by Ida Griesemer
This interview with Alex Bleeker (of the Ridgewood, New Jersey bands Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) took place on January 13, 2010. It will appear in six parts.
View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
In which Real Estate and Underwater Peoples Records are born (together, like twins).
LL: Did that band stay together throughout high school?
AB: We stayed together for freshman and sophomore years. Marc was around for a while, but we never really had our own material, we just played covers. And Paperface couldn’t play together anymore because Matt left for boarding school. None of us liked school very much, which was another thing that bound us together. We were all angsty, failing all of our classes, smoking weed behind garages, talking on the phone. So when Matt left and another one of their members graduated because he was two years ahead of us, that band kind of fell apart.
So we started this other band, Martin, Julian, and I, called The Enormous Radio. Which I think is a really good band. I was listening to our demo – and that’s when we were juniors in high school – I was listening to that the other day and I was like, It’s pretty good. It was super lo-fi, because it had to be.
That was the reason why I made the Freaks band. It was a total throw back to just the core, the originals. The four of us just know each other’s styles so well. Martin, Matt, Julian, and I were the people who were my most inspired musical community growing up. The three of those guys. There’s definitely an oddly huge musician pool from my town that I feel like I could draw from, but those guys, we hung out the most together, we did the most together, we played the most music together.
I think that we’ve influenced each other’s taste, because whenever we’re interested in something, we share it, and that will sway us in a direction, so it became this friendly, I don’t wanna say competition, but like, activity, to find new bands. I mean it’s still like that. If one of us gets into something, we’ll share it and usually that will influence what we’re listening to and that will influence the way that we’re writing. And that’s what’s cool, we sort of keep each other present. We’ll send each other demos as soon as we finish them for advice or critiques or just to share. They’ll definitely be large influence on my music.
LL: So you’re at a point where you can take that kind of criticism from each other?
AB: I think so. You know, it’s sensitive. It’s sensitive, for sure, especially now that we have records that are materializing. That’s pretty surreal on one level, but it also feels like a really natural progression on another, because it happens kind of slowly. In high school all we would talk about was “getting signed,” like, if we could only get signed, than that opens up this other world. But now, realizing that we had no concept of what that even meant, or the fact it’s not some romanticized version of becoming a rock star.
LL: How did that transition happen? How did you become involved with Underwater Peoples?
AB: Well, those guys are from – those guys are very much something that’s really exciting too – Underwater Peoples is organically grown from the place where we come from.
LL: They’re from Ridgewood also?
AB: Yeah, well, one of their members, Evan Brody, who’s also the front man of that band Family Portrait, he was a year younger than us in high school and became a part of our group of friends. And he went to college and met these other kids who are not from Ridgewood, but I feel like they could’ve been. They sort of fit into the family really well. They’re into all the same stuff we are and they’re really good people. They’re in it for all the right reasons. The band Real Estate and the label Underwater People are two things that 2009 was a huge year for. We began the same month. The very first Real Estate record, our first 7”, was their very first release, ever.
LL: And then the Freaks record was the first 12” that they put out too, right?
AB: Yeah. Which is my first effort.
LL: Is Brody on the cover of your album?
AB: Yeah. Actually all the Underwater Peoples guys are the cover. I don’t know if people know this but every member of Family Portrait are also the four founding members of Underwater Peoples. They’re like the house band.
They always wanted to have a label. They’d been talking about it for a while. They started really getting serious about that idea the same summer that we started really getting serious about Real Estate. It was just really lucky that that coincided because we didn’t have to convince – we didn’t have to like find a label and convince them to sign us. We knew them for a while, they were familiar with our music, they had heard our recordings. It was like, Let’s do this together. Let’s put out a record. I don’t even think any of us knew if it would grow beyond that single record or not. And, I don’t know, something aligned correctly for us to have good fortune in the past year.
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