The Sea and Cake rolls with the changes
Group adjusts to recording, tour sans bassist
Sam Prekop was getting so much enjoyment out of making a solo album built on analog synthesizers a few years ago that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around the idea of making another guitar-based album with the band he co-founded 24 years ago, the Sea and Cake.
“Once I got into this modular-synth mindset, I couldn’t even fathom picking up a guitar again and singing,” he says of his 2015 solo release “The Republic.” “But it was helpful to have Archer (Prewitt) and John (McEntire) waiting around to do something. As soon as I forced myself to switch gears, it felt natural. I’m not saying it was easy. But I wanted to see what would happen once we got back together.”
With the band a three-piece in the wake of bassist Eric Claridge’s departure after its last album because of carpal tunnel syndrome, Prekop says he entered the recording sessions for what would become “Any Day” (Thrill Jockey) with a mix of anticipation and trepidation.
“With Archer and John, it’s not like we’d seen each other every day for the last 20 years, but we’re good friends,” Prekop says. “And we felt we had more things to do. Without Eric, it was a big change. We thought about bringing in somebody else (to play bass in the studio), but we also didn’t want to disrupt the continuity and legacy of working together, the mechanics of it. The idea of working with a super-streamlined version of the band was exciting to us.”
The Sea and Cake had operated as a four-piece since 1994, when it brought together veteran musicians from respected Chicago bands (Prekop and Claridge from Shrimp Boat, Prewitt from the Coctails, McEntire from Gastr Del Sol and Tortoise) and developed a distinctive sound: rippling indie rock with hints of bossa-nova cool and the interlocking guitars of West African juju music.
In recent years the pace of recordings slowed as the band members devoted time to their families and other projects. After the release of “Runner” in 2012, Claridge departed just as a tour was about to start.
Eleventh Dream Day and Tortoise bassist Doug McCombs replaced Claridge in the touring lineup on short notice, but the dynamic of the band had to be readjusted. Besides bringing an idiosyncratic feel for merging rhythm and melody in his playing, the bassist also was the band’s toughest in-house critic when it would be shaping Prekop’s tunes during the recording process. Not that everyone else was always in agreement.
“Eric was the skeptic in the band, but we can all be tough in different situations,” Prekop says. “I feel like I’m quite relentless in how things should be, and John as well without uttering as much. He gets things done without verbalizing. If he doesn’t like something, he just won’t do it, and we’ll figure it out later: ‘Oh, I guess John wasn’t that amused by that song or that part.’ Archer is the sunniest of the bunch, the most cheerleading optimist, and that is absolutely critical.”
A further complication cropped up when McEntire made good on a longtime wish to move his Soma studio to California (it’s set to open next month in Nevada City). The Sea and Cake had recorded each of its albums at Soma in Chicago and helped turn the studio into a magnet for indie and experimental bands. But amid the relocation it wasn’t available to the band for the “Any Day” sessions.
“John had been talking about moving to California for a long time, but when he said he was actually doing it, I was completely surprised and shocked,” Prekop says. McEntire engineered the session at another Chicago location, but his move to the West Coast (he’s also buying a house there) altered the mixing process.
“It was another thing we missed, because the payoff of making a record in my mind was to be able to mix it together and add touches, all the fun stuff,” Prekop says. “Because of logistics, we mixed it remotely, which is kind of crazy. It worked out well, but that made it a lot less fun. You’re working toward this goal and you’re not able to come together at the end.”
But the alone time gave Prekop an opportunity to refine his vocals and lyrics to a greater extent than ever before. His allusive wordplay takes on a greater transparency, which adds to the punch of songs such as “I Should Care.”
“It felt more pointed, I got better at what I’m trying to do,” Prekop says. “I noticed in rehearsals (for the band’s upcoming tour) there’s a lot more singing in these new songs, whereas I realize I hardly sing at all on the older songs. Part of it was me reacting to the basic tracks. They’re so lean and have so much open space, it created a lot of room for me to dig in. With that, I felt the words needed to be better. I feel like they’re weightier than previously, of more consequence. I feel in some ways the words are more expressively disappointed.”
When it’s suggested to the songwriter that perhaps he’s more comfortable with the idea of revealing more of himself in his songs, Prekop isn’t buying that entirely. And in the process, he offers a succinct explanation of why the Sea and Cake’s music continues to maintain such mystique within a pop song’s three- and four-minute parameters.
“It’s not in my nature to reveal everything, at least not lyrically,” he says. “I don’t want to overpower the other ideas and work that goes into making the song. I’m careful to not want to dominate everything with that — it would just obscure other qualities of the music that I value just as much. I’m in pursuit of real beauty, unheard things that could not or have not occurred in any other way. If I clobber a song with spilling the beans, that takes that idea away.”
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