Photo courtesy of Tom MacWright

The comparison to Real Estate is an easy one to make when it comes to local trio Teen Mom. Singer/guitarist Chris Kelly‘s wistful tenor recalls that of Real Estate singer Martin Courtney, and the opening track from their debut EP shows an appreciation for relaxed pacing and surf rock guitar tone.

This isn’t to say that their only trick is ripping off the Underwater Peoples roster. Some of their songs, like today’s Song of the Day, “I Wanna Go Out” show off their affinity for the noisy guitar fuzz that can make for loud live shows. Also, the quick drum fills on “Always Happy” courtesy of Sean Dalby keep the song from relaxing too much and Kelly’s guitar even recalls some new wave dissonance and tinniness during “Say My Name.” However, the comparison to Real Estate stands in that they achieve the same impressive result: creating ennui-inducing pop songs that simultaneously bring on a sense of relaxation and a desire to look out the window of a moving vehicle and daydream.

In our conversation with Teen Mom (Dalby, Kelly and bassist Tom MacWright), they demystify Inner Ear, talk about their love of pop culture and disagree on whether Metallica deserves respect.

Find Them Online: http://www.teenmomdc.com

See Them Next: Tonight at DC9 with Ava Luna

How did you three meet each other?

Tom: We met in college.

Sean: We were freshman hallmates.

Where did you guys go to school?

Tom: William & Mary. Classic—a lot of kids go here after graduating. So we live with a lot of those people and one of those people knew Chris from high school. And so Chris crashed one of our parties.

Sean: Back in July 2010.

Chris: I think it was July 4th.

Sean: So basically, Tom and I are closer friends with each other than either of us are with Chris.

Chris: I told them specifically not to be mean to me!

Chris, you also went to William & Mary?

Chris: No. I went to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

How did you end up in Ireland?

Chris: I don’t know. It’s one of those things. You apply to places and you’re like, “Yeah, that looks pretty cool. I’ll try that.”

Sean: He lived in Ireland for four years and he never talks about it. This is the longest I’ve heard him talk about it.

Chris: I’m talking about it right now! You just never ask me any questions.

There’s sort of an inherent silliness to your band name, Teen Mom.

Tom: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

Sean: We hope so.

Well, it’s an MTV show. But the music that you have available on your bandcamp doesn’t seem silly at all, nor does the description of the sorts of songs that you write. Where does the silliness stop?

Tom: Chris? You named the band.

Chris: I don’t know. They’re kind of together. We’re not frivolous about music making and we’ve been playing music for a long time. But also, I guess we try not to take ourselves too seriously because that’s not very cool. And it’s just a funny name.

Well, it sounds like people find your Twitter account that way—because of the show.

Chris: Yeah. I’m constantly blocking people.

Tom: My sister has actually boycotted the band because she thinks it’s offensive that it’s called Teen Mom.

Have other people found it offensive?

Sean: Not that we know of.

Tom: Not really. She’s pretty sensitive. But the feeling that teen motherhood is something that we sponsor or trivialize or that kind of thing. But I actually feel like the show is pretty dramatic and pretty honest. So if anything, we’re making a very deep statement about how pop culture is a valid commentary on our everyday life.

Sean: There’s also supposed to be this ambiguity about it because it’s impossible to endorse that. No one could actually think that.

Tom: That would be pretty fucked up.

Chris: I also like television and before we were Teen Mom, I used to joke that we were called Seinfeld.

Sean: But we couldn’t do Seinfeld.

Chris: We never were Seinfeld. Yet.

Sean: That would’ve been too much.

I gather from your online presence that you do seem to be big fans of pop culture in general. Is that accurate?

Chris: Yeah.

Sean: Chris probably leads the way on that.

Tom: He likes the radio and TV.

Chris: It’s easier than reading Moby Dick. Let’s see what’s on Gawker today! It’s not difficult to stay literate with pop culture.

Sean: It’s also a lot of ammunition for comedy. There’s some pretty ridiculous stuff out there. Like the Twitter for Kim Kierke-Kardashian that I started following. It’s a mashup of Kim Kardashian tweets and Kierkegaard.

Chris: It’s really funny.

Sean: Our Twitter account is in the same vein except no philosophers.

Chris: We just retweet Miley Cyrus. It’s weird how the comedic accounts start up though. Remember the Brooklyn snake? There was a Twitter account for the Brooklyn snake that escaped. It was funny for a few days.

Sean: I think the silliness is supposed to be intertwined.

Tom: And band names have long since been non-descriptive. Like Final Fantasy.

Sean: Or Pavement.

Chris: Or that Tom Cruise band? What’s it called? Com Truise?

Sean: Yeah. And he’s…awful.

Tom: It’s sort of this weird Googleable/non-Googleable name. Nobody’s ever going to find the link for Teen Mom.

