In a sea of bands desperate to impress you at first note (never mind what you think of them by the last) The Sea & Cake is the music equivalent of your best friend since first grade: always awesome, always there to pick up just where you left off, offering you more than they are taking from this relationship. After releasing “Everybody” last year they (plaesently) surprised us with “Car Alarm” this fall (out now on Thrill Jockey) and as they are about to arrive to The Black Cat this Saturday, we sat down with Sam Prekop (guitar, vocals) to talk about all the stuff that makes us love this band A LOT

You guys aren’t known for being the most consistent when it comes to your recording and touring schedules. There was a four year break between 2003’s One Bedroom and last year’s Everybody, yet here you are with a new album. What dictates when the Sea and Cake reactivates after an album release cycle?

well the two longest breaks in our history occurred around my solo records, which always take up more time than i anticipate. there have been times where we would have been waiting for john to finish up some tortoise business and also archer’s solo stuff as well, but basically i sorta feel that it’s my call. just a matter of making the decision and hope that everyone else has the time and is willing. hasn’t been a problem yet.

Sam, you’ve released two solo albums to date. Is that something you’re interested in revisiting or is the band’s recent resurgence and prolific last couple of years something that makes you excited to keep
on with that for a while?

i’d love to do another solo record and have been thinking of doing one where it would be just archer and i on guitars , me singing. i long to know if i could pull off an entire record on such spartan terms. but also indeed i have been feeling quite excited by the new energy level of the sea and cake. and actually before i get to the duo record i’m sensing another sea and cake record sooner than later.

Some of your previous albums were pretty heavy on the electronic elements, especially “One Bedroom”, on which the drum parts seem to be almost entirely programmed. “Car Alarm” and “Everybody” seem to really shy away from this and it seems like the aesthetic of the albums are just
more stripped-down altogether. Why did you decide to excise that aspect after it becoming such a big part of your sound?

i think we felt it was time to try and document the sound of the band the real time interaction, i guess unadorned in a sense. however that was more the case with “everybody”, with car alarm i feel we were looser with any sort of before hand guide lines. in general i’d say we’ll always be interested in electronics i feel it’s one of our signatures really and i think we approach the tools in a similar way as with guitars, drums etc. but we pay attention to where  each album needs to go. some say more synths.

The new album definitely seems to contain some songs that might be considered hard-hitting by Sea and Cake standards. Do tracks like “Car Alarm” and “Aerial” represent an intentional shift towards a more driving sound that the band will explore further on further releases?

i think we were inspired by the live sound we had been getting at shows, we were just hoping to get some of that energy on record, i think we usually feel the songs get better as we play them live so we were just trying to look ahead and anticipate where we thought they might be after having played them a while, loud.

ou’ve released every single album of yours for the last 14 years on Thrill Jockey, which I’m assuming means you have (at least) a fairly good relationship with them. They also released both yours and Archer’s solo releases. Are they pretty understanding of your guys’ tendency to sort of go at your own pace, taking time off and getting involved with other projects? Would you ever calling another label home?

i feel very lucky that we came to be on thrill jockey when we did right at the beginning, basically we’re treated as artists with a career, meaning the commitment runs both ways, i’m quite certain had gotten involved with a major label something like that there’s really hardly any chance we’d still be around. so yes we basically are allowed to do what we need to do to keep making records.

Sam, you recently published a book of photography that came with a CD of instrumental companion music. What do you feel the inclusion of the album adds to the book and is the composition of these songs different than the ones you write for the band since they’re being inspired by something pre-existing?

i have to admit i had to be coaxed into putting a cd in with the book, at first i was pretty against it i just didn’t want to distract from the photo’s, once i gave in i found it sort of interesting but can’t really claim i composed the pieces with the book in mind entirely, i more curated stuff i had around and found a curious sonority between the images and music.

Musically, Chicago in the 90’s is known for many bands that came from there (you guys, Tortoise, multiple Kinsella projects) being very inspired by jazz. How do you account for that shared influence and how it turned the time and place into very much a scene?

i don’t think it was jazz exactly, i would say it was more “improvised” music, which at that time in chicago there was quite a bit of it around. often it fell under a jazz pretext but not exclusively, for me it was terribly exciting to almost play or use anything as a source for new sound it was all newly  legitimate somehow for rock bands to  improvise, experiment in general, it just seemed to be in the air really. it wasn’t conceptually based from my stand point it was just a reflection of what we were listening to, that simple i think.

By recording Car Alarm so quickly after the last album, was there a specific intention to the do something entirely different than what had come before or was it just to get back into the studio while you felt the band was on a roll? Do you consider in advance the way you want a record to sound or does it happen organically while you’re recording it?

we were hoping to capitalize on the band on a roll thing, disbanding and reforming i felt was fitting us in a certain  mold that i thought should be broken this time out, and yeah i thought it would probably produce different results. but really with each record it pretty much an in the moment affair, we’re not big on pre-conceptualizing all that much and rely on intuition and just listening carefully.

After being around for as long as you have, how do you find a way to not retread on what you’ve already done? Does that explain the hiatuses or is it something else?

yeah i think the hiatuses work in some respects, the time passing in general helps really i mean we’ve changed as people of course and as we’re hoping to accurately reflect our ideas, intent ,art, sound, sensibilities they’ve changed as we changed.

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