After starting from scratch, Seattle’s Pickwick found new process on “LoveJoys”

The members of Seattle indie-R&B quintet Pickwick are not quitters.

That’s why, although they were unhappy with the direction of the new music they were recording, they forged ahead, eventually writing 40 songs meant for a pop/R&B record, the follow-up to 2013’s “Can’t Talk Medicine.”

“We had moments of clarity where we were just banging our head against the wall, but none of us are quitters so we just kept going,” singer Galen Disston said.

It wasn’t until a member left the band last year that Disston, keyboardist Cassady Lillstrom, bassist Garrett Parker, guitarist Michael Parker and drummer Alex Westcoat took a step back and realized that, try as they might, their hearts just weren’t in it.

So they scrapped the entire batch of songs and refocused.

Disston also threw out the lyrics he had written and switched up his manner of writing.

Looking back on “Can’t Talk Medicine,” Disston felt he forced the lyrics. He would find a subject to write about and create word collages and craft lyrics from research he had done.

On “LoveJoys,” which was released last month and brings the band to the Bartlett on Saturday, he instead held on to organic phrases that came up during the songwriting process and built lyrics off those phrases.

“We got back to what we do best, which is not overthinking things and following our own muse and getting out of even each other’s way,” Disston said. “I think we had a tendency to micromanage each other and try to make each of us individually what we’re not really. When we got out of each other’s way, it went a lot faster and felt a lot better.”

In total, “LoveJoys” was written in about three months versus the three years the band spent writing the album that wasn’t.

“Lying Awake in the Dark,” for example, was written the weekend before the band entered the recording studio, and Disston wrote the lyrics while in the studio.

The entire process felt better to the band this time around because the songs on “LoveJoys” were so fresh, as opposed to some of the tunes on “Can’t Talk Medicine.”

“Some of those songs we recorded two times in studios before,” Disston said. “By the time we got to the record recording session, we were burned out on the songs already.”

Pickwick recorded “LoveJoys” with producer Erik Blood, who has worked with Seattle bands like experimental hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces, punk quartet Tacocat and rock act the Moondoggies.

“He has this wide range of tastes so he was able to pull from all of that experience to influence what we were writing,” Disston said.

Most of the songs on the album were just as the band had written them, but Blood put his spin on a few, including “Which Way You Go.”

The song was originally much slower. Blood sped it up, helped the band write the bass part and suggested Disston sing the same lyrics and melody, just faster.

“There was a lot of cool moments like that where there were new songs that were born in the studio by his guidance,” Disston said. “We were open to that and we wanted that. That’s why we sought him out.”

Having found a new approach to writing and recording, Disston is thankful the band went through the ups and downs of the last four years.

The dialed-in approach of less second guessing and more going with what feels right has made songwriting much more enjoyable and has resulted in an album Disston said the band loves and loved making.

“We had to take a step back and say ‘What do we like to do? What feels good? What’s fun? Let’s just do that’,” Disston said. “That’s what ‘LoveJoys’ is.”