Alaina Moore//Tennis

“As the melody comes together, I’ll switch to privileging it because I love pop music. Melody is like god to me.”

Alaina Moore loves a good pop song, but Tennis’ new album Swimmer is full of introspection, touching on topics like grief and mortality.

Critics love to classify Tennis as surf pop or dream pop and run with that idea. Alaina Moore and Pat Riley, after all, write music on their long sailboat journeys. And it’s been convenient for critics to conclude that their music cannot possibly contain substance. How could it, they say, when it was written on a boat? One prominent publication, for instance, said that “Tennis’ privileged worldview periodically bleeds through in offputting ways. (Moore scoffs at ‘all the tourists as they flock to the sea’ on the title track.)” But Moore and Riley were hardly scoffing: the song is actually about the day they scattered the ashes of Riley’s father as they watched those tourists.

Because Moore likes to write on the boat, people have assumed that the topics she writes about must be beachy: lacking in depth, superficial. (This reminds me of the annual discussion of whether “beach read” is a compliment to the author.) But John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats told me that he wrote an entire album at his dining room table, and he didn’t write about pancakes. Cory Branan told me that he wrote one album in a mall food court, and no one asked him why he wasn’t writing about Panda Express and The Gap. Writers all have their special places to write. It’s a part of their ritual, or as Darneille told me, “it’s where the mojo is.” And that mojo gives them confidence. For whatever reason, Tennis doesn’t always get that pass from the critics.

Tennis has said that “Swimmer is a tour of the darkest time in our lives. But it is not a dark record. Named for the feeling of suspension and upendedness that characterized this period, it is the story of deep-rooted companionship strengthened by pain and loss. These songs carried us through our grief.” Moore has a fantastic annotation of the album’s lyrics, song by song, here, which elaborates on how the songs came about and why she wrote them.

This is my second time interviewing Moore; here’s the first, from 2015. Tennis released Swimmer in February 2020 and toured for about a month behind it. They were playing to bigger venues and bigger audiences than their last tour and planned on similar, if not better, months ahead. Then, the pandemic hit, and the band returned home to Denver. While they’ve been busy writing their own music and producing other artists in their home studio, time off the road hasn’t been easy. I emailed Moore recently to ask what she and Riley and have been doing, and here’s her response:

Pat and I have built our lives around fear. Whether its touring, offshore sailing, or confronting the unbearable psychic drain of writing, these are the pursuits that constitute our daily lives. I suppose it's because fear is a heightened state, which is good for creativity. I'm curious to see how the pandemic will affect other artists. Pat and I feel stifled, probably because we're big planners and all of our plans have been upended.

Our album Swimmer has only been out a few months, and already it's like a memory from another life. I've been focusing on other things. I'm auditing a philosophy class on conspiracy theories. I'm in a book club that's reading mostly theology. Pat and I are doing a lot of construction around the home. We spent last week building a fence. I do what I can to get out of my head. Right now, music feels like trying to swim against a current.

Read my latest interview with Alaina Moore after the video for “Runner.”

How much writing did you do on the boat?

A

Not too much. Pat wrote the verses to “Runner” and I wrote what eventually became “Echoes,” but that’s about it. All we had was an acoustic guitar on the boat. I came up with the concepts for each song on the boat, like with “Swimmer” I knew I wanted to write a song about the day we scattered the ashes of Pat’s father at sea. I wrote headers in my journal for each song and then sketched out each one that way. And we had about 15 voice memos with chord progressions when we were done. All those things gave us a jumping off point for when we got back to the studio.

Was the creative process organic, or did you set aside a time to write?

A

We built it into the structure of the day, and that’s what I liked about the boat. The boat requires a cycle of repetitive actions and maintenance to keep it going, so all of that structure made it easy to slot the music into the middle of the day. We’d write for about three hours a day.

Did you write on deck or in the cabin?

A

Always inside. And what was weird was that even though we were right next to each other, we always felt like we were writing separately. I have some special skill where I can just disappear from a conversation or crowd of people and go inside my brain. My eyes glaze over and I’m gone. That skill came in handy.

Now that you’re back on land, do you try to write or journal every day?

A

Not unless we’re writing a record. When we are, I try to write six days a week. But when we’re prepping for tour, I don’t write at all.

I know that a lot of songwriters journal every day, but that’s not something I do because I end up writing too much garbage and start to wonder if what I just wrote was important. But if I have something that specifically lends itself to a song, I’ll write it down. I’ve tried to do the daily journal thing, but every time I do, it looks like my 11 year old self. Laughs. And nobody wants to see that.

