RC: So when you did get into the studio for that long, was it hard to put together? I know you guys are scattered all over the country when you're not touring.
SL: Well, I've been doing this other band for the last four or five years called Solea, and it's the same thing. The singer of that band lives in Brooklyn, and in this band Sean lives in Brooklyn (he's the other guitar player), and the bass player lives in Minneapolis, I live in Los Angeles and the singer and the drummer live in San Francisco, so it is kind of logistical nightmare getting together if you want to practice or play a show, but it's what I'm used to.
Going back to our record Clumsy, which was way back in '94, right before we made that record was the last time I was in a band that we all lived in the same city. I was also in a band called Knapsack for a while, and we lived about 90 miles apart, so I don't really know what it's like to be in a band where everyone lives in the same city and we practice every Wednesday or whatever. It's pretty much all that I'm used to.
For years and years, everything I've ever done musically usually had a long drive or plane tickets involved. It's just par for the course for me.
RC: When you guys did finally get back to the studio, did it just come back naturally, or did it take a little work to get back in the groove?
SL: Well, we practiced a ton. We first had the idea to do another record and started practicing last September, so like an entire year ago. And we got together for week-long stints six or seven times before we recorded. We wrote about 18 songs in that time, and threw away a lot of them, so working together and being a band together was not weird or anything but the dynamic in the band is considerably different now, because Sean, since 1997 he was the bass player and when we decided to do this record he switched to guitar. And he's a guy that has a completely different aesthetic than I do and we're sort of a band that's kind of split.
Like, he lives in Brooklyn, and I don't know if you've ever spent any time in Brooklyn, but there's a total hipster quotient there. In a lot of ways it's the antithesis of what Samiam has always been about. Samiam has always been very uncool. Nobody has ever accused Samiam of being good looking, or cool, or hip or particularly positive. But Sean lives there, and he dresses funny, and just has a totally different attitude that's more akin to Brooklyn bands, so when we're making this record and writing it, and pretty much every step of the way, any sort of creative decision that came up, he and I were sort of at each other's throats.
We love each other, we've been friends for years, but working together was really tough. He was the bass player for Astray, and he actually wrote a few of the songs, but he didn't have as big of a voice in decisions. He didn't want to make waves back then, but this time he wanted to control it as much as anyone else. But I'm the kind of guy, and Jason is the kind of guy that, if we're going to do this band we want it to be communal, and everyone has a say. So what ended up happening was a lot of butting heads.
It wasn't an easy album to record. There was a lot of strife. I think in the end, for better or for worse, it made a much more varied record. If anyone was bored enough to check which songs I wrote and which ones Sean wrote, you'd see they're extremely different. They almost sometimes sound like totally different bands.
RC: It definitely makes for a more interesting record.
SL: It makes for a more interesting band in general, even if it makes it a little less pleasant to produce. You know, there's fighting and there's hard feelings at times, but I think the end result is pretty cool.
RC: But theme-wise on the album, it seems like there's a lot of "love gone wrong" kind of songs.
SL: All of the lyrics were written by Jason, the singer. Basically, the whole entire time that Samiam has been a band, since the very early beginning which was like 1989, he was going out with the same woman, that he eventually ended up marrying, and then in 2000 getting separated from. So these songs are the only songs he's written since Astray, he didn't do another band. So, they're all a culmination of the last six years of having this weird separation from his wife.
He's done it before, where he's written a whole record on one theme. On Clumsy, he wrote all those lyrics when his stepfather died, and that whole record, except for a couple exceptions, is all about that theme of his stepfather, and I guess what an a**hole he thought he was, and him dying, and him telling his sisters about him dying.
So this one is his experiences of the last six years in his relationship with his wife, and actually a couple other relationships he's had.
The thing about Jason is that I don't think he considers himself to be a writer, so when he writes for a record he just writes about what he feels.
