Publicity photo
Despite the weight of the second most awkward name in rock (after Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade), The Sea and Cake has lasted a decade in a fickle musical landscape that has felled many of their contemporaries. In May, they celebrated their 10-year anniversary with the release of
Everybody, a 10-track collection of light, relatively friendly rock that once again established multi-talented renaissance frontman Sam Prekop as one of the darlings of Chicago music scene.
The Hook: You guys all have a ton of outside interests-- side projects, comic books, and so on. How does that help or hurt the band?
Sam Prekop: I guess I'm compelled to do all those things. I went to art school and planned to make art, so I've felt like I'm an artist first, but the music has become my day job, so to speak. I feel like I'm fairly restless creatively, so if there's any down time, I pretty much come up with the next project. A lot of that started when [drummer] John McEntire started to get busy with Tortoise-- I found myself with somewhat imposed time off from The Sea and Cake. That's when I started making solo records, and I ended up concentrating on them for a longer period of time than I expected.
The Hook: Does everyone have to drop everything else when it's time to work on The Sea and Cake?
Sam Prekop: We're actually hoping and planning to make a new record much sooner than later. I just hope I can say focused and not get distracted; I've consciously tried not to agree to other art projects, because I think another four years would be problematic.
The Hook: Why?
Sam Prekop: Just to take advantage of a certain momentum. There's no faking the experience of playing live and existing as a band.
The Hook: John has been doing a lot of production work recently-- Spoon, the Fiery Furnaces, Kaki King, Antibalas, and even Bright Eyes. How has that affected the band?
Sam Prekop: Quite a bit. We consider our sound fairly self produced, but he has a very specific aesthetic that comes out. He didn't technically produce the last record, which was one way to change things up again, but I look forward to getting him back behind the board.
The Hook: What changed when you brought in Brian Paulsen as a producer? How did the band react to having an outside influence?
Sam Prekop: One thing we found useful was to have input from someone not in the band. He was really good at egging us on. [His style] and John's style don't diverge radically, but his aesthetic is more in line with capturing what it sounds like in real time, whereas John excels at post-production, manipulating after the fact, and coming up with ideas based on what else can happen in a processing sense. Brian is more about revealing accurately what happened.
The Hook: So how did that change your use of electronics?
Sam Prekop: We've always used electronics in some capacity, but The Fawn stands out because a lot of the songs were generated on keyboards. I felt like I had run out of ideas on guitar, and I was looking for some other way to generate material. But we've always used synthesizers in an overdubbed capacity, so there's quite a bit of electronic stuff in that way on this new record.
The Hook: The songs on it are very short. Why?
Sam Prekop: We just play them and get them to the point where they feel right. Of course, in the past we've been known to play songs for way too long-- on our first record, every song is two to three minutes longer than we think it ought to be. Over the years, we've become conscious of not overstaying our welcome. A lot of the songs are fairly linear pattern-based workouts. It's easy to go on too long when you're droning out. One of our strategies is to do that and then butt it up against a fairly baroque chord change.
The Hook: How important is Chicago in defining the band's identity?
Sam Prekop: I don't think about it too often, or I don't reflect on it. I think that it couldn't have happened anywhere else, but I don't know if it's so much because of the city-- it's who's here.
The Hook: Do you mean individuals like John and yourself, or the population in general, like the young people interested in music?
Sam Prekop: The city is big enough and people are interested enough in music in general to participate in what has to happen-- people have to go to shows; otherwise, bands can't really exist. On that level, the city is important for who it attracts here. Certain people choose to move to Chicago rather than New York or LA. It's a form of natural selection, maybe.
The Sea and Cake perform at the Satellite Ballroom on Thursday, September 27. Meg Baird and Ilad open.
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