Tapes Rolling

On April 8, Tapes ’N Tapes releases Walk It Off, possibly the most anticipated local rock album since—let’s just go crazy with this—The Replacements’ Let It Be. It’s a huge artistic step forward; a band known for wicked sweet nothings finally has something to say about the creepy, post-just-about-everything world we live in. Fan sites are buzzing. Bona fide rock-star status awaits.

But frontman Josh Grier is still keeping his day job.

Grier has worked as a data analyst at a health benefits-administration company ever since graduating from Carleton. Clearly, he has a cool boss—a supervisor who’s OK with seeing an empty cubicle for months at a time, starting in the spring of 2006, when Tapes ’N Tapes was plucked from CD-release-party-at-the-Turf Club obscurity on the strength of their first full-length album, The Loon, which garnered a gushing review on the national indie kingmaking dot-com Pitchfork, propelling T’NT to a deal with XL Recordings, pictures in Rolling Stone, an appearance on Letterman, and tours of the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The Replacements, dude? Really? I know, comparisons to The Replacements amount to blasphemy in Minnesota, but there really is no local indie rock model for Tapes ’N Tapes’ success. Think about it: The Loon has only moved about 50,000 copies in the United States so far, with a lot of those sold out of the back of the band’s own van. Those modest sales, along with a successful if grueling tour for The Loon and, yes, their day jobs, have earned Grier and his bandmates enough money to make the car and house payments. But in this day and age, with the Internet’s pitiless appetite for the new, a band can go through a hyper-accelerated Behind the Music cycle of rise/backlash/backlash-to-the-backlash long before selling its first gold record.

A case in point: Those 50,000 records have spawned almost as many snarky, hand-wringing blog postings questioning how good The Loon’s follow-up could possibly be. When “Hang Them All,” the first single on Walk It Off, was leaked to the Web back in February, Vulture, New York mag’s entertainment and culture blog, was one of the first to weigh in with a snap judgment. Their headline? “Tapes ’N Tapes Comeback Is Impressively Executed.”

Yes, releasing a second album is now considered a comeback.

Can you see why Grier kept that day job?