Chicago-based indie band Cains & Abels befriends dichotomies. David Sampson, Josh Ippel, and Jonathan Dawe forge a lush, engulfing sound, with intricate guitar-and-drum interludes, soothing harmonies, and haunting reverb. Yet the band’s folk influence means many moments stay sparse and echoing, with drums beating as steadily as a distant barn-raising. It means the lyrics lay bare the writer’s thoughts, Sampson’s lead voice stays raw, and the vocals often craft a call and response.
I wrote about the band just before their first full-length album, Call Me Up, came out in 2009. Since then, the band has released Call Me Up on vinyl, toured, recorded a Daytrotter session, and released the EP The Price is Right. They’re in the final stages of producing a second full-length album, tentatively titled My Life Is Easy.
Through these milestones, the band has worked closely with friends. One signed them onto his record label (Positive Beat), others helped book shows, and friend Erik Hall (NOMO, In Tall Buildings) continued as producer. The band’s community experienced a huge change, too—Michelle Vondiziano (keys, cello, vocals) left the band. She and her husband have a new baby, Inez, who gets a shout-out in the EP.
With all these changes in the past two years, it felt like time to check in with the band again.
Last time, we talked about your music’s honesty. What have been some recent challenges to this?
David Sampson (bass, vocals): Maybe the hardest part has been watching musicians that I believe are being disingenuous or flip or cute gain big attention and popularity? That’s a deeply honest and ugly answer.
Jonathan Dawe (drums, vocals): I don’t think there’s such a thing as “dishonest” music, broadly speaking. Sure, our music is not Lady Gaga and the lyrics are confessional and drawn from real experience, but was there ever any doubt?
DS: We’re trying to make music that is us first and foremost, and that serves the lyrics in the songs we’ve written. I even try to keep the instruments and sounds we use to a very small number. The three of us are corn-fed flatland dudes. If I sang in a southern accent, it might help people put our music in a category, but it wouldn’t be me. The way I sing, or the way we play, is undeniably a construct on some level, but I’m trying to make it as true to my background, my experience and my identity as I can. Neil Young is a total inspiration. A lot of his music is in a country vein, but he’s not putting on a Merle Haggard act to do it.
Josh Ippel (guitar): We’re all influenced to some extent by the sounds we’ve digested over the years and it would be impossible to completely leave that aside when writing songs. We do make a conscious effort not to write any songs that directly nod to a specific genre, though there are certainly recognizable elements.
Do you think of the album as a story?
DS: There are a lot of connections and story elements, but there’s no beginning or end, and I don’t think it would benefit in being thought of that way. The images are all meant to compound and refer to each other. There are common metaphors in a bunch of the songs. Deer represent people/women, but in more of an empathetic way than birds on Call Me Up. It took me a long time to figure that out. I was just like, “Oh weird, this time I’m writing about women as deer instead of birds.”
JI: It has the character of a film like Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. It’s filled with beautiful, intuitively connected scenes.
The image of roots keeps coming up in this record, too.
JI: They’re the foundation for the life of a tree but they’re also gnarly, twisted and buried in dirt, so there’s a range of meanings they can conjure.
DS: They’re bigger than the rest of the tree, and they’re impossible to get rid of, and that’s the way I think of difficulties in my life, especially difficulty that comes from bad habits and destructive ways of living (like the ones I’m confronted about in “Why Are You Lying to Me”). The roots in “Roots” represent something that has ensnared people in greed since the beginning of civilization. The “branches grow thick and wild” is imagining the manifestation of that tree with money for roots. It grows out of control like a Brothers Grimm tree, dark and twisted and leafless and moaning in the wind. It becomes the trees in the other songs that taunt me and hold me from happiness.
“Roots” reminded me of Johnny Cash’s “Redemption,” and your line “great is thy treachery” sounds like “great is Thy faithfulness.”
DS: This song is a backwards hymn, a song of negative praise to mammon. Instead of “faithfulness,” money’s treachery is never ending. The first line of the song, in that washy intro is, “Oh, for you cannot deny yourself,” which is a reference to a Bible verse: “If we are faithless, he is faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” Money cannot deny itself, and by very definition brings us misery and strife and death.
