Sam Roberts (PHOTO: Dave Abel, QMI Agency)

Montreal rocker Sam Roberts says he had the best of both worlds writing music at home for his fourth studio album, Collider, which came out earlier this month.

Now a father of three -- Miriam 4, Lucy 2, and new son, Ben, born a mere eight and a half weeks ago -- the 35-year-old musician got to work on the new tunes while at home with his wife Jen and their kids.

"I wrote this record in my basement. I didn't have to go anywhere," Roberts said at a Toronto tavern deck on a sunny spring day.

"So, I'd go down and I'd still be able to go upstairs for lunch. I wrote in my basement, that was the hermit era. And then I brought the music to the band, and then we re-interpreted and re-worked it as a band in our rehearsal space."

Then Roberts and company hightailed it to Chicago for six weeks to work with producer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron and Wine, Califone, Gomez) -- the quickest they've ever made a record "by about seven and a half months," said Roberts.

"As soon as (Deck) got his hands on the songs, he sent me like a five-piece essay on all the stuff that he was going to change about them," said a smiling Roberts, who broke through with his rhythmic 2003 hit Brother Down, and eventually became a six-time Juno winner.

"But that was fantastic. They were really specific ideas. Some of them seemed a little off the wall to me, completely counter to my intuition, or my gut feeling, but once we actually implemented them, and lived with it a little bit and let it breathe, we could really see it. And what he was doing essentially, more than anything, was cutting back -- trimming the fat, really digging for the core of the song, the essence of the song, where it really lay. And in order to do that, it was getting rid of a lot of the clutter."

Still, more rhythm and brass was brought to Roberts' sound courtesy of both Califone percussionist Ben Massarella and Antibalas woodwind star Stuart Bogie, who recorded their parts in one day.

"I think we always wanted to use that type of instrumentation, but it always has to take a backseat to not just the songs, but how prepared you are or unprepared, how long it's taken you to get through the nuts and bolts of it," Roberts said.

"It was a very spontaneous and immediate process. When you get that kind of excitement and energy going, then it's bound to spin off and it came back to us. And then all of a sudden we were trying to go for the same kinds of things. We were sort of just going, 'Let's get something with the right energy. Let's get something with the right feel.' And I think listening back to the record, I feel that. Luckily for our band, its always more about the feel than it is about the pursuit of perfection. That's just how we play."

Some have suggested that Collider -- the first officially billed to Sam Roberts Band, as opposed to just Sam Roberts -- is more rhythm-based than guitar-based, compared to previous efforts.

"There's still just as much guitar, it's just the guitar isn't front and centre necessarily, the guitar is playing a role," Roberts said.

"(That is) far closer to the music that has been inspiring me lately. I listen to mainly South African jazz, like kwela music. I listen to a lot of West African music, Nigerian, Fela Kuti, Sunny Ade, anything with a beat. I think if you go back and listen to our other records, there's always that pulse in the middle of the songs, and even the way that I play guitar has been inspired by it, even since I was a little kid, those were my guitar heroes. Obviously, I love Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, but Paul Simon's Graceland was just as important a record to me for that reason."

Now Roberts and his band mates -- guitarist Dave Nugent, guitarist/keyboardist Eric Fares, bassist James Hall and drummer Josh Trager -- are currently touring North America with a handful of summer Canadian dates -- before a full cross-Canada tour in the fall. So much for the comfy home life Roberts has been enjoying.

"It's going to be hard for the next few months, there's no doubt about it -- and there's no way around it, really," said Roberts of being away from his young son and family.

"And luckily I have the support of my wife, and she's willing to sort of carry the extra weight. The flipside of it, of course, is that when I'm home I get to do what very few dads get to do, which is to spend full-on time with my kids, and I've been doing that essentially for two years. (Being a travelling musician is) definitely difficult, but it has great advantages."

Roberts goes in alone acoustically

Sam Roberts played a couple of early Western dates in late April including a solo acoustic gig in support of the St'at'imc native territory north of Vancouver near Lillooet, B.C.

"I've never done it before," said Roberts, who is of South African descent. "Just me, by myself, playing songs that had never been played acoustic before. Them Kids -- acoustic! -- I never thought it could be done. The Indian drummers came up with me and I had about 15 or 20 of them on stage with me for every single song."

Turns out Roberts was invited by an elder who he met while playing the Pemberton Music Festival a few years earlier.

And while it was an interesting experience, he has no desire to tour acoustically on his own -- a la Jeff Tweedy, Chris Cornell, Neil Young -- anytime soon.

"These songs were written to be played by a rock 'n' roll band," said Roberts. "Even the quiet ones in a way. So while, once in a while at a radio station, you'll have to translate them into acoustic, it feels like a translation, it doesn't necessarily feel like the natural place for them to go. I want to jump around on stage while I got my legs underneath. When it's time for the walker and the fireside sessions (then we'll see) ... I think that's a ways away for me."