bad taste in Courtney’s mouth.

So for “Daniel,” the band went back to a more streamlined process like they’d done with previous albums “Atlas” in 2014 and “In Mind” in 2017. Working with Grammy-winning producer Daniel Tashian over the course of two weeks at RCA Studio A in Nashville, Real Estate created an album that captured what Courtney called the “band in a room” sound.

”I wanted to make it almost almost the opposite of (‘The Main Thing,’)” Courtney said. “I wanted to make a really light, fun, open pop record that would be really fun to make. And we weren’t gonna overthink it and we’re gonna just let it flow naturally.”

Related

• The Brook & the Bluff discuss 'Bluebeard' album, road trips, live experience
• Chappell Roan brings spunk, pink sparkles to Pittsburgh with 'Midwest Princess' tour
• 2024 Pittsburgh area concert calendar

Recording in a famous Nashville studio may have lent itself to some country flourishes like pedal steel, but Courtney had a clear vision for the record, specifically what he was trying to avoid.

“I didn’t want it to sound like indie rock, you know? I really thought that early on, like I don’t wanna make an indie rock record, but I don’t want to make a country record either,” Courtney said. “I talked a lot about REM ‘Automatic for the People,’ but there’s other stuff. Wilco skew kind of country.

“I didn’t want it to be kind of Americana either, but this idea of the songs are their own thing, so it’s not genre driven in terms of the songwriting, but instrumentally or arrangement wise. I thought having it feel sort of timeless, like a lot of acoustic guitar and organ and piano, I didn’t want it to feel stylized, and I didn’t want it to feel like a 2024 indie rock record or whatever, or 90s indie rock.”

The biggest Nashville influence may have been the speed in which they recorded. “Freeze Brain,” for example, had been rehearsed like a “fast My Bloody Valentine rocker,” according to Courtney. But during a mic setup, drummer Sammi Niss began playing new groove, with the band — which also includes bassist Alex Bleeker, keyboardist Matt Kallman and guitarist Julian Lynch — joining in.

“We started playing the song along to it, along with the way she was playing the drums, we were all just kind of messing around and they were like, ‘Oh this this actually sounds pretty cool. Maybe we should get a take of the song?’ … We were like, we’ll do it this way and then we’ll do it the other way that we plan to do it, but then kind of forgot; we moved on so quickly, we’re like all right that one’s done, and we moved onto the next one. We forgot to do it the normal way.”

On their West Coast tour in March, songs like “Say No More” — one of the last songs written for this record — have been getting a better reaction than Courtney anticipated.

”It just wasn’t one of my favorites, but then other people would, unprompted, be like, oh yeah, ‘Say No More,’ that’s one of my favorite songs. So I was like all right, well, we’ll keep it because other people seem to like it. And then when we started rehearsing for tour, we were playing it, and I was like, oh, this song is gonna kill live because it’s fast and it’s got a lot of energy.”

Other songs like “Market Street” still need a little more practice, according to Courtney.

“There’s a guitar solo and that’s me playing it on the record. Every time we’ve played it, I’ve been like really botching that solo and I’m like it’s cool, it’s fine, it’s like Neil Young, like I’ll hit some blue notes, it’s cool,” he said. “But I’m hitting a few too many. I kept being like, let’s just do it, it’s fine, and then Alex our bass player was like, let’s skip that one tonight. He’s looking out for me. I gotta practice a little bit.”

Whether it’s playing a concert at their old middle school or doing a show with the songs plucked from a bingo cage, Real Estate embraces the joy in performing.

For this “Daniel” album, Real Estate used some unusual marketing gimmicks, like starting a “Daniel of the Month” award. Previous winners include Daniel Radcliffe, Daniel “MF Doom” Dumille, Daniel Stern, Danielle Steele and, for April, Anthony Daniels. To celebrate their album release, they played a free show in New York exclusively for people with Daniel (or a variation) somewhere in their name.

“It’s like really the dumbest thing in the world. But it’s cool because the music stands on its own. We’re happy. The music isn’t a joke, you know,” he said. “It’s not like super serious, but we’re not a joke band. Our videos have tended to be a little sillier, just because to me, it’s like we already make music that’s on the more earnest side.

“So you run the risk of taking yourself too seriously. I guess for me I find it kind of corny if your music video is a band just trying to look cool. You can’t take yourself too seriously and so it’s really for us, we need to have fun with it. I think doing it that way, we probably also run the risk of people thinking we’re just really cheesy because it is not necessarily even that funny. It makes us laugh but maybe other people are like this band is extremely corny, but it doesn’t matter. We’re having fun.”