DREAM METROPOLIS
Sam Prekop builds his new solo album, Who’s Your New Professor, piece by gorgeous piece.

Living in a city is a restless business: garbage trucks, car alarms, neighbors. The longer you stay, the more you need the din to be interspersed with the soft metal whir and clamor you’ve begun to associate with comfort. It’s 6:30am. What little sleep is just beginning to wear off. Semi-audible, the bus outside is announcing its route, in the alley someone is rustling through cans. Then, a cornet wavers above it all and is soon eclipsed by a voice. I had put Sam Prekop’s new solo album, Who’s Your New Professor, on rotation the night before. What would otherwise be a calamitous waking up, crowded with the throng of a looming workday is now a gauzy morning. Clearly now: an acoustic bass and the same voice punctuating the blue coming in through the window.

“Breathy,” “whispery sweet,” “tender, falsetto-tinged croon,” are what’s been written about Sam Prekop’s singing. “Swoon,” usually follows the words above. The vocals are integral, Prekop tells me, but are “definitely part of an ensemble” when composing in the past. He’s one of four that comprises The Sea and Cake. Along with John McEntire (Tortoise), Eric Claridge (from the now defunct, Shrimpboat where Prekop was also a member), and Archer Prewitt (ex-Coctails), they have amassed a collection of the most remarkable music over ten years, working in the collaborative vein with which their other musical endeavors prosper. On his first solo effort, Prekop brought in McEntire, Prewitt and invited Josh Abrams (Town & Country, Sticks & Stones, The Roots), Chad Taylor (Chicago Underground, Sticks & Stones) and Rob Mazureck (Chicago Underground, Isotope 217) to help flesh out his self-titled album in 1999.

Five years later, Prekop assembled the same members in hopes of approaching composing differently. “Usually when I’m writing songs with The Sea and Cake, I don’t have much, or terribly clear, or strong ideas of what the vocals will be doing with this music…” He admits he dreads the vocals, and usually, puts them off until the end. “It’s really a process of solving musical problems with words. Sometimes I can’t sing that because it sounds wrong—I don’t care what it means, it just sounds wrong. Those decisions are really innate and I’m not sure how I decide what’s right and wrong, and, often, a few days later, some sort of meaning will come out of it, or it will make this odd sense that could have never thought of beforehand. It’s more like collection of these correct decisions. They add up and, at least, be effective as a song, but I can’t usually tell right off the bat—I wait a little while, hope that it’s ok.”

With Who’s Your New Professor, the vocals are more integral: “This time, the music, I admit, was focusing on it being somewhat subservient to the vocals a bit, mainly, just that, while I was working on it I was actually singing along something…to sort of help get to certain ways of coming up with things that would not have happened, otherwise.” In Prekop’s home studio is where the process starts, he reacts to what’s there and: “…usually I just start singing--whatever it is…certain phrases or words will come up and I’ll glom onto those, write them down, elaborate, hopefully, that will get me to the next line and then it’ll be a back and forth series of edits and revisions, take away, put in, add more. I just hope I can find that at the right time, make the right decisions at the right time with the right work. It’s pretty rare and almost never where I’ll have some idea that I want to clearly get across with these words in this song…it’s that sort of an impressionist thing in general.”

Prekop mentions that, while writing--along with certain words-- gets stuck on certain images he has come across somewhere, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make them work. He studied as a painter at the Art Institute of Chicago and has had gallery shows in New York, Paris, and Glasgow to name a few. Music came as a fluke, he says, in the last part of art school. Still in awe at the incredible reception of said fluke, Prekop feels absolutely lucky to have both painting and music. There’s little urgency to connect both under one defining premise; he never works on both disciplines in tandem. Evergreen, 2003, is part of his second solo exhibition at the Clementine Gallery in New York, after the release of The Sea and Cake’s One Bedroom. The canvas is almost entirely painted in a subdued light-chrome blue. Rectangular shapes in varying sizes and color, populate the bottom of the canvas and through their definition announce themselves at times random and at regular intervals. “Rhythmically,” one art critic stated, and of his show, all paintings, “seemed to evoke distant cityscapes.” On first look, I’m reminded of something Prekop had said, earlier:

“In composing, the nuts and bolts of it is organizing different kinds of sounds. To do that effectively, you have to incorporate some sort of spatial dimension. Otherwise, it’s flat, and a drag to listen to.” Leaving the restaurant, we learn that neither of us have ever had a driver’s license and rarely venture without music. That night is an exception for me as I walk home, with Prekop’s new album playing over in my head.

It’s 7:30am the next morning. The same cornet joins a slight mechanical whir with Sam Prekop’s voice, with a guitar at its pulse. I’m awake and listen to Who’s Your New Professor in its entirety. From track 1 to 11, each layer drifts in and out in subtle intervals. Listening to the album on the way to work, the elegant complexity of it all at once complements the roving city noises outside and filters them to a gorgeous stand still.

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