When Tennis announced they were embarking on their farewell tour after 15 years and seven albums, a longtime friend of the band reached out to them with a digital time capsule. Charlotte Zoller, who met the duo at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound in 2011 and accompanied them on tour the following year, was sitting on a trove of pictures she’d taken of the married indie-pop duo from February to March of 2012.
Beautifully framed, unrehearsed, slice-of-life, these photos show the band’s Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley on the cusp of catapulting their career to the next level, doing everything from playing The Tonight Show (back when Jay Leno was host) to catching Zs on a park bench. “We didn’t even notice she was taking any of these photos,” Moore tells Billboard over Zoom, sitting next Riley. “She’s very subtle.” The pics, which Tennis and Zoller are exclusively sharing with Billboard, offer an unvarnished look at what life was like for a smaller band back in 2012: a period when the indie music boom hadn’t fully cooled, music blogs reigned supreme, and streaming existed but hadn’t become ubiquitous.
Since then, breaking through – and keeping afloat – has become trickier for most musicians, especially mid-sized and smaller artists, which is part of the reason Tennis is hanging up its rackets, at least for now.
“I don’t want to complain about the music industry, because you could do that ad nauseam, but that is part of the equation here,” Riley says matter-of-factly, without bitterness. “Every year, our responsibilities grow and Spotify or whatever pays us less. There are so many things you can point to – costs on the road grow, too. Our workload increases and our payout decreases.”
A shifting music industry is only part of what’s motivating them to move on, however. As Tennis talks about the end of this chapter, there’s a palpable sense of accomplishment and pride in what they’ve done, too.
“More than anything, we felt very creatively fulfilled. We took Tennis as far as we could take it within the constraints of this project,” says Moore. “There’s only so far we could go as a married duo that makes indie surf pop, you know? Everything we do is self-produced. We don’t write with anyone else. We operate inside a vacuum. I think doing that for 15 years is as much as two people can create. We felt like it was fully realized.”
The band – which began the year Moore and Riley married – has defined not only their adult life, but their marriage; naturally, they’re also looking forward to putting “a bit more of a boundary between the two.” Post-Tennis, Moore is working on a memoir, with hopes of writing fiction after that. For his part, Riley aims to do “something that doesn’t deal with intellectual property” for a spell. “Clear the old noggin,” they laugh.
As Tennis embarks upon the second leg of its farewell tour (the new leg kicked off Aug. 18 in San Diego and runs through Sept. 4 in North America before hopping to London on Oct. 23), the band’s Moore and Riley take us on a trip through the past.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “At this point, we’re like 23 — coolness was the only thing we cared about, any of us, desperately,” shares Moore. “There were several in our ranks who were like, ‘We can’t play Jay Leno. It’s not cool.’ Our hired band almost didn’t play the show. It was quite divisive. I actually had a conversation with our publicist where I was like, ‘Playing Leno will ruin our career. We can’t do it. It’s the wrong look.’ And she was like, ‘Are you crazy? You are insane. Why are these words coming out of your mouth?’ She talked sense into us.” (Pictured above: Patrick and Alaina backstage before their performance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 21, 2012 in Burbank, CA.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Looking back, Moore is grateful for the publicist’s pushback. “We got treated like royalty playing Leno. Everyone in the crew was just making sure we had what we wanted, making sure we sounded the way we wanted to sound. And what made it more special is [he] retired [in 2014], so that was the last chance we would have had to play a show that was a tentpole of our childhood. It was culturally significant in a way that doesn’t really exist anymore.” (Pictured above: Alaina and stylist explore wardrobe options for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in a hotel room on March 20, 2012 in Los Angeles, CA.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Pictured above: Alaina and Patrick in their dressing room backstage at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 21, 2012 in Burbank, CA.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Pictured above: Rehearsing “Origins” at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 21, 2012 in Burbank, CA.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Pictured above: Patrick and Alaina in hair and makeup before performing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 21, 2012 in Burbank, CA.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “Our first-ever feature in Nylon, we were really excited – it was a full-page photo spread,” recalls Moore. “Then we found out there was a very specific color palette, a weird pastel, Easter Sunday color palette.” (Pictured above: Alaina at a NYLON Magazine photoshoot on February 26, 2012 in Chicago, IL.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Mid-shoot, the band learned the photoshoot was actually an advertorial, which had dictated the color palette. “We pulled the plug halfway through the photoshoot. It never ended up in the magazine.” (Pictured above: Alaina receives hair and wardrobe adjustments at a NYLON Magazine photoshoot on February 26, 2012 in Chicago, IL.