Brokaw: Some of the songs had been worked on when Arthur and Sean were still in the band, bits and pieces we were playing around with. I'm sure those guys will recognize some of it when they hear the record. Thalia worked out the songs among the two of us and showed them pretty quickly to the two rhythm sections on the album.

Zedek: We had a harder time finishing songs without a bass and drum part. Even though Chris and I had written songs beforehand, it didn't feel complete because we were hearing it with a band.

Q: So the lack of a full-time rhythm section was more of an obstacle at this point?

Zedek: It's a little more spontaneous. We'd never played with any of these people before, so we had to wait until we started before we got a feel for the song.

Q: How difficult was the breakup? I heard that there were a couple of tense gigs before Arthur and Sean left.

Zedek: It wasn't a breakup; they just quit. We were getting ready to write songs and do another record, and they just left. No discussion about it, just them saying, "I don't want to do this anymore."

Q: And that happened backstage at the Beachcomber last summer, right?

Zedek: No, Arthur was changing a light bulb . . .

Brokaw: . . . at a rehearsal. He was screwing a light bulb in and he said, "Uh, by the way, I'm going to leave the band at the end of the summer." Sean said, "Uh, me too." We played the Beachcomber the next day. The band spent a little time sitting in shock, then it was "Okay, what are we going to do from here?"

Q: You had enough confidence that the band could keep going?

Zedek: That, and sheer stubbornness. I've been in a lot of bands and realized that things like this happen, and you have a choice of how to deal with it. In the past I've dealt with it in ways that wasted years of my time.

Q: Such as?

Zedek: Not any great debauchery-type story. Just, say, throwing out every song from my previous bands every time I started with a new one. I've thrown out hundreds of songs, as if they weren't mine and I didn't own them anymore.

Brokaw: Between the Beachcomber and the last [original] Come show, we did half the Steve Wynn album, which was a peaceful exercise. A project where we didn't have the responsibility, it wasn't our ass on the line. He'd come to Boston, show us eight songs in an evening, and we'd record them the next day. That happened twice. That was inspiring for the two of us.

Zedek: It gave me a lot of confidence, seeing how he didn't feel that he had to rehearse a song for years before recording it. Not that he didn't want it to be good, but he didn't need to be a perfectionist.

Brokaw: For the Come album we booked studio time in Chicago, brought in people we'd never worked with before, and practiced for a couple of nights. I don't think we would have had the nerve to do that if not for the Steve Wynn album.

Q: The Steve Wynn show at Mama Kin in February was the first you'd played together. It reminded me of seeing the Dream Syndicate in the '80s. Did he ever get a half-hour version of "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" out of you?

Zedek: Yes, we were forced to! [laughs] I'm on stage thinking, "End this!" I'm not used to jamming that much, and I think we broke a record on that song. We'd come offstage and he'd say, "Aha, 35 minutes!"

Brokaw: Some nights he'd be pushing for avant-garde, free-jazz flights; some nights it would be more like the Grateful Dead. We were forced into playing like lead guitarists.

Q: Was the Beatles quote on "Hurricane" intentional?

Brokaw: No, but people used to say that the end of "Brand New Vein" (from Eleven: Eleven) was totally "She's So Heavy." So maybe that song was a bigger influence on us than we realized.

Zedek: To me, the feel of the song goes back to the whole boat theme of the album.

Q: Boat theme? That wasn't something that came to mind for me.

Zedek: The music of "Hurricane," especially the ending, always reminded me of a sea-chantey type feel. The last song ("Slow Eyed") has a reference to a boat in it, too. It's weird; we'll write songs and then later we'll realize that there's one word in every song.

Brokaw: On the first album, most of the songs on side two have the word "waiting" in them. So that was the unwitting theme of that album somehow. The thing that occurred to me is that this is the third album we've made that begins with the A-minor chord. It's the first chord you hear on each Come record. That's the consistency that we carry on. We'll have to bust out and start getting into sharps.

Zedek: It's a big key for us.

Q: You said that a lot of the last album pertained to distances in relationships. Any similar themes on this one?

Zedek: Boats. [laughs] Really.

Brokaw: Last year was kind of a stormy year, so, near-life experience . . .

Zedek: Maybe not a boat, but storminess, like floating along and looking through portholes. [The album] just makes me think of water. But I'm a freak anyway, so . . .

Q: How much of an agenda do you come into your songwriting with? You've said in the past that a lot of the mood swings in the songs happen more by accident.

Zedek: For me, the idea for a song will come around when I'm messing around on guitar, and it will just present itself. And I'll say, "Oh, that's kind of creepy," or "that's really sad," or "that's nasty-sounding." I never sit down and try to write one kind of song.

Q: Come does get pegged as a darker band. Do you think that's been overplayed?

Brokaw: It's there, but it's not something that weighs upon us as our identity. It doesn't feel like we're in a goth band or some gloomy metal band. It's just what makes sense.

Zedek: I don't think of it as dark, just melancholy. That's what I really love, and it's not a lyric thing. Melancholy is more beautiful to me for some reason.

Brokaw: Someone like Leonard Cohen has always been tagged as being gloomy, so people would think he's no fun. But I put on a Leonard Cohen album and get jazzed; that's what feels good to me.

Zedek: But really, what's the alternative? I try to think of happy movies, for instance, and all that comes to mind is Free Willy or Forrest Gump.

Q: Is the sound of that acoustic show at Charlie's Tap going to turn up again?

Brokaw: Definitely. There's a single that just came out in England that has a radically different mix of "Hurricane" -- just piano, violin, and slide guitar. We want to explore more of that, along with the guitar-rock or whatever that we've been doing.

Q: Thalia, your first band was Dangerous Birds, and the two songs that got released (on the single "Alpha Romeo"/"Smile on Your Face") sound more pop than anything else you've done. I don't think I ever saw that band; were those songs typical of what you sounded like or was there any indication of what you're doing now?

Zedek: There was in my songs. The ones that Lori [Green] wrote, like the A-side of the single, were a lot different. It was a good time for local music, but I don't feel like those were the good old days and it can never be like that again. I have a lot of good memories of that band, and of Uzi.

Q: You left out Live Skull, so I assume your memories aren't as friendly?

Zedek: [long pause] The first band I ever toured in, the first band I ever made an album in, so a lot of new experiences. I wasn't writing any of the music, and that was different for me. I would have liked more of a hand in the songwriting. We did some grueling tours.

Q: You lived in New York at the time, right?

Zedek: Right, and one of the reasons I came back here was to play with Chris.

Brokaw: She came up to me at the last Live Skull show at the Rat and said, "I think Live Skull's going to be taking a little break, we should put a band together."

Zedek: That was an insane night.

Q: Everybody hating each other?

Zedek: That, and a lot of wild and reckless behavior. I had good friends in Boston and I didn't have a job or a place to live. So I came back here because it was a refuge where people liked me and would take care of me.

Q: Six years and counting is pretty good for a musical partnership. How have you pulled that off?

Zedek: God, it couldn't be that long!

Brokaw: We played guitar together the first time we met, which must have been 1988. It was the first time I'd played with somebody where I felt there was a lot of interplay, that we were each doing stuff that would make the other respond.

Zedek: I just think Chris is a fucking great guitar player. And there is a good [understanding] with us. It's hard making music with people you can't stand. I've had situations like that, but everyone I'm thinking of is someone I'm friends with again now that we're not in bands together. But things can get tough when people act like jerks. I've been through that, and there have been times when I acted like a jerk, too. But it's hard to make music with someone when you can't stand being in the same room with them.

Q: That would suck.

A: There are people who thrive on that. But I'm not one of them.