Photo by D. Wade

A lot can happen in ten years. Look at some of the earliest Three Stars subjects: most of them have moved, re-emerged under new monikers ,or left music behind entirely. As D.C.’s musical landscape has evolved, jangly rock trio The Jet Age has a maintained a steady output, seemingly immune to the effects of time and personal life arcs.

To be fair, the members of The Jet Age have been active in D.C. music since the mid-’90s. Prior to forming The Jet Age, singer/guitarist Eric Tischler and bassist Greg Bennett had spent nine years together in local indie pop act The Hurricane Lamps; although there’s a bit more gravity and grit in Tischler’s Jet Age riffs, the songs are still upbeat enough to satiate fans of the early ’90s Teen Beat catalog. This is especially apparent in “I Wrote You This Song,” which will appear on their sixth album, Destroy. Rebuild out on August 28.

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of songs on this album that refer to the omnipresent destruction, violence, and general awfulness in the country over the past 12 months, but this straightforward tune is definitely on the “Rebuild” end of the spectrum. Tischler’s vocals are mixed highly over the riffs that swing melodically during the verses and crunch mightily over Pete Nuwayser’s fast drum fills on the chorus so that the love song won’t be buried.

You can listen to “I Wrote You This Song” below. We also talked to Tischler about getting back to The Jet Age’s essence on Destroy. Rebuild and the fateful Black Cat show that inspired the song.

What was going through your head when you were writing “I Wrote You This Song”?

No one calls the Black Cat “the BC” but it fit the lyrics and it sounded good. …A lot of the record is about ideas and told stories. This one is a little more heart on the sleeve. That one is about me and my wife and our family. The Black Cat is where I met my wife. That’s why that’s in there. I guess it comes out as a non-sequitur. If you haven’t seen the lyrics, it may not make any sense.

At which show did you meet her?

I met her at a Superchunk show in ’97. The Softies were opening. They are, as their name implies, very soft. And this is at the height of Superchunk’s fame. They’d been on Beavis and Butthead and the audience was kind of booing The Softies. I like The Softies and I was trying to shout out words of encouragement and this woman in front of me asked me to call out a song request for her. That woman was my wife and I kept running into her at shows and eventually she succumbs to my apparently meager charms which took many months.

It’s a very straightforward title as well.

Yeah. It is. The whole record is about feeling overwhelmed by the country and the world we live in right now. So, that song was an affirmation that “hey, we still have this.” This family. That’s wonderful even though everything around us is scary and shitty.

Was there anything particular? It seems like you just described the past twelve months.

Exactly. Pick your poison. From the midterm elections on, it’s just been one terrifying thing after another. Then you get one ray of sunshine like the Supreme Court ruling for gay marriage and then all of a sudden you’ve got Donald Trump at the top of the poll. His polls rise after he says a bunch of racist bullshit. You can’t rest on your laurels.

What is the dynamic of how often you guys meet up and play?

We’re pretty good about doing it weekly. We’ll have lapses if I’m not writing a lot and if we’re not touring a record or making a record. But it seems like we’re always making a record or touring a record.

Sometimes after a band has been around for awhile, things change.

I think we like playing together so much. One of the reasons I wanted the record to just be about us and not about my ideas for a song that these two guys helped me with, which sort of felt like that’s how we were going.

How long has it been since The Jet Age has released an album? It seems like it’s been a couple of years.

Well, we released one last year, but we kind of punted on it. I wrote it as an exercise, almost. I had all these kinds of songs that I wanted to write. I felt like it was weird. I wanted to make a record where every song was a different style and get it out of my system. So, that’s what we did, but what happened was with the shoegazer song Adam Franklin from Swervedriver and Mark [Gardener] from Ride added vocals and once they did that, it felt stupid to not release it. But we didn’t tour it and I kind of thought Adam and Mark would just get the press going but it didn’t work out that way and I didn’t push the press so we kind of just threw it out there.

That’s probably why it seems like we haven’t done a record in awhile because that one didn’t get the usual push. I think it’s so hard to be noticed or heard these days, which is why Big Hassle [their promotion company] is doing this. I just kind of threw my hands up and said “You know what—see what you can do.” Because even a piddly release is hard to get out there. It’s hard to hand deliver stuff, it seems.

You’ve been around long enough to have made friends with people like Swervedriver and Ride and usually when I see The Wedding Present coming through the area, you’re the opener.

Yup. I tell you, D.C. is our worst city by far. We do better in any other market.

That has to be frustrating.

Super frustrating. It’s like, “I’m really itching to play a good rock show. How much are tickets to Seattle?”

In regards to the new album, it seems like you went for lo-fi production. Was that intentional?

No. When I first started playing with The Hurricane Lamps, I had just taught myself how to play guitar and as I inevitably got better and better, I started expanding my range. Like, there are funk songs in The Jet Age and alt-country stuff mixed in as well. Because it got to this point where it was distracting from whatever my “voice” is.

So, having done the last record which is called Jukebox Memoir with all the different styles, on this record, I really wanted to focus on what does The Jet Age do. What makes us, us. I don’t think of it as being raw but I really wanted the songs to breathe and the performances to breathe. So it was important to me that there be a lot of space in the songs and it not be super produced. Not that the other stuff is super produced, but I didn’t want to gild the lily too much. So hopefully, it breathes and it’s spacious and it’s simple, but hopefully effective.

I will say though, we almost finished the record and then Swervedriver came to town. So, I went to see them, of course. And the record came out around the same time and Adam had so many good harmonies on that record that I went back and threw down a bunch of harmonies which I hadn’t planned on doing. I was so inspired. But that was my only real concession to production.

Have these friendships with bands that have been around for awhile—has that come from constant touring?

Yeah. I think one of the reasons I’m even in a band is for all the social elements of it. I’ve made so many good friends, many of whom you probably don’t know their work, although it is amazing. Some you do, obviously. I think, too, The Hurricane Lamps came up at a good time because it was sort of that initial crop of indie pop that was big in the early ‘90s [but] slowed down or faded out so it was up to us and Metropolitan to carry that banner. So we had a lot of opportunities locally.

Then, the press at that time was such so that I was able to communicate pretty easily, so we got a lot of great coverage at a time when it wasn’t as obvious how to get [it]. So the Hurricane Lamps got a pretty good profile, some of which have carried over to The Jet Age and some of which haven’t. The Jet Age have had a lot of great things, too. We got to play with The Constantines at the Troubadour in LA. That’s very rock ‘n’ roll. And I didn’t get to tour the UK until The Jet Age, but The Hurricane Lamps definitely helped build the bridge.

Destroy. Rebuild is out on August 28. They play a record release show at Villian & Saint in Bethesda on September 12th.