Guitarist Sergie Loobkoff starts the tale of Stowaway like any great whale tale: “In the beginning, Chad took a demo that we did at up in Oakland—actually, in Emeryville—at Green Day’s Studio, that was never intended to be a blueprint of our record. It was just to be like, ‘Hey, here’s 15 songs. Jason, get to work.’ He had a lot of catching up to do. But then when the lockdown happened, we had to do it in the manner that we ended up having to do, which was remote.”
Stowaway, out now on Pure Noise Records, marks the band’s first record in 12 years. It’s the record you want from Samiam. It sounds like Samiam. It feels like Samiam. Soaring guitars by Sergie Loobkoff and Sean Kennerly, with Chad Darby on bass and Colin Brooks on drums are perfectly blended from all corners of the country—Oakland, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Gainesville—into this album. It comes after nine years of touring together, writing together, and turning up the heat on critiques to make a better piece of music. The result is an album longtime fans as well as newcomers will play again and again.
The pandemic sent the 15 songs to Gainesville where Chad Darby would create a framework for Colin Brooks. Loobkoff explains the musical layover in Florida before sending the tracks north to do the drums. “Chad took these demos and put them through the computer and his brain to sort of make sense of it, beat detect it, then put it on a grid,” he says. “(He figured out what our) intentions were, the rhythm and all the little intricate details.”
Sean Kennerly adds, “This was the most chaotic recording ever, and Colin and Chad made it easier because they’re total pros and were mentally on the ball about getting it done. We were floating a couple of ideas, but then the lockdown and the pandemic threw everything into chaos. We just abandoned the idea of getting a producer. It took another year and a half before we even started recording the drums, which we couldn’t do in person.”
Once Darby’s “grid” recordings made it to Brooklyn, it was time to lay the backbeat and Brooks made quick work of the task.
“The putting together of the songs was easy,” says Brooks. “But we didn’t exactly record at all together. I did the drums separately from everybody else because of lockdown regulations, so I was wearing two masks while I was doing the drums, but that was cool.”
It was just Brooks and an engineer with lots of masks. Brooks says, “I was worried that if there was less pressure because it was just me and the engineer, if I blew a take, I didn’t have five people looking at me like, ‘Come on.’ It was just one person who would just go, ‘Oh, I’ll just hit the space bar and go back.’ So, it was easy to stay in the zone without panicking that, ‘Oh no, we have to retake that again.’ So that was nice for me.”
Brooks kicked out the drums in only two short days.
“Two short days, yeah,” he laughs. “The second day was only a half day. It was quick. I mean, I’d been driving around listening to the songs for a long time at that point. And so, I knew them well. It was just a matter of doing them and giving options if they wanted to edit something or if they didn’t like something I played or whatever. It was relatively easy and painless. I would be fine to do it again this way.”
The drum tracks made their way back down to Gainesville. Darby took it from there until everyone could make it safely to Black Bear Studios.
“It was super fun having the drums like that too,” says Darby. “I knew all the songs. I knew every beat and every note of the songs, or at least the demos that we had before we sent them to Colin, because I had edited everything. So, I’d heard every single guitar note, snare hit, high hat hit and everything. It was so exciting to get the drums back from the studio. Then it was fun when Sergie and Sean and I went to the studio in Gainesville with Ryan (Williams). We had these incredible drums to track, and I got to play bass on it. I was like, ‘Oh, cool. I love that fill he did, and I get to play something to that fill.’ It still had that excitement of playing in a room. Once we got the drums and got to tracking the guitars, it was kind of like this new, exciting thing I felt like it was really kind of fresh and exciting to track the bass to what Colin had done and it was a live feeling.”
“We went down the Gainesville with no vocals and re-recorded the songs, the music part, the bass and guitars. Then we started to try to record the vocals. I think Jason had sort of been banking on the world collapsing,” Kennerly laughs. “He just started writing much of the lyrics. That just ended up being a really protracted, long process recording the vocals. It took almost another year. It was total chaos. But luckily, our label was very forgiving and after several ‘We’re going to start now. Oh, no, we can’t, blah, blah, blah.’ They were just like, ‘All right, you guys take whatever time you need to do this.’”
