The Rentals were lost, but now they are found. My biggest fear is that people have moved on. Matt Sharp decided to hole himself away in a small town in Tennessee to record a slow-churning folky country record a few years ago and the band that should have been king – which inspired everyone from HelloGoodbye to Motion City Soundtrack to Volcano! I’m Still Excited! To Au Revoir Simone and countless others – was locked away in the boondocks of the former Weezer bassist’s care center. He let the dust collect and absence makes the music fan forget. It’s not the other way around. The Rentals were truly original at the time of their inception. No one had heard of Moog synthesizers in years and suddenly they were everywhere, floundering away in forgottensville no more. The Cars would take on a newfound relevancy. Ozma and the Teen Heroes would come onto a scene nurtured by what Matt Sharp created with an obsession for collecting synthesizers in Japan and wherever else the Weezer tour stops took him. His main band was, for a lot of high schoolers, who graduated in the early 90s, the quintessential band. “The Sweater Song” and all the puppy dogs running through the video, the silly faces that Sharp and drummer Patrick Wilson made in every video, the oddity that was Rivers Cuomo, the songs that still live as the smelling salts to those days of co-ed bonfires, homecoming dances and nervously finding your way to the doors of what would be adulthood are still meaningful. When we heard – almost instantaneously upon putting in the invitation and request for this session – that the band was way into the idea and that they were all Daytrotter fans, it was a proud day. My friends and I drove in the nastiest ice storm we’d ever seen to see Weezer play for the first time in Minneapolis, on the Pinkerton tour at the First Avenue Club. As luck had it, we booked our rooms at the same downtown Holiday Inn as the band and when we went down to pick up a pizza, they walked into the lobby. Wilson commented on the “choo-choo trains” on my bootlegged, homemade tee-shirt and we lived off those memories for years. The Rentals were an extension of those days as well as Sharp gave us the first batch of quirky love songs that helped us make what little sense we could of the ice queens and the girls that wouldn’t give us the time. He made up the word “machino” and how were we to know who Gary Numan was before he laid it on us? So, to have Sharp in our studio with the bus of synths, the seven vocalists and there he is getting bare-chested because of the hot summer afternoon turning the live room steamy, it was surreal.

First song
Last Romantic Day (The Rentals) [4.01MB] [3119 downloads]


– original version appears on The Last Little Life
I think this was the very first song that led me to believe that going down the path to make a new Rentals record was the right thing to do. It was very much a transitional song. I was just working on a large group of songs. I do everything on a handheld recorder. If they aren’t working, I don’t get too far into arranging things. If it sounds good on my handheld recorder, I keep going. What I’d done is I’d made CDs for 10 or 20 of my friends, who were either not musicians at all or songwriters themselves. I just asked them to tell me, “What sticks with you?” Sara from Tegan and Sara got one of those CDs and this was the one song where she told me, “Well, it sounds like you’re going to make another Rentals record.”

Second song
A Little Bit of You in Everything (The Rentals) [3.35MB] [3108 downloads]


– original version appears in The Last Little Life
It’s the most recent song we have. I think it probably speaks most to what we are now. It’s the most recent and it has the least traditional structure. It’s the one I’m most proud of lyrically. I took another sabbatical last summer. I went back to Barcelona. I just decided to spend some extra time there after our tour ended there. Every day that I was there, there was a real rhythm to the day. It helped me reconnect with how much your environment can help you write. I just wrote all day long. Every day was me going to a cafe and sitting outside writing, then walking to another cafe on the other side of town and sitting outside writing some more. It was a whole lot of walking and writing in cafes.

Third song
Sweetness and Tenderness (The Rentals) [6.20MB] [2972 downloads]


– original version appears on The Return of the Rentals as well as on The Last Little Life
This song absolutely resonates with me out of all the old songs. Before we actually started doing Rentals again, it gave me some amount of anxiety. I didn’t want to do anything if it didn’t start from an honest place. I guess this song felt the most organic to the group. We realized that we were liberated from having to recreate anything we’d done in the past. It just felt like being home. It didn’t feel like we were putting anybody on. That tour last summer has such a special memory for me. It’s why we decided to re-record it. I wanted to have something to remember from that tour.

Fourth song
Life Without a Brain (The Rentals) [3.24MB] [2946 downloads]


– original version appears on The Last Little Life
In many ways, this song was part of the same thing that “Last Romantic Thing” was a part of. My feelings about writing songs wasn’t concise at the time. I was more thinking to take as much time as you need to get where you were going. Everything was a little more patient. I worked with Rivers for a little while during this time and I was working with Tegan and Sara too. I was interested in trying to say what I wanted to say in a more concise way. I think Tegan and Sara rival The Beatles for the density of an idea in two minutes or less. I’d heard their song “Not Tonight” and it was basically how our friendship started. I had absolute envy of them for that song. I listened to that song so many times.