Alaina Moore of Tennis Tells Us Why Their Album ‘Yours Conditionally’ Almost Didn’t Happen

Seven years after the sailing expedition that birthed their musical partnership, Tennis, the indie pop duo comprised of married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, returned to nature to create their upcoming fourth album “Yours Conditionally.” Moore recently sat down to speak with Entertainment Voice about how she and Riley came together, gender stereotypes in the music industry, and how “Yours Conditionally” almost didn’t happen.

You and your husband Patrick formed Tennis following an eight-month sailing expedition. What is it about the open sea that inspired your music?

I think that the reason why we wrote music in the first place is because the sailing trip is the first time I ever did anything interesting enough that was worth writing about. I was just a young recent college graduate. I grew up playing piano and singing and I kind of always wanted to write music, but whenever I would try it would just be like a teen girl’s diary, but not nearly as interesting as, like, Lorde’s diary [laughs]. I just had nothing to say, and it occurred to me that I just had to live life and had to have any experience of the world in order to write about it first. It could have been anything, but it happened to be sailing, if that makes sense. We could have backpacked across Europe or hiked a mountain after we graduated. It could have been any one of those things, but we arbitrarily chose sailing.

Do you guys still sail?

We do. We sailed for this record.

You and Patrick – I know you guys met in college, but can you talk about how the two of you came together personally and musically?

We met in an analytics philosophy class. I happened to be, I think, one of two girls in the entire class, so there wasn’t a lot of competition [laughs]. He walked in and sat right next to me and apparently I had waited on him at the restaurant I worked at across the street and he remembered me. We started talking, and we got coffee that day, and got coffee the next day, and then we started writing our papers together – and then we started organizing our class load together, and then I moved in one month later, and then one month after that we were planning our sailing trip, and right after that we were married. It was an instant connection.

I actually didn’t really know that he could make music at first. It wasn’t something we connected over at the time.  We both obviously had a full musical past: he had been in lots of bands and I grew up playing music in church, and we had both been music major dropouts. We both felt like failures in that area. We both dropped out because we were so terrible academically at music. When we met we bonded over philosophy and I proposed going on a sailing trip together, so music really never came up [at first]. We never played music together. We both had really similar taste in music, and would listen to the same things and have a lot of musical discovery together, but it really was not at the forefront of our relationship. [Philosophy] really was the bedrock of our relationship in its earliest stages.

It wasn’t until we came back from the sailing trip and we were back to the nine to five, 40-hour-a-week jobs and feeling a little bit lost. We tried painting together just as a pastime. We were looking for stress-relieving activities that were [also] creative outlets. It was really fun to paint, but we’re horrible painters, and after a couple of weeks we were like, “You know, we actually know how to play instruments. Maybe we could play music together?” The very first evening [it occurred to me], he got his guitar out and set it all up. He wrote the chords for a song that’s on our first record called “Bimini Bay,” and I ran and got my ship log out, I had kept a diary of our passages and pulled some words out of it, and that whole song came to us in five minutes. I wish all songs since then were that simple, but it almost felt like lightening struck or something. I was like, “Whoa, that was way better than any painting…” That’s kind of what prompted us, the sailing trip, and then seven years later, here we are.

It’s seven years later and you guys just released your fourth album, “Yours Conditionally.” Is there anything you did differently in the recording studio this time around?

The writing process for this record was really different. We wrote half of it at home in our apartment, and then for the other half, we went on a five-month sailing expedition to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and we finished writing the record there.

We actually didn’t know if we were going to make the record. The story of this record is we didn’t even know if we were going to continue on as Tennis. We had a few songs sitting on our drive at home that we thought had potential, but we thought our connection to Tennis was dissolving. We were experiencing a lot of burnout and it felt like we were just doing it because we had to. We were kind of losing the joy that we first had when we were writing songs together, so we went on this sailing trip not knowing if we would actually come back. While we were gone, I think the distance gave us a lot of perspective, and we started writing music again. It felt really good what we were doing and we thought, “Okay, let’s just make one more record, but we’ll do it on our own terms. We’ll self-release it, self-produce it, record it alone in a little cabin when we get home. Let’s take the pressure off of us.” I don’t like to write music thinking of the consequence of it, you know what I mean? “What will it gain me? What’s the end goal?” I don’t want to treat music that way. I just want it to exist for the sake of itself, even if it brings me just a fleeting moment of joy and that’s all it needed to do, and then that’s enough. So, taking off the weight of expectations of it making the label any money… Taking all of that away made it easier to work again.

