The phylum of the Sea and Cake’s sound is rounded, clean, and lucid. It’s a subtly phased, convex, and well-articulated combination. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Sam Prekop’s voice is soft and calm. His lazed, oneiric words arrange themselves and float above the music, tethered to the songs by a string. Since 1994, the Sea and Cake have released nine finely crafted pop- and jazz-imbued albums for Thrill Jockey Records. The latest, The Moonlight Butterfly, was recorded and produced by their drummer/guru blacksmith John McEntire (who’s also in Tortoise). Over the years, McEntire has filtered down the Sea and Cake’s sonic output into a photosynthesis. A sound so unalloyed, it literally grows plants, and releases oxygen. For ear-brain gills, the Sea and Cake is chlorophyll. A light-driven synthesis of organic compounds and sugars.

Prekop spoke from Chicago, surrounded by orchids, and oxygen.

Your sound is so healthy and clean. It's good for plants. Death metal makes plants wilt and die. The Sea and Cake causes stalks and leaves to sprout and flourish. Your music is photosynthesis. Do you agree? What are your thoughts about plants?

I like them. I like the idea that we could help grow plants. It's a proven thing, that metal music is bad for plants?

Yes. Especially speed metal.

I have a black thumb, I have to admit. I don't know what it is—I have a bunch of half-dead plants in my house. I grew up around a lot of healthy plants in a greenhouse sort of environment. But that's one trait that hasn't carried over for me. If I can help them grow with my jams, I'll take that. My Mom was an orchid collector, before you could buy them at hardware stores, in the '80s, when it was a much more obscure and exotic thing to do. I've always loved plants. I've never really thought about how I grew up with them all around me. Interesting. That's one of the things I seek out on tour, is big greenhouse/conservatory-type places. They always seem like neglected tourist spots. They seem empty during the week, and I've always appreciated them.

The way you sing and enunciate words, I can't always understand what you're saying. But I like it. I do a subconscious interpretive thing where I make up my own words. You give out a vocal guideline, with punctuation, to a map of some foreign language, then let the listener inject their own story line.

I don't mind that it's not always intelligible. I don't sit down and write a song where it's the music supporting the words. The music always comes first. Not that it's more important. We'll get the music going, and the words will respond directly to that. A lot of it comes out of free association and improvising. I start with non-words to generate broad ideas. Through that, I'll hear things that might stay in the song, or get thrown away, but will push me in the direction of what words will work and what sounds right. Lots of it has to do with sounds. It's a process of elimination and distilling. Random, off-the-cuff ideas and words that I run through this process of distillation. I hope that the words hold up. They become sort of signposts for emotion. I'm not singing about emotion, though. The words sort of embody that type of thing. Without describing it, the words resonate for me beyond their literal meaning if they strike with the music properly. It's a gut feeling. It's a lot of work sometimes to stop myself from singing something really stupid. [Laughs] It's a pain in my ass, this singing thing, but also the most rewarding.

You have an ease with it, though. At least it sounds that way. An ease that's not easy?

Exactly. Sometimes the words match effortlessly to the music, and when that happens it's great. But more times than not, it takes work. I wish it was easy more often.

In the course of your nine albums, and of your life as a band, what has changed?

I think a lot has changed. For the first album, we weren't even a band yet. It was a studio project. We've organically evolved over the years. I had no idea it was going to turn into anything. I don't know if I've become a better songwriter; I've become different. It's interesting to play some older songs. I can't imagine how I arrived at some of those ideas, which I think is a good sign. The music, I think and hope, reflects what I'm interested in at that time. I'm not a stylist, and I can't fake it. I don't have the skills to play something other than what I've figured out how to do on my own. Like when I try to learn an older song that we'd like to play live, and I can't actually do it, it's because I have no idea what I could have been thinking of at that time.

That just means you need more orchids. There's a great greenhouse here in Seattle at Volunteer Park—you'll have to go to. They have orchids. I go in there and crank Pantera all the time. You can borrow my boom box if you want.

Sounds good. I've got my own boom box.

Your sounds are so nuanced. How do you derive that rounded, clean, and temperate sound? Maybe it's John McEntire's production. You're using some kind of phaser, right?

I think one thing that might provide that sound is that the other guitar player, Archer Prewitt, and I like to think that we're playing one big guitar together. Or that he's finishing my lines and vice versa. I'm more the rhythm, he's more the melodic lead. Our parts are pretty meshed and that might promote some of that phase-y sound. On Car Alarm there's a song called "On a Letter" where we ran the whole band through a phaser, slightly.

We often look to these types of things when a song is failing, or not lifting off, or not happening for us. During mixdown, and postproduction, we do bring out studio effects. Altering things after the fact has been a longtime part of our palette. The nature of our aesthetic is particular. Hopefully not overly precious, and we sometimes battle that. The innate prettiness that we deal in is often sort of dull, so we'll mess with it. Over the course of our records, we've learned to tailor some distortion sounds.

How do you do that tailoring?

By making careful choices. I'm never happy with my guitar sounds. I'll doctor it with effects, but what I've figured out is that what you sound like is in your body. Like, it's beyond your guitar. It's the way your fingers touch the thing. I've gone through guitars hoping to get a tone that's closer to my head, only to realize it's how I touch the thing that makes more difference than anything else.

And the fact that when you record, you're surrounded by 300 Pink Cymbidium orchids.

We can hardly breathe there are so many orchids in there.

What kind of guitar are you playing now?

A Telecaster. It's handmade to look and play like a Telecaster. It's my most solid-sounding guitar. The intonation is really good. I also like the late-'60s Silvertone. It's semi-hollow body, made out of Masonite. I played it almost exclusively on the latest record. I was having sort of a reunion with it.

Your drummer/producer, John McEntire, is an out-and-out master at producing sounds with his Soma Studios there in Chicago, and such a master drummer. He's a meticulous forger—so much more than just the drummer. What's it like working with him? I know that's too broad of a question.

We've been working together for so long, it's all so ingrained. One thing I'll say is that it's hard to get him to voice an opinion, except he'll make it very known by what actually happens. If he feels like something is a bad idea, he won't say it. He just won't do it. Archer, Eric, and I are more vocal with our wants and needs in the studio. John can be—not painfully mute, but really quiet about certain things. In the end, he'll make decisions without us really knowing. [Laughs] A very crafty way of working. I think the dynamic between him and us is much different than him working in another band. I think in Tortoise, he takes on more of a lead role. In the Sea and Cake, he doesn't necessarily seek out that responsibility. He's a huge part of the sound, but often he'll defer to me on what we should do here and there. I think he enjoys it for that reason—it's not necessarily on his shoulders. I could be just reading more into it, I don't know. He would never admit as much.