No one could have known from listening to it, but the title of Tennis’s previous long-player, 2014’s Ritual in Repeat, was rather loaded. The result of the Denver, Colorado, band’s first work-to-order songwriting sessions, it was also their third album – a stage at which the rote promotional and touring duties of a band lucky enough to reach such a milestone often become a millstone.
“It was kind of a joyless process, where we had to discover the monotony of the routine of showing up to make music that day, and we work until the end of the day, and then we stop,” recalls singer/keyboardist and – alongside husband Patrick Riley – Tennis co-founder Alaina Moore. “Probably every songwriter has gone through this, and it was important that we had that experience. I think a lot of it came from the fact that I wanted to write better songs – I wanted to move forward, but I didn’t know what the next step was. I wanted the joy of discovery and expression. Not necessarily ease – I don’t expect it to be easy anymore, and it never is – but I wanted those things back, because that’s what makes it worth doing.”
So, she and Riley returned to the scene that had been the inspiration for their widely acclaimed debut album, Cape Dory: international waters. Despite being of very limited means (when they married, Riley cut Moore’s hair for the ceremony because she couldn't afford to go to a salon), the newlywed couple procured a small sailboat, which they took out for an extended sojourn along the Eastern Seaboard. Returning to life on land, the seeds of a record had been sown.
Fast-forward six-plus years, and the Tennis linchpins were once again upon the ocean’s isolated and isolating void, hoping inspiration would strike. Fortunately, it did. “The world feels very unreal; it recedes with the shoreline and it’s gone,” Moore says of life at sea. “It’s just your own mind out there, and it allowed me to write about whatever I wanted and not worry about it anymore.”
The result is Yours Conditionally (out Mar. 10), another triumphant addition to a near-flawless discography of classic pop melodies often matched with slyly subversive lyrics from the fount of Moore’s tirelessly inquisitive mind. A former philosophy major, she likes to think of her words as a “bonus layer” that shouldn’t distract a listener, but are waiting to be discovered by those who want to find them. The new album finds them biting slightly harder than before, in the caustic humour of “Ladies Don’t Play Guitar” and the blurred gender perspective of “Baby Don’t Believe.” These are the result of a drive to do away with the ambiguities of previous albums that led to Tennis being dismissed by less attentive listeners as a lightweight endeavour, indebted to the surface pleasures of the 1960s girl-group sound without adding anything new to the art form.
“I’m inspired by that type of songwriting,” Moore concedes. “The lyrics are so simplistic because they have to serve the melody; they sound so good when you sing a held note. There’s a lot of utility behind why those songs became popular. But I don’t have that relationship to romance: I’m a feminist, I live in a different century. Even my feelings of love, they’re framed by a super-egalitarian, monogamous, long-term partnership. It’s not like this swirling, explosive, emotional connection; it’s practice, it’s devotion, it’s discipline. So, when I was writing these songs, I was like, ‘How do I stay true to my own experience of life and the world and my own views, but I’m still making the kind of music I love the most and I want to make?’
“But there’s also no need to be derivative and continue to describe the same sentiments in another pop song, because we’ve already had the best ones ever,” she continues, chuckling good-naturedly. “I’m not gonna write [the Shirelles’] ‘Baby It’s You,’ so why even try to do that? I have to set some kind of bar for myself.”
Tennis play the Biltmore Cabaret on Wednesday, Mar. 1 at 8pm. Tickets at ticketweb.ca.
