Real Estate Interview: SXSW 2010

The recession and terrible job market are providing quite the headache for people fresh out of college and looking for new careers. For four guys in New Jersey, their newfound unemployment led to them forming the band Real Estate. Now, after a couple of years together, they are ready to take their show to SXSW. The band's singer/guitarist, Martin Courtney, talked to Spinner about Real Estate's guilty pleasures and their failed first careers.

How would you describe your sound?

Psychedelic pop music.

Who were your musical influences coming up?

We all listened to the Grateful Dead. That's where our jammiest guitar music comes from. Yo La Tengo is a big influence on me, which is pretty obvious to some people. We all really like Paul McCartney's solo stuff, his more weird stuff. We like psyched out '70s stuff. We share a lot of influences because we grew up together, so we listened to the same music for a long period of time.

How did you guys come together to form the band?

We've known each other forever and played in a lot of different bands. We all went to different parts of the country for college but kept in touch. We didn't know Etienne, actually. He's the drummer. He lived in the same town as Matt, our guitar player, in college. That's how we met him. We all played in a band together three years ago. When we graduated, we all came back home and there was nothing else to do. We decided to start a band. It was a natural thing to do.

How did you come up with your name?

We graduated from college and it was hard to find a job. My parents own a real estate office in Jersey, so I was going to school to get my license as a fall-back. That's the same time we were forming a band and trying to come up with a band name. We thought it'd be funny if we all got our real estate licenses and called the band Real Estate. That didn't happen, but we liked the name. It doesn't bring much to mind, musically at least. But it sounds cool, like what's real and estate. That sounds pretty cool. We like it for its lack of meaning.

What's your musical guilty pleasure?

When we were in Europe, we watched a ton of German MTV. It just gets burned into your skull. Like, we would all start singing that Black Eyed Peas song. I think we all hate it so much, but it's intensely catchy. I forget the name. What is it? I don't know. The video is them riding on Mars and it's super weird. I don't know.

What's the craziest thing you've seen on the road?

The night that our record came out, we were driving down the desert and there was a crazy meteor shower. That's not that crazy, but you'll have to take it [laughs].


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