Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley make up the band Tennis. Photo by Darren Vargas.
Tennis, a husband-and-wife band of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore, originated with breezy, seaside tunes and evolved to churn out synth-pop and rock with R&B influences. They two met in college and played on KCRW throughout their 20s and 30s. Now they’ve just released their seventh and last studio album called Face Down in the Garden.
Riley says they didn’t know they’d play music professionally at the start, and he even remains self-critical today. “There’s just that side of me that will never turn off, the striving-to-be-better side.”
The name Tennis was chosen by Moore partly as an inside joke but mostly to honor Riley’s first great pursuit to become a tennis professional. However, one defeat during a key tournament meant losing his ranking and scholarship opportunities.
“I was like, ‘This will be your new tennis, the new project that you strive for,’” Moore says.
The first track on their new album is “At the Apartment,” based on the first time Riley showed Moore a record player and they listened to a full album while lying on the floor together.
“I think the wistfulness in the song now is that we’ll never be those people again at the beginning of everything. And I think making this album, knowing it would be our last album, I spent a lot of time remembering how it all began, the band, our marriage, everything, and it is bittersweet to step back into those memories,” Moore says.
So what led to their decision to stop making music? Riley explains that they reached a point where making every new song took twice as long as the previous.
Moore adds, “With every album, we wanted to raise the bar and challenge ourselves to do something that we hadn’t done before. And then we had the sense that we were over-leveraging ourselves. Were we gonna do that infinitely, for the rest of our lives, just keep squeezing ourselves for the best possible thing we could get? And we had felt like Tennis had been created with this goal to express something really specific, and we … had done that. … I have said what I would like to say. … We want to walk away on a high while the quality of our work has never been diluted.”
Plus, touring brought health repercussions, and Moore had been developing a chronic illness for a decade.
“Part of being young is just ignoring your body. … There’s this ‘the show must go on’ mentality to it, that it doesn’t really matter what your personal suffering is, you just get on the stage and do it,” she says. “And I think that we’re starting to hit a lot of diminishing returns there, where we’re just like, I don’t know how much I want to keep doing this to myself.”
On top of all that, the two suffered a robbery attempt while sailing the Sea of Cortez, on their way to a cove where they wrote their best material. Four teens in a fishing boat headed straight toward them.
“I knew something was wrong. There was no reason for them to be coming directly at us. We were literally nowhere,” Moore recalls. “And they came straight to our boat, and just all started climbing into our boat, demanding money and fuel. Patrick … just physically held them off by having his arm outstretched. Our boat was taller than theirs, and he kept making himself into a wall so that they couldn’t climb on while saying, ‘No, no, don’t get on the boat’ while I hid on the inside. And he managed to avoid it ever escalating into violence, which I’m so grateful for.”
She continues, “I weirdly had a stash of American whiskey, which is actually really hard to find in Mexico. They didn’t know I was on the boat, so I made a surprise appearance and shoved into the arms of the one guy … bottles of whiskey. And he was so surprised and also stoked to have the whiskey, that they just released our boat for that one second, and just started drinking the whiskey. They were only one foot away, but Pat just turned the boat on, and we just started motoring away as fast as we could, and they just let us go.”
Another song on their new album, “12 Blown Tires,” is based on another struggle to drive home after a show. The couple kept pulling over on the side of the road to change tires, and they lost four tires in two days.
“At one of those stops, while Patrick was changing a tire, I started writing those lyrics. … It was an entry point into me reflecting on the many highs and lows that we’ve experienced in all of the years on the road,” Moore says.
The song “Weight of Desire” explores Moore’s conflicting desires of basing her legacy on songwriting or motherhood.
“I’ve had to forgo motherhood in order to have the band work. … I’m 40 now, and I’m just now opening the door to that. And it has been something that I’ve grieved a little bit, realizing as all my friends around me have entered motherhood and seeing that I’m still here, and I’ve made this choice to honor the band instead of that other desire.”
They had planned to try to have a kid after touring their fifth album, but then the COVID pandemic happened and set them back financially, according to Riley.
Moore adds, “I didn’t realize at the time that one of the things that we would be losing because of the pandemic was actually my prime fertility years. … It was my decision [to not become a mother], and I wouldn’t have changed it. But it’s not that that decision didn’t come with some amount of sadness.”
Plus, their work has impacted their personal relationship. “That was definitely part of our decision to make this our final record. We’ve just realized that success hasn’t made it easier. It’s actually made it harder. It just asks more of us. And looking ahead, we thought, what would that mean? This would just mean less and less boundaries between the band and our marriage. And we didn’t want that anymore,” Moore says.
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