Pure Noise gave them the leeway during COVID to finish what they started. Kennerly interjects, “It’s a different recording than any that we’ve ever done, I think because we had that luxury of taking way too much time to do it.”
Loobkoff enjoyed the time he spent tracking in Florida. Of the time, he says, “I didn’t have to sing, which is the hard part. So, from my perspective, even more than like the big-budget, major-label ones that we had tons of money in the nineties, this was like the most luxurious one. We had so much time to think about these songs and change things and learn how to play them a little bit. One thing is, all four of us write music, and we all write too much music to be put out by any one band. If you go to Colin’s SoundCloud, he has album after album of his music. Sean, Chad, and I don’t necessarily have that, but we have a backlog of MP3s in folders that will never be heard unless we start doing the five-record box set or something. The process to get these songs together, it was a little weird at the end. It was facilitated by Chad. Chad was the guy that got the ship together to happen in the beginning. Sean was the guy that got this to happen at the end.”
Kennerly says, “I sort of identified this problem that, I don’t know if anybody else even thought it was a problem, but that we tended to, as a band, write these slow, pretty songs. Sergie and I both would write these songs that were kind of, like, pretty mellow. We both like Elliot Smith. We would try to bring that to Samiam, and they almost invariably don’t work. We end up, the songs and the music, and then it’s, ‘Well, I guess that’s OK.’ So, we always put it at the end of the album. And the end of the album was our songs that didn’t really work out very well. And they’re the slowest songs that we wrote.
“I’m not speaking for the rest of the band. Obviously, it does start off best jams, and then they kind of trail at the end. We have eight solid songs and four songs sort of nosedive. I wanted this record to be all upbeat, solid stuff and not like our failed experiments. I personally was pushing to try to get it to be all high energy, start to finish, something you could listen to all the way through. And at the end of the album, (it) could be like, ‘Yes, I want to play that again’ and pick up the needle and put it back at the beginning rather than then sort of like, ‘Oh yeah, I guess I’m kind of over this record.’”
Kennerly gave Stowaway everything he had in many ways, including penning numerous songs, and singing duties.
“I wrote a couple songs to try to sort of lighten the load for Jason so he would be able to handle it. As the recording kept progressing, ‘I could do another one, I guess.’ And then I wrote another one, and then, like, three months would go by, and then it’ll be like, ‘Well, I guess I could do another one.’ I ended up writing four or five songs. I can’t remember, (but) a lot more than usual.
“I wrote the lyrics for ‘Crystallized’ and ‘Lake Speed,’ but ‘Lights Out,’ Jason wrote most of the lyrics for the album.” He continues, “I try and fail to imitate Jason’s style a little, I think he’s a better poet at his style of writing for sure. I mean his lyrics feel genuine because they are real stories from his life. I come from more of a pop angle. I am heavily steeped in pop songwriting. I approach it like, what’s a catchy chorus, what’s a good theme for the song and that angle. I still try to make it heartfelt and real.”
Kennerly explains his lyric writing is about Samiam itself.
“I wrote ‘Crystallized’ about the band, and so is, in a way, ‘Lake Speed.’ They’re both autobiographical. ‘Lake Speed’ is about the band through a failed race car driver. I’m maybe more experimental in that way, I guess. I don’t think I’m as good of a songwriter as Jason at taking a simple life event like Jason did for ‘Lights Out Little Hustler.’ Just feeling this alienation with somebody that you’re trapped within a household with during the pandemic and this strange feeling of not being together while you’re together and turning it into a great song. I often marvel at his poetic abilities in that regard.”
He says, instead of literal and poetic, he draws from things like stories he’s reading and uses them more metaphorically.
“I was reading about Lake Speed, this driver and his career. He tried, he was a NASCAR driver for a really long career of like 15 years, but he never was a winner. He just kind of is bumbling along in the low echelon able to keep going. He did enough to keep racing. He had trouble keeping his sponsors, and he had to borrow money to make a shop and build his own cars and stuff. He was like scraping by, basically. He loved doing it and so he kept doing it. And I thought, that’s sort of like Samiam.”
Kennerly and Loobkoff disagree, sometimes like high school rivals who grew up to be best friends.
