The Florida Keys are a collection of islands jutting off the tip of the titular state, connected by what is now called the Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway. The islands are remote. They are not unpopulated; whatever land that hasn't been claimed by humans makes up a broad expanse of state parks, with marinas and small communities tucked along the shores.
It's at a bar on one of these islands that Tennis, the duo composed of married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, first decided to make music together. On one of their first sailing trips — Moore and Riley have a sailboat and go out to sea for extended stretches of time — the bartender was playing songs from early girl groups. They gushed over "Baby, It's You" by the Shirelles. "We were just like, 'I want to make music right now that sounds exactly like this.' And that's what we set out to do," singer Moore tells Exclaim! during a Zoom call from L.A.
These efforts are documented not only throughout their nearly 15-year career, but evidenced through Neutral Poetry, a mini LP of early demos that will be released on May 16 — soon after this week's Face Down in the Garden (out April 25), their seventh and final album as a band.
Moore and Riley had long agreed that they would choose to end Tennis before they were forced to end Tennis. With every successive album, they wanted to "beat" the previous one. It wasn't until they were in the throes of making Face Down in the Garden that Moore and Riley realized it would be their last. "We felt the songs were tacitly waiting in the wings, waiting to come out. We really wanted to honour that. But while we were doing it, I just kept telling Pat, 'I feel like I've said everything I want to say in a Tennis song,'" Moore remembers. "We felt like we couldn't keep raising that bar indefinitely, forever, without making ourselves insane. This just felt like a good point to stop."
Moore admits that for her, the hardest part of Tennis has always been writing lyrics — a dedication reflected in her well-considered words. It's never sounds like Moore is trying to shoe-horn a big word to prove a point, and she rarely relies on cliché. She's looking forward to eschewing the limitations of songwriting — in its formalized structure and brevity — in different mediums, first working on a memoir. "I'm going to be comparing our tour diary with our ship's log. The experience of being on tour or voyaging, they're both very lonely and isolating, but it's very performative. It's very other-worldly," she reflects. The parallels between performing for audiences and sailing are apt: for starters, they both terrify her.
"The feeling I have of walking on stage is the same feeling I have when we leave a port and set sail," she notes. "I have the same crazy adrenaline dump in my body. It's very powerful and I don't know why I do it. I feel like I have to, weirdly. It feels like it's transformative to me. It's making me a person that I didn't know that I could be, but I really want to be." It's funny that Moore speaks in the hypothetical, as though she isn't already the person she wants to be, simply by the sheer fact that she's been doing both for the better part of 15 years.
"The thing to ask yourself is: are you afraid of doing it because it's just a fear, or are you afraid of doing it because you're afraid of failing? I have to interrogate the fear, because often I find I'm afraid because it means so much to me," she muses. "I'm afraid of losing it or messing it up. I'm very good at deceiving myself and telling myself I'm afraid because it's risky to my life, but I'm not really afraid of that. I'm afraid of fucking it up." Moore concedes that, while sailing in the open ocean, there is a small but genuine chance of experiencing true catastrophe; meanwhile, a bad performance may only result in ruining someone's night, rather than their whole life.
Working against and in spite of fear is the standard operational mode for Tennis, let it be while toiling on an album or on stage, and is in part why they decided Face Down in the Garden would be their last. "I don't want to push this because we're afraid of something else," Moore says. "I didn't want to get to a point where we were undermining our legacy by putting out a lower quality of work."
There's a palpable sadness to Face Down in the Garden that's appropriate for the end of Moore and Riley's creative partnership. The feeling is subtle, but it's there. You can hear it in Moore's voice, somehow both more grounded and more detached than before. Tennis has never shied away from exploring the nuances in relationships; very rarely do their songs succumb to a single emotion, and their final album is no different. "At the Wedding" explores marital ambivalence and uncertainty at someone else's nuptials. Sometimes, the settings in which we're supposed to be the happiest — in this instance, celebrating someone else's love — are the hardest places to escape your own anxieties. "Weight of Desire" is a reconfirmation of commitment, but not in the face of an unspecified ending. It's here that we witness the closest Moore comes to pleading, reconciling an imminent change by looking inward.
Moore shares that she lost two pregnancies while making the album. "I didn't know if I wanted to be a mother, and then being pregnant, I was like, 'Oh, I think I do want this.' And then I lost it," she reveals. Though this wasn't at all a focal point of the album, it lent a heaviness to the atmosphere in which Moore and Riley created.
"It opened me up almost on a spiritual level to a sadness that I hadn't really felt before. The album's not about that, it's just what was going on in my life," Moore says. "I felt like I was going through a big transition as a woman and an artist and a human, and I was mourning some of it at first. I felt like some was a loss, but I also felt like some is just a change with no value attached to it. I don't think nature cares if it's spring, fall, summer, winter — it's just another season, and I've been trying to think of my own life in those terms."
"12 Blown Tires," the final lyrical track on the album and its climax allowed Moore to explore this sadness. "Even the line 'Press my desire to the margins / I've been face down in the garden' is how I kept processing that, of pushing some of my dreams for myself aside. I had this image of being face down in my own garden. I've been gardening this year, but I felt like it was a beautiful image. You've kind of given up. You're exhausted and you've collapsed, but you're in a garden and you're being held by nature. It's beautiful and comforting, even though it's a releasing and collapsing," offers Moore.
It's images like this that best serve Moore's lyrical ambitions. "I wanted there to be an emotional reality to each song, even more than writing hit songs — which, in the past, we really have tried to write very catchy songs. Even on Pollen, we were trying to see how hooky of a song we could write."
Without explicitly trying to, Moore and Riley arrive at memorable refrains anyway. I couldn't help but sing the outro of "At the Apartment" to myself over and over again, alone in my own apartment. The melody is groovy, anchored by Moore's breathy vocals as she sings in a lower register than usual: "Takes more to be your man / I'm the one who understands." Dedicated listeners are rewarded thoroughly; true to their aims, this may be Tennis's best album yet.
This spring and summer, Tennis will embark on their farewell tour. Some artists would take this opportunity to go bigger and bolder with their showmanship, but Moore would rather deliver a great show and truly feel the presence of her audience. "I really want to practice trying to be vulnerable and make myself available as a human person," Moore says. "I want to be able to be really present. I want to make eye contact. I want to listen. I want to try and be as connected to this great, vast other that reminds me a lot of gazing out into the ocean when I gaze out into a crowd."
That fateful evening in the Florida Keys, soundtracked by the Shirelles, took place two years after Moore and Riley first got together. Though their marriage has been the centre of Tennis, Moore recalls a more restful, exploratory time before they became partners in music as well as life: "I've loved our marriage at every point and I love our relationship. Before we made music together, there was a whole other way of relating to each other that we don't have anymore because there's no room, like physically no time in the day. I'm actually excited to have that back."