Bergen County, New Jersey natives Real Estate will make their return to Northeast Ohio for a show at the newly christened The Roxy (operated by longtime Lakewood staple, Mahall’s) on April 12. The 5-piece indie rock outfit are no stranger to the Greater Cleveland area, having been through the area many times on previous tours.
Phoning CleveRock prior to the tour’s kickoff, bassist Alex Bleeker says the band is looking forward to returning to Cleveland!
“We’ve played Beachland Ballroom and Tavern and Grog Shop and a bunch of other venues there, but this will be our first time at Mahall’s, and I’m sure it’s really nice,” he said. “I’ve just been hearing good things about the place, so I’m excited to be there.”
Real Estate is on the road in support of their new album, ‘Daniel’ (02.23.24; Domino). Many fans and critics are calling the record the band’s best work to date. Bleeker shared his thoughts on that subject:
“In some ways, I feel like every time we put out a new album, we’re always excited about the new material. The short answer is, ‘yeah,’ I mean, I feel really, really good about this album. I think that opinions about what’s the best or whatever, I leave that to the fans and the critics. I think it certainly can be counted among our best,” Bleeker explains. “It’s really up there, and I think it will stand the test of time, as mentioned in that conversation when people are talking about their favorite records. I’m just so excited that we’ve been around long enough. This is our sixth full-length LP, and we’ve got a handful of EPs in there and stuff, too, and it really starts to feel like we’re building a catalog where people can have conversations or even arguments about what the best one is, and everyone’s going to have their different favorites. I know my friends who are like music geeks, we talk about bands with long catalogs. ‘What’s your favorite Beatles album? What’s your favorite Radiohead album? Yo La Tango…’ all these great bands, and it’s kind of cool. We have enough output now that we are still around to be a part of a conversation like that. I think I’m really psyched that other people agree with us that this album’s really good, and it feels like there’s something special about this one. We’re super excited about it.”
In unusual fashion, Real Estate recorded ‘Daniel’ over the course of only nine days.
“It’s really cool for us, we were in this very classic Nashville studio, the legendary country studio called RCA Studio A, and it’s still very much an active studio to this day, making new Nashville records. The folks that were working there and were recording it thought we were going really slow because the Nashville speed is like bringing some highly skilled hired gun players and songwriters. You’re doing two songs a day. Done! In the Can! And the studio folks were asking, ‘Isn’t it great to have so much time to work on a record? ‘And for us, we were more in the indie rock tradition of laboring over something and doing overdubs and stuff like that. We were like, ‘Wow, we’re moving at a really good clip here!’ So it really is kind of subjective. But for us, it felt fast, but not too fast,” Bleeker said. “It was kind of how we wanted to do it. The songs were written. They were good to go. We felt like they were good songs and sometimes, the first thought is the best. You just want to get down the magic of the band playing together in the studio and sort of capture that. And that’s what we were able to do in nine days. We had 11 scheduled, and we didn’t even have to use them all, which was really cool. I mean, from start to finish, the songs were written, we’d gotten together and rehearsed, we’d worked on stuff. It took longer to mix and master the record. It wasn’t done-done after those nine days, but all the recording that needed to be done was done kind of on the spot in Nashville in just over a week’s time, which felt great.”
‘Daniel’ was recorded with producer Daniel Tashian, a highly sought-after studio wizard. (Of note: Bleeker says that the album title and producer’s first name are one and the same, which is a mere coincidence. Maybe it should have been homage to him. Bleeker had glowing things to say about Tashian and his imprint on the record.
“He did leave a huge, indelible mark on the record. He is great. He’s just a really fantastic producer. He’s earned his reputation, and he’s really sort of like, I would call him, whimsical and impulsive and taps into a sort of innocent creativity in a really cool way,” Bleeker praised. “He works fast, and he’ll just be kind of sitting at the control desk or maybe even in the live room, and he’ll have an idea, and he’ll throw it out there, and it’s really fun. He was sort of pushing us. We told him before we made the record that we wanted to make a suite of catchy tunes, 10 straight-ahead pop songs that could really grab the listener immediately. And he kept us honest. He really held us to that, and he heard our prompt. He helped us get there in a way that I don’t think anybody else could. He was totally great to work with.”
The band’s music video for one of the tracks from ‘Daniel,’ “Water Underground,” is an ode to the 90’s television classic, The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The video even features actor and musician Danny Tamberelli (“Little Pete,” for those who remember the show.
This 40-year-old interviewer is 100% about 90s nostalgia! While visiting family in Wyckoff, New Jersey (the neighboring town of Bleeker’s origins in Ridgewood), I visited a bagel shop, and my food was bagged by Tamberelli, a resident of the area! I thought maybe I dreamt this or that it was a grandiose delusion until I met Tamberelli playing in a Weezer cover band in Akron, Ohio, in 2015. A conversation with Tamberelli confirmed his bagel shop employment.
No longer slinging bills, Tamberelli is a bonafide bass player who found time to star in Real Estate’s video! What a great idea!
“It was actually my idea, so I’m the right guy to talk to about it,” Bleeker said with a laugh. “It’s funny you mention Wyckoff because Danny Danny Tamberellil grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and I kind of knew that. He was a few years older than me, but I knew that and was obviously a huge fan of the show. The show had a big influence on all the members of Real Estate. We loved it. If you listen to Real Estate or even just check out how we dress or our aesthetic, I feel like it’s a pretty clear influence that the show and the feeling of that show and the music in the show had on us. So we’ve always loved it. And Danny was somebody who I knew was from our part of New Jersey. The show was shot in New Jersey, so it had a particularly strong impact on a kid growing up in that part of the world, and eventually, I got to meet him. I met him in New York City and we had some mutual friends from the area and kind of hit it off, so we’d been in touch for years. I’d always dreamed of making the video and then this song just seemed like the perfect song to fit with that feeling of Pete and Pete and the kind of a reunion. And so I texted him and, he was into the idea and, he was really instrumental in pulling everybody together there and making it happen. It was pretty amazing.
Bands come, and bands go. It’s tough to earn a living touring today, and don’t even get me started on selling records in 2024! Still, Real Estate is not only surviving but thriving! The band has been together for over 15 years and still draws a great crowd while on the road.
What is the secret to longevity in the rat race of the music business?
“I don’t know. I think it’s maybe the strength of our relationships. Four of us grew up together, and we’ve been playing band together since we were in high school, and so honestly, it’s almost like we don’t know anything else,” he answered. “We feel really grateful to still be hanging around and that anybody’s interested in coming to our shows or talking to us for a publication, such as yours. We’ve always tried to have a sort of timelessness in our music. We don’t want to bog down in any one particular fleeting trend. The taste of music moves really fast, but there are certain trends that kind of stand the test of time. You can’t pin on a certain era or fad. And I think that’s always been our approach to songwriting, and maybe we owe some of it to that. A lot of the records kind can resonate today as much as they could in the time that they’re made.”
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