Joey Sweeney is a resourceful man. Right after he ends his seven-year stint as a music critic and columnist for our competitor, the Philadelphia Weekly, he shows up at City Paper to pitch some non-music features for us. His band is pretty resourceful, too. When a "disastrous" tour left him and bandmate/brother-in-law John "Heyward" Howkins without a rhythm section in September 2002, The Trouble With Sweeney continued on with their plans to record that December. Fortuitously, TTWS found Mike Conklin, a punk-rock bassist from Boston, and drummer Richard Stuverud from Seattle who played in The Fastbacks and Three Fish (Jeff Ament’s Pearl Jam side project). The reformulated Trouble’s fourth album since their 2000 inception, I Know You Destroy, is a little less twangy and a lot more melodic. Twinkling pianos, bold rock-star indulgences and smartly complex lyrical imagery make the album a repeat player. And how’s this for bold? The CD release party is a big open-bar affair floating on the Delaware, and is followed by a five-week residency at Silk City. Sweeney and I chatted over IM about the trouble with him.

City Paper: When I first booked this article, you were still writing for the Weekly and the idea of interviewing you was sort of taboo. I mean, PW is the enemy! What will the loyal readers think? But the new CD is good, so how was I supposed to avoid it? Then you go and quit the Weekly and you’ll probably be doing freelance for City Paper. So now this article looks like pandering, or some kind of hypocritical about-face or something. My point is, boy did you screw this up!

JS: Well, I had been thinking about it for a very, very long time. I suppose it really came down to a handful of issues. One being that I was unenthused about the general direction of the paper, and two being that, as I got more and more into doing the band, I had a real crisis as a critic. And then, when they asked me to take a pay cut, well, that was pretty much the end of it.

CP: I guess you were running out of bands with whom you haven't shared a bill or were otherwise connected to.

JS: Well, that didn't bother me so much. I always thought that I had handled things like that with a certain amount of honesty: If I had a connection to somebody, I was always the first to admit it -- and by no means was it a prerequisite, either. There were lots of people who I was friends with whom I just wasn't moved to write about. But yeah, there was the temptation to rename the column "Me and My Awesome Friends."

CP: The band's name is something of a play off Weekly column "The Trouble With Spikol," right? Any copyright infringement discussions?

JS: Well, yes, but there was also an element of it that referred to The Trouble With Harry, which is a movie about a corpse no one wants to deal with. No copyright stuff has come up yet, but you know what? It wouldn't be the worst thing if it did. We all pretty much hate the name. It was never supposed to stick like it did.

JS: That's the thing: It's kind of too late now. We have four releases out, have toured a ton of times. It would be more of a pain in the ass than anything else. For a while -- after this last lineup change -- I was thinking of calling it The Counterfeiters, but John -- I'm sorry, Heyward -- didn't like it.

JS: Precisely. I think it makes us sound like a jam band, like Leftover Salmon or something. We have the Cosby sweater of band names. At the very least though, it does convey that there is a band there, which is something.

CP: OK. One last PW question: No parting article? No final "That Dirty Lowdown"?

JS: OK, well, there was one, a final Lowdown, I mean. But the paper opted out of printing it. Which was so strange -- I'd never had anything killed before.

JS: Yeah. Although, it really was not particularly caustic or mean or anything. In fact, parts of it were rather sweet. At least I thought. More than anything, it was honest. I made fun of the paper for not having an A&E editor for two years, and talked about how much I missed Jill MacDowell.

JS: Oh, it's a picture from Gregory Carafelli's portfolio -- all the photos in the packaging are by him. It's a photograph of a woman smoking a cigarette backstage on the scaffolding at The Academy of Music. It's during an opera, and she's an extra.

JS: Yeah. We met him because he had taken photos of us on the sly, hanging outside a gig, and then he e-mailed them to us. For the longest time, we were like, who is this guy? Eventually, he sent us a link to his online portfolio, and we were, like, wow. He does shoot other bands, but I get the feeling that, in general, he does not like to tell them -- which is a real stroke of genius. Posing for band photos is always a nightmare. Everyone gets so stiff.

CP: Did you have a different vision for this CD, compared to the previous ones? I'm hearing more rock, less rootsy-ness.

JS: The whole idea behind the record was to be, in a generalized way, more ambitious -- not just with the recording of it -- which we spent more time on than probably all of other records combined, but also in the songwriting.

CP: OK. You're a rock critic. Or a recovering rock critic. Gimme a review of the new CD.

JS: "We here at City Paper went for a very long time trying to ignore The Trouble With Sweeney, the band led by longtime critic and, uh, indie lightning rod Joey Sweeney. The one time we did write them up, people on Dummytown got all up in Brian Howard's grill like there was no tomorrow. It just wasn't worth it. But we're a little older now, a little wiser, and TTWS' insistence on bringing musical theater into the parlance of The Replacements has also ripened with age."

JS: "Say! Did anybody else see Joey Sweeney sneaking in and out of Brian McTear's studio all last December with the drummer from Pearl Jam? Huzzah, manizzle! Go drink at Bar Noir!" I could do this for a living.

JS: Well, it's about a few things. One is that it references the book by Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters, which is essentially about a group of people who play at love and crime for such a long while that they confuse the two to the point where there's no going back, and the other is that it's just a song in that classic mold of spat-upon kids rallying to stick together. I know that sounds pretty pretentious, but there you go.

CP: Tell me about the "Booze Cruise." Is this something you've ever done before?

JS: Well, the boat we're going on is the same one where we threw a birthday party for my wife last year, but as far as the band, no, we've never done the high seas bit before. When we were at SXSW, we were all talking about how we wanted to do something really ballsy, and this is what we came up with.

JS: It's almost like a little ferry. It only holds 150 people and there's a big deck on the top floor that is all outside. That's where we're gonna play. The boat starts out near Dave and Buster's and then cruises south, down past the naval base, and back.

JS: No, but how awesome would that be? Part of the idea was to do this big weird splashy thing that would hopefully generate enough interest about the band to drive people to the residency in July [at Silk City].

CP: The last show at Silk is a Velvet Underground tribute. The Velvets don't come to mind when I hear the Trouble -- just a personal favorite?

JS: Ah, I think it's more than that. I mean, between my own love for the Velvets (and The Smiths) and my dad's constant hammering away at the Dylan thing, that's pretty much how I learned how to write songs.

JS: Naw. I have a pretty stringent no-heroes rule when it comes to seeing bands.

CP: On "Arm in Arm" you sing "Philadelph-I-AY." Is that an artistic license that should only be granted to locals?

The Trouble With Sweeney Riverboat Booze Cruise has been moved to its rain date: Sun., June 22, boat departs at 8:30 p.m., returns at 11:30 p.m., $20, with DJ Dirty Dave Pee, Captain Lucky’s Cruise Steamer, Callowhill St. and Delaware Ave., tickets at www.plainparade.org. The Trouble With Sweeney’s residency runs Tuesdays in July at Silk City, Fifth and Spring Garden sts., 215-592-8838.