I also hate brainstorming, and Pat loves brainstorming sessions. He’s tried hard to get me into brainstorming because I’m constantly shooting down ideas as they are presented, which is the opposite of brainstorming. But if I know I hate an idea, why consider it? Laughs.

The one thing I can do, though, is sit and write for hours and hours if it’s some kind of long form piece. I can’t do it with songs, though. But to be honest, when I write for long stretches, that’s a sign that I’ve written too much. Because I look back at it and think Who wants to edit this crap? Certainly not me. I think I need to be a better filter of my writing as I write.

“I’ve started experimenting with thinking of my songs as short stories rather than poems, which makes it easier. I found that it really helped me with writer’s block.”

Really? I’ve always thought that filtering as you write disrupts the creative process too much. My first drafts are atrocious, with little regard for structure. The last thing I want to do is force my non-linear thinking process into a linear form.

A

That’s amazing. I’m going to try that. Well that’s comforting, because the biggest critique of myself is how non-linear my writing is. I guess that’s my philosophy background. I didn’t take any writing classes in college, so no one ever read my writing and gave me feedback.

One of the problems with my process now is that I try so hard to keep things organized as I write, so it’s nice to know that maybe it’s not the most efficient way to do things. That reminds me of our songwriting process. Sometimes we’ll write a verse for one song and realize that it belongs in another song.

How much revising do you do to your lyrics?

A

Most of the time when I write lyrics, I write them with no notion of singing them. It’s just the idea of the song and what I want it to be about, because most of the time the music comes first. I’ve started experimenting with thinking of my songs as short stories rather than poems, which makes it easier. I found that it really helped me with writer’s block. I’d think about things like setting and actions, and I’d imagine each verse like the arc of a story. I’d write to that and then start trying to sing it.

As the melody came together, I’d switch to privileging melody because I love pop music. I don’t care about the lyrics when I first write them; they’re extremely incoherent. Once I have to start singing them, they erode as the melody emerges, then I do my best to juggle those two concerns.

The final product is always a compromise. I end up throwing away lines that I love so much and that tie everything together, but there’s just no way to sing it. It’s very frustrating, and I wonder if that’s why reviewers never pay attention to our lyrics. There are rarely comments about my lyrics, but there’s always comments about my hair. But I’m not going to change that aspect of my writing. Melody is like god to me. I don’t like when I start turning my song into a vehicle to be pedantic. It’s a song, not a speech. I actually get annoyed when I hear a song where the melody is there just to service the lyrics.

Let’s talk about writer’s block, something you mentioned earlier. I’ve heard several writers describe it as a myth, Anthony Doerr described it to me as a “failure of courage.”

A

I could really get behind that statement when it comes to words, but I think it’s different with music. Usually my writer’s block is with the music. When I get stumped with lyrics, it’s because I can’t crack the code. I have something to say, but I can’t make it fit in the song. With music, it’s around something like what kind of chords we should put in a chorus. When a song works, it feels like you’re shining a light in a dark room, then find something that was already there. The problem with this process is that you spend a lot of time in that dark room with nothing to see. Laughs.

When that happens, do you rely on certain techniques to overcome it?

A

Most of the time we push through. When we hit a roadblock with a song we’re already committed to and made a lot of progress on, we’ll spend four to six hours a day hammering out ideas. After a couple of days of that, if we haven’t made any progress, we go into “kill your darlings” mode where we slow it down, speed it up, change the key, change the vocal melody. Whatever we can do to shake it out. If that doesn’t work, we put it away and work on something else. We might come back to it months or even weeks later.

That’s what happened with “Runner.” It was so hard to go from verse to chorus. Once we had all the parts, writing the lyrics was incredibly difficult. An early version had lyrics that I loved so much, but when I sang it in the studio, it sounded insane. The melody was ruined. I had written that vocal melody first and loved it. But every time I sang my lines, it ruined the flow. I could only sing a certain vowel sound on a certain note, and if I sang any other vowel, it sounded wrong. So I had to change the lyrics, which changed the rhyme scheme. It felt like a Rubik’s Cube: we kept on changing things until everything lined up. That song took about a year to write.

Photo credits: Luca Venter

When you’re not on the boat, what’s your ideal writing environment?

