Tonight I’m going to be at the Crocodile checking out the Denver duo Tennis — I’ve recently gotten into this band and their sunny vocal harmonies, as heard on beautiful tracks like “Marathon” and “South Carolina,” and last week I spoke with half of the band, Patrick Riley (the other half being his wife, Alaina Moore). They were in LA getting ready for the first night of their current tour, and Riley spoke to me about their famous sailing trip and their upcoming full-length, Cape Dory (which will be released on January 18 via Fat Possum).How did you and Alaina first meet?We met in philosophy class. Our philosophy class was extremely male-dominated. Alaina was one of five girls in the entire program. I started flirting with her, and we became really good friends. From there, she learned about how I was saving up money for the last four or five years for a sailboat, and how we [couldn’t] start a relationship because I [was] gonna be leaving in a few months. And then she was like, ‘oh, I wanna go.’ So she started saving up money as well.Where did you first come up with the idea that you wanted to have a sailboat?When I was about 12 years old, my dad got a bonus, and he took us out sailing in San Diego. It was easily one of my favorite experiences growing up, and since then I’ve had this fantasy that I would grow up, buy a sailboat and sail around the Caribbean.I grew up in Arizona. I think being landlocked your whole life, this fantasy just gets built up bigger and bigger, the idea that you’re so far away from everything beautiful.What about Alaina?She hadn’t even seen the ocean before. We thought it would be a little too much for her if we would just get on a boat and not have time to take in the sea, so the first couple days when we moved down to Florida to look for a boat, all we did was spend time at the beach. I was there the first time when she walked out to the ocean for the first time. It was pretty exciting.And it wasn’t your plan to be in a band and write music about the trip?No, not at all. We were both performance majors at one point or another in college, and we just kind of exhausted music. I’ve been playing in bands ever since middle school. I soon learned that it was really hard to make a living, and if I wanted to do something with the music industry, if I wanted to succeed with music, I had to do with a huge label, and I didn’t necessarily agree with what was going on with major labels at the time. So I just decided, I’m done, I’m gonna go study philosophy. Alaina was a vocal performance major for a while, and she had the exact same experience. What changed your mind?We were just doing it for personal reasons. We wanted a way to document our trip creatively. Originally, the idea first came when we had just sailed to Marathon, Florida, and we were absolutely exhausted from our brutal trip down there. The song “Marathon” is about our exact trip down there. Everything went wrong. Our engine broke, winds were in the wrong direction, there was fog, our GPS went out. It was one thing after another, and that was only our seventh day sailing. It was nerve-wracking. We were absolutely terrified, just balls of anxiety. So we finally got in, we went to the local watering hole and shared one beer because we were broke. We’re having a beer and this really flamboyant bartender was playing a bunch of old 50s music. It was really great stuff. We’d heard it all before, but it was in a new light, especially in relationship to our experiences with that sailing trip, it just felt like we should be listening to that music. It was the Shirelles song “Baby It’s You” that we were just like, ‘holy shit, this is it, I don’t even want to hear contemporary music anymore.’ That’s when we made the comment, ‘if we ever made music again, I want it to sound like this.’What about that type of music appealed to you?There’s a minimalism. Alaina and I are trying to take a firm stance right now on not overdubbing things beyond ability. The early 50s music was really sincere in that respect. Very very basic, cut and dry, get to the heart of the song without having to layer 10 guitar parts, a bass line, ten drum parts. Just really genuine. How do you think touring with your wife is going to be?When we were on the boat we never got tired of each other. I’m essentially just married to my best friend. As far as our relationship went on the sailboat, because we were in close quarters the whole time, our communication skills got really really good. Because you can’t hide from anything, everything has to be apparent, everything has to be direct. Back to the voyage. Did you see any sharks?Yeah, we saw dolphins every day, and we saw sharks about one a week. One of the coolest things we saw was, when we were in the Bahamas, we were anchored and every morning, sting rays would jump like four feet out of the water and bellyflop. We would wake up and hear this thing launch out of the water and look to the left and see a pancake flopping on the water. Did you ever get afraid you’d hit a storm?Yeah, that was our biggest fear. Everything else kind of fits in place, but you get so connected with the weather. The whole lifestyle of sailing is completely dependent on weather, and your relationship with weather gets more and more heightened everyday. You could wake up and smell the air and be like, ‘ok, it’s gonna rain today.’ We got to the point where we could anticipate squalls by how the wind was blowing.Are you planning another voyage?Absolutely, that’s the plan. Before our band took off, we were in the midst of saving up money for another trip. And then it kind of took off. But hopefully, it might be March, after SXSW, that we’ll try to go for at least a few months. And then maybe a more substantial one in 2012.My last question is about your album cover. Who is that girl?It’s Alaina, with a lot of makeup on. It’s based on a Lisa Hartman album cover called Hold On. Alaina’s been going through this phase where she’s been collecting albums based on the artwork alone. That happens to come from a period when almost every female singer was forced to do this really confrontational cover artwork. It feels so unwilling and forced. We really wanted to try to get that.