Summertime in Edmonton can be pretty hectic, and most will jump at any opportunity to escape for a fun little getaway. But there’s no need to actually leave town. Tonight, Sam Roberts and his band are hitting Capital Ex’s Ed Fest stage with material from Chemical City, their latest album and a fantastical sonic adventure.

Not only is the album a journey, but Roberts himself travelled around the world to kick-start his creative juices for the recording, released in April.

Following a trip to his parents’ native South Africa, Roberts headed to Australia and stumbled upon an old, renovated Presbyterian church which provided inspiration and a recording space for Chemical City.

“The philosophy behind this record was to really capture a specific time period,” says Roberts, over the phone from Toronto. “A raw and spontaneous outflow of creativity rather than think through everything to the smallest detail and remove any happy accidents or any spontaneity by over-thinking it.”

Unlike the band’s 2003 Juno-winning debut We Were Born in a Flame, which was a collection of songs Roberts had been working on for a decade, there was almost no prepared material and instead, “I was writing songs in the morning and we were recording them in the afternoon,” say Roberts.

For Roberts, music is his fantasy realm and with Chemical City, he’s invited the world to join him.

“There’s always that tension between the real and the fantastical. The world we live in every day and the places you escape to that allow you to live beyond the mundane and that’s always been a very important thing for me,” says Roberts. “I was trying, in some way, to capture that push and pull between the real and unreal. And I’ve never really been all that grounded in reality anyway, so it was a very natural extension of who I am and what I think about.”

As a songwriter, Roberts doesn’t write a lot about himself or his life, but instead embraces the idea of fantasizing about the world and those who share it.

“Being a human being is being able to look through other people’s eyes and to see the world through their eyes. And from a creative side, that offers you an infinite canvas on which to paint,” he says. “Even though it may seem far away from what you live every day, there’s always something you can relate to in it.”

Sharing his fantasies with the world is one thing, but when it comes time to creating his music, Roberts says it’s a solo journey. He write lyrics, melodies and song bits all by himself and his method became entrenched while working alone on 2002’s EP The Inhuman Condition following the breakup of his band.

Roberts has been playing with the same core of guys since high school. He’s known his bass player, James Hall, since they were both five years old and keyboardist Eric Fares was in their grade in high school. The band worked under several names and was known as Northstar when they finally disbanded and headed in different directions in 1998.

With no band and no outlet, Roberts kept writing songs with buddy Fares by his side. He eventually got Jordan Zadorozny, occasional Courtney Love collaborator, to record six of his songs in as many days, including the radio hit Brother Down, which became The Inhuman Condition.

“Things took off. I didn’t know why the hell it was then and there. After all the years we’d been working at it, you know, as a functioning, viable band who love what they did,” says Roberts, who quickly tracked down his loyal bandmates once Brother Down began to chart.

“James was actually off in Korea teaching English and I got on the phone to him as soon as I could and was like ‘Hey man, you’ve got to come back here. We’ve got to get the band going again. This thing is working – it’s really working.’ And he was like, ‘Are you sure? What do you mean by working?’ And I was like, ‘No really, it’s going. Something’s happening. There’s a spark.’ And I think his passion for what we do just sort of overwhelmed everything else. He got on the next plane and was back home and onstage in a couple of weeks.”

From that breaking moment, Roberts and his band have been playing all over the world and intend to continue doing just that.

“There’s no better way to get people into what you’re saying musically than by performing it onstage,” says Roberts. “Both Calgary and Edmonton are really, really great to play. I think there’s a strong rock ’n’ roll tradition there that’s not really shared in a lot of places. Alberta’s always been into rock ’n’ roll music and that’s what we love to play, so there’s always been a good connection there.”