“Sean and I have been friends for, like, 37 years,” says Loobkoff. “We really know how to push each other’s buttons. In 2006, we made a record (Whatever’s Got You Down) where we fought like crazy, right? And we had mixed results on that. And then with (2011’s) Trips, we didn’t fight at all because we both were just like on good behavior. This one we were somewhere in between. We had some fricking fights.”
Talking about “Crystalized,” he says, “I think typically I don’t fuck with his songs. He doesn’t fuck with my songs, but you’d have to ask him why he really fucked with that one maybe because he liked it so much, and I wasn’t particularly into it. He just put a lot of initiative and just completely chopped it up and made a completely different song. Which is unusual because typically we’re sort of like a little bit apprehensive of saying, ‘you should cut that part.’”
Kennerly explains the end of the sessions, “I was sitting with Jason in his kitchen or in the dining room, and I was like, ‘OK, what’s happening with ‘Scout Knife?” And he was like, ‘Don’t worry, I got that. I got ideas for that; that’s going to be fine.’ I was like, ‘OK, well, what about ‘Crystallized?” And he’s like, ‘I don’t know what to do with that song. Every time I listen to it, after the beginning part, my mind goes dumb, and I can’t come up with anything.’ And I was like, ‘All right, well what if we just like hacked that off?'”
“I went on Garage Band and took off the beginning and gave it to him. Then a month went by, and he still didn’t do anything. My dad had recently died, and I was remodeling his house to try to get rid of it and staying up in this isolated mountain cabin by myself. I was there for a week, and we were about to go in for what was hopefully, fingers crossed, going to be the last time we recorded the vocals. I really thought the song was great. I just spent a week and wrote five horrible versions of the song and finally came up with one that I thought was pretty good. Jason liked it; I knew it was going to make Sergie mad, and it did.”
What happens next is skinned knees and bruised elbows; metaphorically, one person brings the other a band aid after the school brawl, and the other pokes him in the eyes and runs home.
Loobkoff admits, “I took this record off from fighting with Jason. Sean, it was his turn.”
Kennerly volunteers he had some bitter blowouts too.
“’Hustler’ was the most bitter, bitter fighting between Jason and me,” admits Kennerly. “He came with this kind of, like, flat line vocal thing, and I was like, ‘You need to put some more mustard on that in the chorus, change it and make it more active.’ And he was like, ‘I’ll try it.’ And he tried it, and then it was, I thought, way better. He was like, ‘I hate it.’ And he erased it and did it over again the same way he’d done initially.”
This sort of honesty is something, from the outside, through a shattered-glass window, feels like Samiam. You don’t have songs that feel so real and tell such profound stories without artist and musicians who are real and have true feelings.
Stowaway is the result of living years of societal pressures, from pandemic loneliness to family loss, and the cumulative total is an album better than the NASCAR driver in “Lake Speed.” Samiam has a winning album. They have this new thing that pressure pushed together with a high gloss clarity and authentic real time crystallization of relationships in the band, as well as the songs they write.
Loobkoff wraps up, “When you ask a member of the band was it successful? We have too many personal prejudices. Especially Sean when he was just describing whether he is happy. He went through so much emotionally on these trips (to his dad’s house) and stuff. Although he is happy with the record, I can’t imagine him just being, ‘Everything turned out perfectly.’ He had to live through it. We all had to live through it in a way. The other three of us had lived through it even though we weren’t there. Just the uncertainty and the law, you know, the months that went by. I mean, years that went by to make it happen. So, it was emotionally hard for us.”
Sergie Loobkoff and Sean Kennerly’s musical voices, writing styles, and their playing, in their more than 20 years of making music together, are as imperative to Samiam as Jason’s Beebout’s painful wailing and knack for lyricism, going from “fading to grey” and losing the fear of saying goodbye in “Monterey Canyon” to “I still wanna be, just need something worth believing.” It must be a lot of timing and ultimately satisfaction for Chad Darby and Colin Brooks to hold the beat and keep it all in line. In the end, from 20 years ago, on Astray, until today, on Stowaway, Samiam leave the light on for everyone who believes in music as a cathartic release and creative amalgamation.
Photos courtesy of Austin Rhodes
