Archer Prewitt, Inc.
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Prewitt, 36, moved to Chicago in 1991 with the Coctails, an eclectic, Martin Denny-crazy quartet he joined in art school in Kansas City. By the time the lounge revival hit, they’d moved on to less kitschy, more modern pop, and when the band split up in 1995, after issuing four albums, half a dozen singles, and boatloads of handmade merchandise, Prewitt was ensconced as a guitarist in the Sea and Cake. But immediately after that quartet, led by former Shrimp Boat singer Sam Prekop, finished recording its fourth album, The Fawn, in October 1996, Prewitt returned to the studio to make his first solo album, In the Sun, a collection of elegant pop gems that came out the next summer. He’d written his share of the Coctails’ repertoire, but only a couple of songs for the Sea and Cake, and he didn’t feel that was enough.
After four months of touring with the Sea and Cake, Prewitt hit the road for several more weeks last spring to support the solo album, and more than half of the tunes played by the group–trimmed to Prewitt with Greenberg, Goulding, Crawford, and Mertens–were new ones. Pleased with the sound of things, Prewitt shepherded the band into a recording studio two days after they got home, and those sessions became the foundation of White Sky, a far more cogent, sophisticated album than his debut. It took months to bring to fruition the meticulously beautiful arrangements he worked out with Mertens. “It was like giving birth to a giant boulder, and I couldn’t even work out ten songs,” he says (the record contains nine). “But I feel really good about it.”
Prewitt opens for Pavement on Friday at the Vic, and his official record-release party is slated for Saturday, November 6, at Lounge Ax.