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “We’ve played many, many shows [in Madison],” says Moore. “One of the promoters there was historically supportive to us, even letting us crash at his house once in-between dates.” (Pictured above: Patrick, Alaina, Nathan, and James Barone backstage before their performance at High Noon Saloon on February 24, 2012 in Madison, WI.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Riley says of their appearance on The Current, a taste-making Minnesota radio station. “We didn’t know the significance of half of our press appearances,” adds Moore. “It was actually great, because I wasn’t nervous for anything we ever did except late night, because I knew what that was.” (Pictured above: Patrick, James, and Nathan load out after their performance on The Current at Minnesota Public Radio on February 23, 2012 in St. Paul, MN.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Patrick performs at SiriusXM in Rockefeller Center on March 5, 2012 in New York, NY.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “That was the first time we were in hotels,” Moore says of the tour. “Driving in our van, sleeping in hotels, eating gas station food. Barely eating.” “The calorie intake was very interesting,” Riley smirks. “We found out that a breakfast bagel was the most calorie for our dollar.” (Pictured above: Alaina on a day off on March 8, 2012 in Baltimore, MD.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “The tangibility of something like that was not lost on us,” says Riley of walking into a record store and seeing their album on display. “It was mind-blowing.” (Pictured above: Alaina and James at Strictly Discs on February 25, 2012 in Madison, WI.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “I look back and I see like kids with no idea what they’re getting into, trying to figure out how to make it work, trying to rise to the occasion,” says Moore. “We understood that something incredible was happening to us and that it was a once in a lifetime chance, and we were just doing our best to not squander it. And it was crazy. There was so much pressure, but there was so much elation. We really were thankful.” (Pictured above: Alaina organizing merch in their kitchen on February 21, 2012 in Denver, CO.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “It was my childhood dream to be in a band and be a successful musician, and in a roundabout way, I got there,” says Riley. (Pictured above: Patrick walking into Lincoln Hall before their show on February 26, 2012 in Chicago, IL.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “We still, literally right now, are in a van,” says Riley. “We’ve never been in the bus. We’ve never flown anywhere. If we do, it’s out of desperation. That’s the sad news of being in an indie band.” (Pictured above: Patrick pumping gas in Upstate NY en route to Boston on March 1, 2012.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “I can describe this entire tour as being totally naïve and then stunned,” says Moore. (Pictured above: Alaina waiting to go onstage at Brighton Music Hall on March 2, 2012 in Boston, MA.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “I remember being tired a lot — I mean, an eight-hour drive before a show,” says Riley. Adds Moore: “I remember us falling asleep anywhere.” (Pictured above: Patrick resting on a park bench on February 27, 2012 in Indianapolis, IN.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “I’m just grateful that we have this document, because it was such an intense time that my memory is really spotty,” says Moore. “I remember the highs and the lows,” adds Riley. “I don’t remember the normal days.”
Patrick, Alaina, and James in a hotel room on March 23, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “Once I couldn’t get any water for the show,” recalls Moore of SXSW. “They would only give me an open cup of water from the bar. And I was like, ‘This will spill and destroy our pedal board.’ I had to leave to buy a bottle of water, and then they wouldn’t give me entrance back in. They made me wait in the back of the line behind the VIP laminate holders who were coming in to see us play.” (Pictured above: Performing at a SXSW showcase on March 16, 2012 in Austin, TX.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “We were learning a lot,” recalls Riley. “We had no family in the music industry, no friends who had any success with music. We were coming from an island — the island of Denver,” he laughs. “It was us showing up with no idea of what was happening. It was a crash course of what it is to be a touring band and have a career in music.” (Pictured above: Signing copies of ‘Young & Old’ backstage at Union Transfer on March 6, 2012 in Philadelphia, PA.)
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Pictured aboce: Patrick and Alaina interviewed by John Norris during SXSW at the Hyatt Regency on March 15, 2012 in Austin, TX.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller Pictured above: Alaina and Patrick play soccer in a backyard in Texas ahead of their SXSW performances on March 12, 2012.
Image Credit: Charlotte Zoller “It was just this snapshot of adolescence on the cusp of adulthood. I know we were in our early twenties, but it felt like we were just growing up,” says Moore. (Pictured above: Rehearsing at a practice space on March 22, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV.)