A

I only write at home or on the boat. I’ve rarely written anywhere else. I can’t have anyone else around except Pat. I always write lyrics in the morning over coffee and breakfast. There’s a breakfast nook off our kitchen where I like to write. It gets lots of light, and there are a few trees outside I can look at. It’s got to be light and airy. When we write on the boat, there’s something about the warmth of the wood that puts me in a good state. When we’re home, I like to buy myself flowers and put them next to me in the breakfast nook. That seems to help. I think it’s important to treat the process as a sacred ritual. I try to make the process structured. As I said earlier, structure is easy on the boat; it’s harder to do, but just as important, at home.

Then I stay in that state and grab an acoustic guitar or maybe go to my piano to mess around with those ideas. Then we’ll go to the studio and work on a song that’s already tracked. We split our day between new ideas and old ideas.

When you write lyrics: computer or paper?

A

When I’m out, it’s pen and paper. I always try to keep some with me in case any ideas come. It’s got to be black ink, and it;s got to be ballpoint. But when I’m home, I use a laptop because it’s faster. I can rearrange lines as I go.

Why black ink?

A

Blue looks unprofessional. Like wearing a blue suit to your own wedding. Laughs.

With “How to Forgive,” you started with the title and worked from there. Is that common?

A

That was unusual for me. We had just written “Need Your Love,” where I let myself be angry. And “How to Forgive” allowed me to close the door on that emotion. I wanted to write closure for myself. “Need Your Love” was a way for me to vent about never being right, about never getting closure by winning an argument. The next song was at first about reliving that anger. I’ve been trying to meditate and have been interested in the idea that once you first experience anger, whatever triggers the emotion in you is involuntary. But from that moment on, you’re just actively reliving it, telling the story over and over in your head. “How to Forgive” was an easy song to write because it was about putting that anger to bed.

So is there an ideal emotion when you’re at your most productive? And can you write through anger?

A

Fear is a surprisingly productive state for me. It reveals a lot about a person. For example, on our last tour when I lost consciousness in the grocery store because of the flu, I started screaming as soon as I woke up because I thought I was dying. Now I know that when I’m faced with death, I’ll be screaming at the top of my lungs instead of calmly accepting my fate in a dignified manner.

We had a friend who was driving us on that tour, and he was in another part of the store. When he heard Pat scream for help, he froze. He said he knew what was happening and he should do something, but he was unable to move. He regretted that moment later. Just like I was embarrassed by the way I screamed at the top of my lungs like an idiot.

Pat, however, was all action. He was running around getting shit done and making sure that I got help, even though he thought I was dead.

Looking back, it was interesting to see what fear did to each of us.

(Note: at this point, Alaina’s husband Pat hears us and adds his perspective)

PAT: I’ve never experienced this before, I thought it was a fascinating human response to crisis. Alaina fainted and wasn’t breathing. Here eyes went dead and turned grey. One was pointing up and the other pointing down. Within five seconds of this happening, I was already planning so many things simultaneously: the funeral, selling the house, grief, will I ever recover. I’ve never experienced time slowing down like that, and it seemed like in the space of those few seconds I had already planned and organized my life without Alaina.

How often do lyrics come to you when you’re not writing?

A

Rarely. Sometimes when we’re on the road and I’m staring at the highway and zoning out, a line will come to me. The first line on the record—”As the sun slips over my shoulder/I can tell that I’ve been getting older”—is something I wrote on tour, and it sat in my notebook for three years.

What made you pull it out and use it?

A

I had gotten to a point in my active lyric writing for the record when I was feeling drained. When that happens, I pull out all my old notebooks and go through them. That usually helps. Pat Carney of the Black Keys told me about that one. He told me to always have something unused waiting in the wings that will help you dislodge an idea.

You and I love to talk about books, so let’s end by talking about what you’ve read recently.

A

I’ve read some great books. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a great one. Pat and I both read it. It’s massive but we each read it in two days. It sucked me in. It’s so gorgeous. Pat and I also loved Late Fame by Arthrur Schnitzer. It’s a recently discovered work of his. The main character wrote a bunch of poems in college and wanted to be a poet, but it didn’t pan out so he became a business man. It’s set in Victorian Era Prague. Then all of the sudden when he’s in his 60s he is approached by a young group of writers obsessed with this poetry he wrote 40 years ago. He then becomes their celebrity, and it transforms his psyche in this hilarious and demented way. It explores how one’s sense of being a writer is defined by the other.

And I know I’ve told you this before, but Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is so, so good. That book still stays with me.

A