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.

Cains and Abels (L- R): Josh Ippel, Jonathan Dawe, David Sampson.

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.

Two hundred people fill a sparsely furnished sanctuary, singing at the top of their lungs. They are untrained singers with plenty of vocal eccentricities. No instruments give the right key or take the edge off the voices’ peculiarities. Stumbling upon a scenario like this would make many people flee for the exits. And, knowing that the lead singer of Chicago-based indie band Cains & Abels had grown up in this tradition, I thought of the torturous a capella as an experience he would have had to overcome to get on with his musical life. Far from it, he told me. David Sampson, Cains & Abels’ front man, considers the unaccompanied hymn-singing foundational to his music making. In fact, these experiences have woven the ethos and sound of Call Me Up, Cains & Abels’ first full-length album.

Sampson grew up Plymouth Brethren. For this denomination, a capella singing was a symbol of the way members craved direct, simple communion with God. “You could sing your head off,” Sampson recalls. You were purely accepted and simply free to participate. “Obviously, sometimes it could get weird, with nobody in a church who officially knew anything about music. We could end up singing really really slow, or sometimes we could lose pitch at every verse and end up singing in a different key. Overall, though, I think the way we sang was very honest and direct,” he reflects.

“I actually like to think about it as kind of punk rock. Like Beat Happening. You should have heard how some of these people sang. This one old guy would start all of the singing. Someone would suggest a hymn to sing, and then he would start it off. Sometimes nobody knew the tunes, so he would just make something up on the spot. It was amazing. He had a loud voice. You could hear it out in the parking lot. If a note was too high for him to hit, he would go for it anyway.”

The authenticity of those voices is still in David Sampson’s head when he makes music. “I remember being young and figuring out from those people how to use my voice in that way,” he says, adding that the Brethren style influences the harmonies he seeks. Authenticity is important to the whole band – they proudly use words like “pained” and “raw” when they describe the music, and their MySpace page proclaims, “We are trying to make the most real and honest music we can.”

Josh Ippel
Photo: David Sampson
 

Call Me Up doesn’t sound much like church music – it is layered, folk-infused rock music with lots of reverb and instrumental solos (think Neil Young & Crazy Horse).Nevertheless, the honesty and simplicity of the Brethren style are evident lyrically and musically throughout Call Me Up.

The album builds to moments where sound practically swallows you. Jonathan Dawe and Michelle Vondiziano’s background vocals are soothing and pretty, like a lullaby from another room, and Josh Ippel’s guitar is eerie, ringing thick with distortion.These blend with Vondiziano’s cello and keys, the primal sound of Dawe’s drums, and Sampson’s bass to form lush, engulfing instrumentation.It feels oddly similar to how Sampson describes church conferences as a kid, where a thousand people filled a rented high school auditorium and sang hymns a capella.”The silence in the moment right after the last note was an amazing moment. It was like the trough of a wave. You could hear a creaking chair in the corner in a place where a second earlier, you couldn’t even talk to your neighbor.”

Sampson’s voice rides on these waves of backing vocals and instrumentation, a voice that hits the emotions of the song perfectly, without requiring itself to hit a perfect pitch.(Of course, isn’t this what the folk tradition is all about? It reminds me of when Bob Dylan goes all out on The Rolling Thunder Revue, or when Will Oldham sings “Madeleine-Mary.”) “I’m not trying to sing in a traditionally beautiful way,” says Sampson. “I hope that the way I’m singing now has the most in common with the voice I used when I was five to sing the alphabet.”The result is a “super-acquired taste,” Sampson admits, but it has power to grab its listeners.Jonathan Dawe confesses to singing the tunes in his head before realizing they’re Cains & Abels songs. “It’s got it’s own charm,” he says.

Jonathan Dawe
Photo: David Sampson
 

Seeking to make honest music, Cains & Abels embrace both harshness and beauty.Visceral, image-driven lyrics, reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel’s physicality, combine with memorable melodies. Michelle Vondiziano says she often forgets she’s harmonizing to disturbing lyrics, because she is so focused on creating beautiful harmonies.

Take these lyrics from “Metal in my Mouth”:

I shoved my hand into a crack in the road

And let cars and trucks roll over my body

I tore a piece of skin off of my finger tip

And gave it to a squirrel to take to her.

Or this imagery from “Killed By Birds”:

For the stone to be thrown

For the bone to be lodged in my soft neck

Each time I pull back the skin

I find the feathers within…

Killed, killed by birds

Killed killed by lady birds

If the lyrics seem violent, it is because the band is trying to communicate something about intimacy. Intimacy is the Rosetta Stone for this album, making lyrics like “lay a hand on my hand” and “I’d dive into a fire if it lit up the phone in my pocket” come together into what Sampson describes as “a big fat universal plea.”

Reaching out, to anyone at all, is a theme throughout Call Me Up. The startling lyric about tearing off skin is actually about prayer, about just wanting to be able to give a piece of yourself to God and know that it got there.The album’s title is also a reference to intimacy.”Call Me Up” refers to what Sampson wanted most in 2006, when a relationship was ending. “I wanted to send that to the universe.”

There are times in the album when pain is quenched, when an answer comes:

And you can never be alone

You are loved by me

And I cling to your heart

I cling to your heart.

Michelle Vondiziano
Photo: David Sampson
 

Interestingly, Vondiziano singles out this song, “Never Be Alone,” as one of the album’s most musically pained and raw. This makes sense, because harshness and beauty become a push and pull within Call Me Up, and the album reverberates between extremes.The dichotomies are not by accident, because even the band’s name describes a dichotomy.It describes the band’s belief that each person is literally a Cain and an Abel simultaneously: both a cruel, rebellious person and a kind, generous person.

All along the spectrum, beauty slips in. It’s a haunting, engulfing beauty that, because it grows from painful authenticity, avoids anything saccharine. Interestingly, that’s just what happened in Brethren church services, too. “They weren’t bringing beauty to the services in an intentional way,” says Sampson, “but beauty was able to slip in through the cracks.”

Because they have pursued authenticity and achieved a rare kind of beauty, Cains & Abels’ Call Me Up is well worth checking out.Call Me Up is available May 19 through iTunes, States Rights Records, and Southern Records.