The Lunar Laugh are back with a new album, and it's a good one. It’s a studio album, not live as their last one, Nighthawks.

Jared Lekites was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

Andrea Weiss: Who were you listening to when you were making In The Black?

Jared Lekites:Well it was a three year process making the album, so there was a lot to absorb in that time. Apart from the old stuff I listen to on the daily, I was quite taken with the Harry's House album by Harry Styles when it came out. I also dove into the deluxe reissues of Prince's Sign O' The Times and The Gold Experience albums. I know there are plenty of albums that I am forgetting but I remember having those on my car radio on the way to a couple of the first sessions.

AW: What do you see as the differences between In The Black and your previous album, Nighthawks, other than that the performances there are live?

JL: With the live album, most of those songs we played countless times over and over. The In The Black songs are ones we hadn't really road-tested when we went in to record them. There's still those raw nerves of presenting the new tune to the others in the band flowing about in some of the performances.

AW: The music is so happy, but the lyrics are so bittersweet, which I find interesting and cool. Did the juxtaposition sound natural to you?

JL: That is something we have kind of built our catalog on. I think it speaks a lot to some of our personalities. We joke and laugh our ways through a lot of pain. So it makes sense that some of that comes across in the music.

AW: Some of these songs are about love and some about life. Do you tend to favor one subject over the other?

JL: I think they go hand in hand. Love is a part of life and life is a part of love. So I can't justify picking one over another.

AW: There are no covers on this album, and there were three on the last one. Did it just work out that way, no covers?

JL: The covers on the live album had a lot to do with us wanting to fill in some time during concerts and also to bring a bit of familiarity to people in the crowd that didn't know our songs. But this was the first time we have written every song on an album. We got really close with the Mama's Boy album except there was one track on the physical copies of the album that was by an outside writer. I think it was an unspoken thing that we wanted this to be as much of a band creation as possible, so we didn't consider covering anything. Also we had a good backlog of original songs piled up.

AW:Did you approach your new songs from a different perspective than on Nighthawks?

JL: I think we always took it one song at a time, no matter what album we were working on. The approach was to always do what would best serve the music.

AW: Did you find it easier to make Nighthawks than a studio album like In The Black?

JL: Recording the live album was a much quicker process than tracking in the studio, but then actually sitting through every recorded show and selecting which version of a given song was the one to use, and then going through all those and fixing any glitches that might spoil the listener's enjoyment, took a long time. So I think it evened out in the end.