On Juggling Two Loves: Music & Family

Martin Courtney is on the side of the road in upstate New York. He's trying to change a tyre before darkness sets in and brings with it the foot-and-a-half of snow that's been predicted. "Could we maybe do the interview tomorrow?" he asks. A day later Courtney's safe at his upstate New York home, snow piled high outside. "Having a two-and-a-half-year-old, snow is pretty exciting in my house."

Courtney is living, these days, "40 miles" from where he grew up. As a teenager in suburban New Jersey, he and his friends — Matt Mondanile, Alex Bleeker, Julian Lynch — were obsessed with music. When he left for university, Courtney picked the most indie-rock of colleges: The Evergreen State College in Olympia; the birthplace of K Records, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill. "That was how I heard about that school: I was a huge fan of The Microphones and loved K Records."

"I'm deep in family mode, these days. I have two kids, and a whole new lot of worries."

There, Courtney studied English and French and wrote music constantly; recording in his dorm, sharing tapes with Mondanile who was at school on the east coast. After college Courtney, Mondanile and Bleeker reconnected: "we were all living back at our parents' houses, so we started a band," he recounts. Real Estate were born, taking their influence from the guitars of Pavement, the lyrics of Bill Callahan and the sheen of '70s soft-rock. "We were basically trying to be a soft-rock band. We were trying to sound like Steely Dan, only we're nowhere near that good," says Courtney.

After their 2009 self-titled debut LP was met with bona fide buzz, Real Estate become beloved indie-rock perennials; their autumnal sound built on jangling guitars and Courtney's melancholy lyrics. By their third album, 2014's Atlas, the band had entered the Billboard Top 200 chart (#34), but, after its release, Mondanile left to focus on his own project, Ducktails. To replace him Courtney and Bleeker turned to their old pal Lynch, who'd released six solo LPs of his own.

"Removing Matt from the band definitely changes the equation," Courtney says, "but I'm pretty sure I met Julian on the same day I met Matt Mondanile. So this isn't just some new guy; we have a long history with him, too."

For the new Real Estate LP, In Mind, Courtney wanted to take the sound back to the band's beginning, losing the road-tested tautness of Atlas and making something "looser, weirder". Lyrically, Courtney is again hung-up on time, memory and changes. "Every album ends up being a portrait of a different point in my life," he offers. "This time, I'm deep in family mode, these days. I have two kids, and a whole new lot of worries. I have this job that is not very conducive to stability, and being home a lot. So I hear a lot of uncertainty in these songs. I love my family, and I love music, but sometimes it feels as if they're at opposite ends of my life and the balance between them can be uneasy."