We rented a tiny cabin, actually, on Airbnb. We brought own studio equipment into the house and set it up and we recorded alone with the help of our drummer Steve and a friend, Luca, engineering… for eleven days. It was amazing. I got to be in a house with light, airy windows, and there were herds of deer and there were moose and foxes running through the front yard, and I got to cook in the kitchen and do laundry and have some semblance of a normal home life. That was very grounding to me. It makes it easier to tackle something that seems very daunting, like making a record, when it was contextualized with a normal routine. We didn’t have anyone to impress; we only had to make ourselves happy, and that’s what this record is. I feel very, very close to it and am very satisfied with it.

“Ladies Don’t Play Guitar” is one of our favorite tracks on the album. What is the story behind that one?

I had written that one thinking about the really hardened female archetypes that are so clear and persistent to me. In the music industry, I feel like there are pretty hardened pre-defined roles. The male collaborator/producer is the mastermind of the music. He plays all the instruments and the girl just sings. The girl is just the face of it; you know what I mean? She’s like the conduit for the man’s ideas, basically. And even after so many years, people still do that to Patrick and I. They’ll look at Patrick and be like, “Great song.” And I’ll be like, “I wrote it. I literally wrote every part. Every instrument, the drums, the bass line, that one’s mine.” Sometimes we write songs together, sometimes we write them separately. And Patrick notices it and is baffled by it all the time too.

So, “Ladies Don’t Play Don’t Play Guitar” came from one of those archetypes. I’m so glad I’m a piano player, but I’m not a guitar player surely because of the accident of me being a girl and no one thinking to hand me an electric guitar. Instead, they gave me a piano, because that’s what you give girls. You give them ballet lessons and piano lessons, refined things. Patrick, being a boy, was given an electric guitar. And that’s literally the only reason why I don’t play the electric guitar, and that’s why I wrote “Ladies Don’t Play Guitar.” It’s just an accident of gender that I’m not a shredding lead guitar soloist.

How much of “Yours Conditionally” are you performing on your current tour?

We’re playing half the record right now. We’re trying to split it up between lots of old songs so that we don’t really lose anyone. I, of course, wish we could play the whole new album and no old songs because it’s fun to have new things, but I totally get it as a music fan myself. Especially if a record it not formerly out yet, that’s just way too many unfamiliar things to hear live.

Anything special planned for your upcoming Coachella performance?

Every show we ever play we try to do our absolute best. We’re going to do the same thing with Coachella. We’re going to try and be as good as possible. We still are at that level where we don’t really have a lot of money to put into our production. I think we might have one of my really close girlfriends sing backup vocals with me. Normally I don’t get to travel with a backup singer, so that would be amazing to have live harmonies. We might add a few bandmates, but otherwise, we’re just going to try to do the same live show that we do every night to the best of our abilities [laughs].

What would you say is unique about playing a festival as opposed to playing a regular concert?

It’s totally different. It’s a really more stressful, but I really love being outside, usually, as long as it’s not insane weather. I love playing in the daylight, I love sunshine, and I love how it’s just a huge excited crowd. Everyone has the day off from work, everyone’s there to have a great time. I feel like the crowd always has a lot more energy and they’re bigger, which is very energizing to me on stage. It’s a shorter set, short and sweet, but I really enjoy festivals. I know people who don’t, but I love them.

You’ve already touched on this a little bit, but can you talk more about the greatest aspects of working with your husband?

Well, we never have to be apart, which is amazing. I feel like Tennis was the natural outpouring of our relationship anyway. It’s all of our shared endeavors. We wouldn’t set up our lives in such a way to where we’re always together if we didn’t want to be together and work together. We’re a really good team and we have a lot of respect for our differences. The way I like to think of it is like two distinct freedoms, my freedom and his freedom and our partnership is a negotiation of two free individuals. I think the common perception of marriage is two becoming one, like Mr. and Mrs. Whatever, and you’re one entity now, but our approach to marriage is the opposite. We emphasize our unique differences from each other and it forces us to stay more mindful and respectful of each other’s needs, preferences, tastes, everything. It makes working together a lot more fluid and productive for us.

Do you have plans after this tour ends? Is there another sailing expedition in the works?

We have a lot more touring coming up – so we’ll just be touring for quite a while, I think. I think we’re going to go sailing again. We are right now toying with the idea of crafting the Pacific. If we don’t have a huge goal in front of us, then we aren’t living our life right [laughs].

“Yours Conditionally” is available March 10 on Apple Music.