Tennis, made up of husband and wife duo, Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore, became a band after they wrote a series of songs to commemorate a sailing voyage they went on together. What started out as personal enjoyment eventually became the couple’s first album, “Cape Dory,” which they eventually took on tour. After the success of “Cape Dory,” Tennis decided to compose a new album with the intent of performing it live and taking it on tour. The album, “Young & Old” was released earlier this year and the band will be playing at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco this weekend. Daily Bruin’s Meg Davis spoke with Moore about the band’s beginnings, personal experiences and their new album.
Daily Bruin: Where did the name Tennis come from?
Alaina Moore: Actually, it started off as a joke. When Patrick and I first met, we met as philosophy majors in college. But he had been a business major before that, which I thought was really funny because it just wasn’t like him at all. I basically would make fun of him for everything he ever did before I met him, which was play aristocratic, old white male sports and it kind of became this joke to refer to tennis all the time.
DB: How did that transition happen from writing music just as something to enjoy to becoming a public band?
AM: It was a really, really hard thing for me. It wasn’t something I wanted but I loved being able to make music and it was so rewarding to discover that people liked our music and were interested; it was very flattering and very exciting but something I had never envisioned having and I didn’t honestly even know what to do with it. And for our first several months of touring and playing shows it was harder for me than anything I’ve done in my entire life. I’m a very private person. I hated being on stage. I felt so insecure performing and even now I don’t feel like a performer. But I’ve learned how to do it and I’ve actually learned to really appreciate it.
DB: Since your first album was mostly about your trip, is there anything about your writing process that has been different for you in making your new album?
AM: Well, the one difference is just where you’re at mentally when you go to write a song. Instead of going to write a song specifically to encapsulate a certain experience like the trip, we were writing music for the sake of music. So now the ideas would come from moments when I’ll listen to a Kate Bush song or a Todd Rundgren, and I will love an element of that music. I’ll think I’d really like to write a song that builds off that idea and I’ll talk to Patrick about it. Our music usually starts really conceptually and we’ll pick an idea and literally create music (around) it. For example on “Young & Old,” our new album, there’s a song called “Petition” ““ I was in love with the Black Keys album “Brothers” and I really wanted a song that had more of that blues-y feeling and I was listening to “Brothers” and turned it off and went to the piano and in literally five minutes I wrote that song. That never happens ever, but I just knew what I wanted to do.
DB: Could you talk about more about what inspired the album “Young & Old” as a whole?
AM: There was no one thing that inspired it; it was just that we wanted to make music and see what that music would look like having toured for a year for the first time ever. We felt like we had changed as musicians and that our taste had evolved a little bit as far as what we enjoyed playing live and that is kind of what motivated it. The album title “Young & Old” comes from a William Butler Yeats poem, “A Woman Young and Old,” which I read when I was experiencing complete writer’s block lyrically. We had all this music written and I couldn’t write a single word on the page that I felt like it belonged. I started reading poetry for inspiration and I came across this poem and it really resonated with me.
DB: How do you like being on tour? Have there been any especially memorable performances or experiences?
AM: I think one of my most memorable experiences is playing a music festival last summer in Moscow. I never thought in my life I would be brought to Russia by the government to play; it was a public festival that was free to the public in Moscow. And that was just such a weird, surreal experience; it was such fun. The security were armed Russian military in urban camo ““ like that blue camo. Courtney Love headlined so we played our set and then literally walked over to watch Courtney Love play surrounded by urban camo Russian military. Everyone was so lovely and it was so amazing. That is just a moment I will never forget.