It may sound improbable, but Chicago singer-keyboardist Robert Lamm, of the “rock band with horns,” has been most inspired by EDM acts over the last few years. While the 77-year-old hasn’t necessarily been listening to Marshmello or David Guetta, he mentions the likes of Austrian duo DZihan and Kamien, German collective Sonar Kollektiv Orchester and English production duo Rae & Christian. Lamm is also a big fan of Swedes Little Dragon, which employs electronic production.

“In this era of sampling and remixing, a lot of that stuff comes from Europe and Asia, from Japan,” Lamm says from his home in Los Angeles, three days before Chicago kicks off a U.S. tour in Phoenix. The band visits the Bay Area a few days later, playing Concord Pavilion with the iconic Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “Japan is full of guys who do great sampling and manipulating of pre-recorded material. It’s endless, really. I find it very ingenious in a way. … It kind of opened my ears a little bit more to sounds.”

It’s these artists and others that got Robert Lamm writing songs again—he’s written dozens of the band’s hits since the early ‘70s that have sold more than 100 million units in that time—after lockdowns froze the band’s 2020 tour in its tracks. Up to that point, Chicago had lived on its touring every year since the band came together in 1967. After the pandemic arrived in the U.S., the members went their separate ways, including original members Lamm, trombonist James Pankow and singer-trumpeter Lee Loughnane.

Original saxophonist Walter Parazaider had stepped down from touring in 2017 after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and the band’s guitarist of 27 years, Keith Howland, departed the band last December after breaking his arm.

At home, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer began to write again, partnering on several tracks with Jim Peterik of The Ides of March and Survivor, as well as a few others. Some of their demos reached the ears of Brian Wilson and Dave Matthews Band producer Joe Thomas, who convinced Lamm to turn several of the songs into the basis for a new Chicago album.

That album is now scheduled for release this year, and was preceded by a Thomas-penned first single, “If This is Goodbye,” last week. Even if the record doesn’t stand up to Chicago’s biggest hits like “25 or 6 to 4,” “Saturday In The Park,” “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” and “Make Me Smile” — Chicago was the first American band to chart Top 40 albums in six consecutive decades, has 21 top 10 singles, 25 albums certified platinum, two Grammys and received the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020—it still features some of his most mature songwriting ever.

“If This Is Goodbye,” and the album, which Lamm said is titled Born for This Moment, is Chicago’s first original music released since 2014 Chicago XXXVI: Now.

Fans can expect to hear the new song alongside many of the classics on tour.

What was it like for a band that’s been on the road every year since 1967 to scrap its 2020 tour, which was about one or two weeks from arriving in the Bay Area?

Robert Lamm: It was really disorienting in many ways because obviously we had a certain, if not routine, we had a certain expectation that we’d be able to perform. Chicago’s always been a performing band, not necessarily a recording band. We’ve always liked to play, and as a result, we played a hundred shows a year here and abroad. That was the normal thing. When the pandemic hit, it was like everybody else: “Well, what happens now?” Nobody knew. We were all sort of living off the newsfeeds, trying to figure out what will happen next. When will things return to normal? Of course, they never have, really.

What I intuitively did was I went home, I kissed the wife, got in touch with all the kids, and then I sat down at my piano and started doing what I hadn’t done for quite a while, and that is write and go very deep, deeper than usual for my lyric writing and my music writing. I did that for two years.

Is that what led to your forthcoming album?

Robert Lamm: Yes, actually. … There’s one single that came out about a week ago [“If This is Goodbye”]. What was going on is I was doing my writing. I began contacting other guys who I’ve worked with before and whose work I admired. I got in touch with people that I had the time now to work with. I began writing and a lot of file-sharing with my collaborators. During that time, within the first year, I had a handful of interesting songs. I had no plans for it. My partners in Chicago—we really weren’t communicating. Everyone was at home and did what they needed to do. At one point, a producer by the name of Joe Thomas got word to me that he had heard a couple of the demos of the new songs and asked if I was interested in doing those songs for a Chicago project. … One thing led to another, we had several phone meetings, and we decided to work with Joe and see what happened. That resulted in the album that’s just being released.

How did it turn into an album for Chicago as opposed to a solo album?

