CL Feature: Tennis, a retro pop outfit that opens for Dum Dum Girls this Sunday at Orpheum, Ybor City (with audio, video & complete Q&A with Patrick Riley included)

Tennis founding member Patrick Riley spent just over six years saving up for the sailboat that carried him and wife/vocalist-keyboardist Aliana Moore on the seven-month journey that’s sonically documented in the retro pop duo’s debut LP, Cape Dory.

“It’s not hard to raise a bunch of money if you forgo having a car, Internet, cell phone, etc.,” Riley told CL in a recent interview. While the idea of trading in the complexities of today’s modern world for the simplicity of life on a boat may seem crazy, it worked perfectly for the Denver-based twosome and resulted in an album full of shimmery guitar, dreamy vocals, and the kind of rolling rhythms that can only be inspired by long days and nights spent bobbing up and down on the surface of the sea.

What’s most interesting is that it all started right here in the Tampa Bay area.

Riley said he bought the boat at the Municipal Marina in St. Pete, where he and Moore spent a month fixing it up before sailing to the Keys. They didn’t organize the voyage with making music in mind – that is until they heard The Shirelles’ hit “Baby It’s You” playing on the house speakers at the Key Fisheries Bar in Marathon. At that moment, with the sunny harmonies and simplicity of the 1961 Bell Studios track in the background, the pair decided to form Tennis and use music to document the time they’d be spending on the boat.“We wanted a connection to our experiences that could not otherwise be expressed in a landlocked state like Denver,” said Riley. “We instantly became obsessed.”

That obsession spurred Cape Dory, one of 2011’s early frontrunners for album of the year, its tracklist boasting song titles like “Long Boat Pass,” “Marathon,” and “Bimini Bay.” The 30-minute LP supplies listeners with all of the romance they might expect from a 2,500-nautical-mile cruise that went as far south as the Bahamas, but reality and the sort of habits a person forms on a sailboat also get mentions on Cape Dory.

Riley admitted he spent a third of his time on the trip just studying charts and listening to weather reports, and despite dutifully preparing for the trek by reading every sailing book he could get his hands on, he and Moore couldn’t avoid a few dangerous situations along the way, like those described in “Marathon”: “Coconut Grove is a very small cove / separated from the sea / by a shifting shoal,” Moore sings. “We didn’t realize that we had arrived at high tide / barely made it out alive.”

This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2011.