Sean: Girls is a similar band.

How long have you been playing music together? I know you crashed the party in 2010, Chris, but how long after that did music start to come together?

Tom: Chris and I started to jam almost immediately afterwards. Our first show was March 2011. But we played three months before that. Velvet Lounge was our first show. It was fun.

How does songwriting work with you guys?

Tom: Chris does it all.

Sean: Chris writes parts in his bedroom and sometimes sends us demos that are just him on the guitar with a vocal line over it. That’s happened some of the time but that’s not standard. It’s about 50/50. Then, we come together and Tom and I live together in a house up in Columbia Heights. We have a basement there and that’s our practice space. Our neighbors have been really nice over the years. Chris comes over and either we’ve heard it or he plays a guitar part for us and Tom and I write our respective parts to it. And it takes awhile —usually a few times playing it live—to work out the song to its completion. But I really enjoy the songwriting process. We all contribute.

Chris: Yeah, I learned not to dictate. Because Tom writes bass lines that I could never do. Sean’s a much better drummer than I am. It doesn’t make any sense to have a really strict, limiting view of the song.

Tom: As far as bands go, it’s a partial dictatorship because he writes all the songs but not all the parts of all the songs. So, we’ve had a few attempts at writing a collaborative song or someone else writes a song, but Chris is the personality of the core of the songs that I think works pretty well.

Sean: It gives a consistent thought to everything and it’s fun working out songs, too. It’s still very much a creative outlet for me.

Tom: Sometimes we’ll mess around with structure a little bit, too. Like, it’s not like there’s a set structure necessarily for the songs. Like we messed around with “You and Me” a bit. And “I Want To Go Out.” Those we altered the structure of a little bit.

Chris: When we started making the record, it was just us. We didn’t have any label support or anything. So, initially we just put out one song, “You and Me.”

Sean: We recorded this EP in August of 2011. So, the digital version was finished in February.

Chris: It was just so long. We did it with Eamonn (Aiken) over in The Bastille. And he was getting married and then he was in the hospital. It was just all these delays so a lot of time passed. So we got it mixed by Eamonn and mastered by TJ (Lipple). Then we just got tired and we put out one song.

Tom: We sold the whole EP for a little while and we made nearly $100. But then Matt at Analog Edition found us and we decided to take it down and do a proper release through a label.

Sean: He put up a bunch of money to do the vinyl for it.

Where is Analog Edition based out of?

Sean: D.C.

Chris: Well, he was here and then he moved to Portland. He put out a couple of records. One was from a band from LA. One was from Portland. Land and Peoples from Baltimore. And he moved back to D.C. and he wanted to put out a local band. I guess he just found us at an opportune moment. It’s super difficult to figure out who to go to in order to press a vinyl record—who’s good, who’s bad, will it sound like shit—and he’s like, “Oh, I’ve done it before,” and that’s pretty much made everything a lot easier for us.

Tom: So, I think we have 350 in total coming out.

Chris: So, we’ve got some copies. They sound pretty cool.

Sean: And we just got in the studio a few weeks ago doing new jams.

Chris: This time we got to record in the big studio at Inner Ear instead of the little one, which was a little weird. It’s also weird, because this is the punk studio and there’s all these stuffed animals on the wall.

Sean: It’s a great room.

Chris: It’s like a preschool center. There are big alligators on the wall and colors everywhere.

Sean: There are crates filled with—well, instruments now—but it looks like they were filled with toys.

Chris: It’s pretty unlike how you’d imagine it to be.

Chris, knowing that you do a lot of the song construction, do the three of you have similar taste in music that you listen to?

Chris: Yeah.

Tom: More or less. There’s a lot of crossover. The disagreements are…

Chris: Metallica.

Tom: I do not like Metallica. Chris loves Metallica.

What era of Metallica?

Tom: All eras.

Chris: Not all eras!

Do you like St. Anger?

Chris: No! Definitely not. I got into Master of Puppets my junior/senior year of college and then the one after that and Ride the Lightning. They’re so good!

Tom: We don’t share this respect.

Chris: I haven’t listened to Metallica in awhile, though.

Sean: There’s a lot of overlap of liking bands, but some of us like bands more than others.

Metallica surprises me a little bit. What are some surprising interests from the two of you?

Tom: Battles. And all of the weirder Battles around there.

Sean: Joanna Newsom, I guess. I like a lot of rap music. That’s pretty different.

I’d be more surprised if you didn’t like rap music.

Chris: We like a lot of electronic music. Tom likes folk and math rock stuff. Tom is a little different.

Tom: With fleeting interest in bluegrass.

Sean: I guess I really like jazz. I really like jazz drummers like Art Blakey. It’s a style of drumming that I’ve taken lessons in a little bit but not extensively.