“On the first two albums, we were really put in a position to embrace the revolving door aspect of what we were doing by default,” says Matt Sharp of the original incarnation of The Rentals. “Most of the people who were involved with the first two records were invested in another project that was their livelihood.”
It’s this design that has always defined the band. The Rentals were born as a side project of Sharp’s, then the bassist of the soon-to-be megastars Weezer, on hiatus during the recording of their first—and to this day biggest—record, the self-titled debut, which will forever be known as The Blue Album.
With downtime in New York City after the recording of that masterpiece, Sharp put pen to paper, and hand to synth, for the humbling beginnings of another: Return of the Rentals. “We were not hands-on with the mixing, so we had a lot of time where we were holed up in New York, so I started writing a lot of those songs there,” Sharp says. “When we finished The Blue Album, we had a really long delay between completing the album and actually being able to go out and tour; it was somewhere between six and nine months. And in that time, I kept writing songs and recorded most of the first album.”
Return proved to be something of a success in its own right, spawning the single, “Friends of P,” and tours with Blur, Garbage and a handful of stadium dates supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sharp made it clear, however, that the side project was just that, following Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo into the studio for the band’s true masterpiece, Pinkerton, only to be unceremoniously dismissed following the support tour for that record.
“I was basically told that, ‘We’re not going to continue to do this,’” confesses Sharp, softly, with nary a hint of malice in his voice. “It was specific toward me. Rivers said, more or less, ‘This isn’t going to continue with you.’ I don’t hold any ill feelings towards that. I also didn’t have any fight left in me to stay with them at the time. I was sort of out of gas at that point.”
Even without a full-time gig, Sharp’s second record with The Rentals, Seven More Minutes, embraced the revolving door aspect of the band even more fully than the first time around, with members of Blur, Elastica and Ash all popping up throughout. “We just tried to open that door as wide as we could, and whoever was within stone’s throw became involved in the group in some way; if you happened to be walking by the studio, or in the studio next door.”
Now freshly back from a Japanese stadium support show with the band’s new lineup, the first since the DOA tour for that second record, The Rentals have something they’ve never been able to claim before: a sense of permanency.
“With the current incarnation, the thing that intrigues me is doing it in a way that is central to the lives of everyone that is involved with it, and we think about doing things in a way that are essential to the big picture and hopefully years down the road together.”
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