Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

Photo by Brian Tamborello

​Every kid who straps on an electric guitar and stands in front of his (or her) bedroom mirror before he or she can barely play an open chord is dreaming of universal acclaim. But when Sunny Day Real Estate's 1994 debut album Diary suddenly made them college rock darlings and found them branded with tags like the next Nirvana (an easy enough association since they were also from Seattle, even if they had little in common with grunge), the young band cracked and broke under the strain, with label Sub Pop barely managing to release a second album variously called LP2 or Pink or just Sunny Day Real Estate--it was submitted to the label without a title or artwork by the rapidly fracturing band. Members departed for the Foo Fighters (bassist Nate Mendel remains with them to this day) and solo careers before they returned in 1998 with How It Feels to Be Something On and 2000's The Rising Tide. Without Mendel, though, it wasn't the same band and soon they had broken up again.

But despite this turning away from the spotlight and their relatively short time together, Sunny Day Real Estate has become one of those touchstone bands that everyone from hipster indie kids to arena-ready emo rockers draw inspiration from. They're a band (like At the Drive-In or Neutral Milk Hotel) you either saw or didn't, a band too fiery and brilliant to last long. But if you missed them then, you're getting a second chance now because Sub Pop's decision to remaster and reissue both Diary and LP2 coincides with the original lineup's decision to reunite on a tour that will find them playing First Avenue here in Minneapolis tonight, September 23.

Guitarist Dan Hoerner was kind enough to answer a few of our fanboy questions.

What are you up to? Still in Seattle right now?

Yup, just about to head over to rehearsals in a little bit after we're done chatting.

Is it just going to be the four of you or do you have extra musicians?

We don't need any extra musicians when you've got Nate [Mendel, bassist] in the band [laughs]. You can just go and do what you need to do. He's just awesome. It's just the four of us, it's the original sound, and it's rocking--it's pretty huge.

So has it been easy to get back into playing the old stuff?

Yeah, surprisingly, it's like this language you picked up when you were five years old and you sort of forgot it but you can talk the whole language again as soon as somebody starts speaking it to you. I don't know exactly how to put it, but it's like riding a bike. It takes a little bit to shake the dust off and get the rust out of some of the creaky parts, but it's sounding pretty epic right now.

Did you have any of those moments going over stuff where you just could not remember how to play it?

Oh my god, yes. I'm terrible. I can have just recorded something and the next day I'll be like, "What the fuck?! What was I just playing?!" So I'm probably the weakest link in terms of remembering things. William [Goldsmith, drummer], on the other hand, is like a freak of nature. He doesn't even rehearse. We'll say, "Learn everything from LP2." And we'll all have spent a month learning every song and William will sit down and we'll say, "Did you even listen to the record?" No, and he'll play it perfectly with every single beat and every single grace note and every pause all the way through without messing up one time. He's like a robot.

So what got you guys talking seriously about doing this reunion? What was the turning point?

I think the turning point was Nate. He had the opening in his schedule--Nate's very much involved with the Foo Fighters--and it was the perfect time for everybody and Nate was kind of the impetus. I had no inkling, no idea that it was even a possibility. If you had asked me even one day before Nate called me if I expected Nate to call me within the next five years, I would have laughed. So when he gave me the shout, what am I going to say? I'm busy? No: I was like, "YES! Tell me when!" It was Nate. Ultimately, everybody had the time and everybody was in the right place to do it, and to get the push from Nate and to know that Nate's got a whole team of people he works with now that are fantastic, so just all the stars aligned in the right way.

What kind of material from the records are you doing? Sub Pop is reissuing the first two records (Diary and LP2); are you mostly focusing on those?

Yeah, given that it's the four original guys, obviously we're going to do pretty much everything from Diary and LP2, minus a couple of clunkers that just don't work anymore, and then we're actually going to take a pretty sizable chunk from How It Feels and The Rising Tide as well. It's a monster list. When we rehearse, we look at the list and go, "My god: that's like 35 songs." So we're going to try and put together a really long set, which Sunny Day has kind of been famous for playing eight songs and then a two-song encore and that's just not going to fly for this. We would be murdered [laughs]. So we're going to try and put together a 25-song setlist and really try to give what everyone's going to want.