Real Estate are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their breakout album, Days, with a cover of the song that inspired it: Television’s striking 1978 track “Days.”
With this cover, Real Estate are rattling the unbroken chain connecting melodic indie rock of the past and present. It’s a fittingly faithful cover, and would slot in nicely amongst the tuneful guitars of Days.
In a statement, bassist Alex Bleeker explained how Television’s song, their own album, and the new cover are related. He wrote,
“The shrewd, completist bootlegger will always remember 6/30/2011 as the day that we debuted the album Days live in its entirety at 285 Kent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Back then Domino Park, across the street, was still a dilapidated sugar warehouse, and our unreleased sophomore album didn’t yet have a name. Real heads (or as we like to call them, ‘agents’) might also recall that this show was a release party for the new 33 1/3 book recounting the history of Television’s Marquee Moon. Somewhere in the introduction to that volume author Bryan Waterman declared that even though the song ‘Days’ was on Television’s often overlooked second record, it provided a blueprint for all of the melodic guitar-based indie rock that would soon follow in its wake.
“We were of course huge fans of that tune, this was in fact our second record, and we saw ourselves humbly as the torchbearers of that tradition. So the story goes like this — we were on tour, sitting in our fire engine red Dodge Ram 2500 somewhere along the I-95 when someone in the band read that sentence aloud, and said, ‘why don’t we call the album Days?’ As I recall, nobody loved it, but more importantly, nobody hated it and it stuck. It’s true, this now decade-old album is named after this fantastic, underappreciated Television tune, which was a joy for us to cover and record for you after all these years.”
Related Video
Check out Real Estate’s cover of “Days” below. Earlier this year, the band shared the Half a Human EP and, last year they unveiled their fifth LP, The Main Thing. Songs from both projects can be heard on the band’s upcoming November tour, and tickets are available through Ticketmaster.