Robert Lamm: I’ve always been sort of dependent upon my Chicago partners to supply songs for each album. I’m always writing music, and I’ve done a number of solo albums. … I sketched horn parts. Now that we all work on laptops, we could get pretty close to the final stages of recording with that. I sent everything that I was writing and working on to Joe Thomas, and Joe would send it to the other guys. He did input and that kind of thing. It was sort of put together piecemeal. … What I didn’t really think about is that everybody works with a different recording software platform, so that at some point our poor producer was trying to get these various platforms to speak to each other and create the tracks for the new album. It was really time-consuming for him. It was a lot of work.

What does the rest of the album sound like?

Robert Lamm: It’s really kind of a mixed bag, which is not unusual for Chicago. I’ve been really influenced by—as crazy as it may sound—electronic dance music and that type of recording and sound-sourcing and sample-using. That was what I was playing around with at the time. I’ve also been very influenced over the years—my entire career, but more so in the last decade—by Brazilian music. So there’s some little tastes of that.

One of the best tracks on the album is a song that was cowritten with Marcos Valle [“Sureia do Mar,” Portuguese for “The Mermaids”], one of the first wave of bossa nova artists going back to the ‘60s. Marcos and I had been friends for a long, long time, so there was a track that he sent me in the ‘70s. He said, “Could you write some English lyrics for this?” and I did. That thing just sort of sat there in my files for a long time. So I brought it out, and with his permission, I added a bridge, and it’s one of the cooler tracks on the album. It’s a mixed bag. James Pankow wrote a couple of really nice songs in the way that he does, which probably sounds more identifiably Chicago than mine do.

Are there any themes that tie the album together?

Robert Lamm: I probably wrote at least a dozen songs that were at least considered for the album. I ended up with six or seven songs on the album. From my point of view, I was writing in a way that was more deeply emotional, and actually, kind of mature. Just looking at life and looking at my life and looking at the world around us in a more mature way.

There’s a couple of kind of crazy songs. There’s one called, “Crazy Idea,” and it’s really a dance track with a lyric by one of my collaborators, Jim Peterik. Jim and I had cowritten a number of songs. He’s a cowriter on the title track… “Born for This Moment.” In my working with Jim Peterik, I found a collaborator that I could go to with a track, and he would be very fast with either a lyric idea or a melodic idea. That was a satisfying discovery to be able to work with him on some of these songs.

Are you playing the single or other new stuff on this tour?

Robert Lamm: We have been playing the single. We’re curious to see how it would go over. It has been going over. We have the embarrassment of repertoire that we can fool around with from night to night or tour to tour.

See, you are a recording band!

Robert Lamm: [Laughs]. We are a recording band.

How is Walter Parazaider doing?

Robert Lamm: He’s recovering, doing the best he can. That was a tough one to swallow, and he’s got great support. For the most part, he was one foot out the door, anyway. He was tired of the grind, which I could completely understand. He was sort of semi-retired. He no longer wanted to travel abroad when the band went to Europe. The Alzheimer’s thing came as a surprise to everyone. He’s doing OK.

Chicago has toured with the Beach Boys in the past, but I’m not sure if Brian Wilson was in the band at the time. What do you think touring with him will be like?

Robert Lamm: Going back as far as the very first tour with the Beach Boys and Chicago [in 1975], Brian was there, and from night to night, we didn’t know if he was going to join his band for any part of their show. For the most part, he just kind of hung out. … Then jump to the ‘90s; he did perform with us at the Hollywood Bowl here in Los Angeles. He was not all that comfortable. It was all before he finally put a band together that wasn’t the Beach Boys that was a very good band that could do the Beach Boys records well, but he was also doing his solo repertoire. My wife and I lived in New York for many years, and one of the shows he did at Radio City Music Hall, we attended, and I was surprised—it happened to be my birthday, and they sang “Happy Birthday” to me in the middle of their concert.

Brian is a very unique individual. … He’s always been very sweet to me. I was very close friends with Carl [Wilson], and Carl and I did some recording together. That enhanced Brian’s openness to me. Oh yeah, we did tour Australia together not many years ago. There were four bands, and his was one of them. Chicago was another one. America was part of it. In that one, we did travel together. When you tour in Australia, it’s not a bus thing, it’s a get-on-the-plane thing. He was always fun to fly with. I’m giggling about that.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.