“Where Did You Go” has changed since early performances. Do songs tend to evolve in practice, or live?
DS: Both. Totally both. We work really hard on the songs in practice and do our best to make them finished compositions. Our songs have usually existed for a year or more when we record them for an album. Practice is where we change things in songs, but live is where we test them out.
JD: Both live performances and the studio experience have made these songs more heavy. “Where Did You Go?” is a good example of this. I didn’t originally like that song much, but now it has more force and rocks harder. I don’t always think that “rocking harder” is synonymous with making a song better, but in that case it is.
The band’s following has expanded. Has that led to a more complex relationship with listeners? Do people ask about the lyrics?
DS: More people listen to us now, but I have had only two conversations with people inquiring about lyrics. Either they’re so clear that no one has any questions, or no one cares about the lyrics, or I’m such an intimidating person that they’re all terrified.
Is it strange that people listen to your music without the band being right there getting a sense of audience reaction?
JD: I think a lot about what it’s like to listen to our music on a recording (or live) without being in the band. It’s a perspective I’m jealous of. Would I like it if I weren’t a part of it?
JI: I’ve always wished I could be in someone else’s brain when they’re at home, cooking dinner and listening to one of our tunes. I guess I’d have to quit the band and get brainwashed to have that sort of experience.
Does the new album work with dichotomies, building on your original concept that each person is both a Cain and an Abel, cruel and kind?
DS: This is the question I had the hardest time with. The most obvious example is in “Where Did You Go,” where I talk about walking north with “peaceful pastures on my left, and howling trucks were on my right.” It’s a reference to “the highway’s right lane stands for grieving and pain / the highway’s left lane stands for rising again” in “Black Black Black” on Call Me Up.
JI: The new songs seem to slide between a disembodied, abstract voice and a grounded, first-person narrative, which fits with the way we deal with concepts like money and survival.
Are dichotomies not up front in your lyrics anymore?
DS: Well, it’s something that I’m always interested in, and it was tough to think about the songs and realize that I didn’t have that theme in there very prominently. In “My Life Is Easy,” I contrast myself with the buck who is shot at. It’s been a popular thing to talk about “white people problems” in the last year, and while I think the concept is a deeply unsettling and decidedly un-funny thing to laugh about, “my life is easy” is talking about that. Compared to an animal being shot at (or an African being shot at in his home), my life is one of a prince. I never lack for comfort. I worry not about eating too little, but about eating too much. I worry most about love. My life is so easy. Beyond that, the dichotomies aren’t too present in the songs. It’s not that I’m not interested in them, but maybe they just didn’t come up?
What’s your take on how you came to use Wesley Willis’s “Vultures” live and on the EP, why you changed his lyric “dead ass” to “body,” and your familiarity with Willis and the original song?
JD: Replacing “dead ass” with “body” is in keeping with David’s approach to lyrics and keeping unnecessary crassness/vulgarities out. I admire him for that and think it’s the right move.
DS: I try to keep my language classy. Talking about damage to “my body” is something that is already in Cains & Abels lyrics, so it seemed to fit. Mark Neigh [a friend who helped with booking and filled a variety of other roles] actually suggested that we cover the song, and I looked up the lyrics and realized it did an amazing job of bridging themes from Call Me Up and the new record, so it made perfect sense to put it on the EP. I love Wesley Willis. On my first trip to Chicago I spotted a Wesley Willis drawing framed on the back wall of the Burger King on Milwaukee in Wicker Park. It made me love Chicago, to think that a Burger King would mount and display his drawings.
Is the EP a bridge between Call Me Up and My Life is Easy in other ways?
DS: It’s kind of a palette cleanser. There is a slower, more soulful mode on it, as well as a lower-fi sound that allows it to be itself. If you’re following the band release by release, the EP dismisses any expectations of what the next album will be like.
—Sean Talbot contributed to this article.
All photos by Maren Celest.
Cains & Abels Call Me Up folk In Tall Buildings NOMO Positive Beat rock