Change may be good, but not always wanted. Preston Klik lived by this a year ago when the walls of his trip-hop band My Scarlet Life began crumbling around him. Amazingly, he isn’t afraid to talk about the experience, and deep down it seems he may even be happier than before with his new band Scarlet Life.

But don’t think he let his band fall apart without a fight.

“I desperately tried to keep My Scarlet Life together, but I failed, and eventually we cracked up,” Klik says, reliving the story from his home in Chicago. “We were a very cohesive whole for most of our time together, but we started to unravel. People wanted to go certain directions.”

Sadly enough, My Scarlet Life, a band with four innovative albums in its bag, played their last show in November 1999.

Although Klik is an energetic person, the breakup hurt him and he says there was a time when he wondered whether or not he should continue.

“Music is my life, and a band is my life. That’s my outlet. When something I’ve devoted my life to starts to fall apart it totally freaks me out. It totally depresses me,” he says. “I’m not a good person to be around then, for quite a few months. Usually I’m not really in a nasty mood, but just a dark mood.”

It was during this dark period where Klik began auditioning for parts in other bands. He didn’t think he could play the part of band leader anymore and wanted to find a niche where he could be in the background.

Instead, he found himself recharged.

“It was so exciting being around people who were excited about music, not that the My Scarlet Life people weren’t, but they weren’t at the end, and that was the lingering memory that I was having of what music was,”Klik says.

With this new energy running through him, Klik knew he couldn’t possibly quit, so he started running ads in Chicago newspapers to recruit new members for his band.

When Chandra Clark showed up at his door and started singing for him, Klik says he instantly had a vision for a band.

“It was the first ad she’d ever answered. It turns out we live a block apart in the city,” Klik says. “She came over to my place that night, listened to my stuff, loved it, came back a few days later with some vocal ideas, I loved them, and it was like, ‘We gotta put a band together.'”

He was looking for a very soulful and passionate singer with good lyrics and good pitch. He found all of that with Clark, who herself had been looking for a Portishead- or Garbage-like sound and found that with Scarlet Life.

Klik was now on his way to forming a new band with a new sound. My Scarlet Life had a guitar and live percussion, but Klik replaced the gaps with a scratch DJ and upright bass, which gives a warm, organic bottom to the sound.

On turntables is DJ Skeptik, who Klik says he always wanted in the band if he could get it to come together.

“A scratch DJ takes the place of where there would be a melodic guitar solo. It modernizes it a bit,” Klik says. “I’m not anti-guitars, but they’ve become a bit mainstream, mundane, whatever.”

Klik found the upright bass player he was looking for with Zebulun, a man who has played in numerous rock, jazz, funk, Latin, Americana and avant-garde acts. He has even done extensive work in alternative theater.

“He’s a dependable, respect-able, virtuous guy who I really dig spending time with,” Klik says.

“One thing you want when you put a band together is if you know you’re gonna go on the road, it’s gotta be, ‘Can I be with this person for seven hours in a van on the way to Minneapolis?’ and the answer with all these people is yes,” he says.

As it turns out, the end result of Klik’s formation of Scarlet Life also brought out a change in the music. Although the music is a little similar in continuity to My Scarlet Life, Klik says he decided to keep part of the name, but drop off “My” to imply change.

By March of this year, Klik had a new band, and a new sound. He says he still agrees with the trip-hop label, but also says there are electronic influences and what he calls a “lounge influence,” something evident on the band’s debut album “Sugar Spice Saccharin & Cyanide.”

“It’s a very eclectic mix of instruments and genres,” Klik says. “This is my most accessible band I’ve ever done, but also one of the edgier bands at the same time. But a lot of music these days has a very acceptable edge to it.”

Klik attributes this edge to the vibrant underground scene, which itself he believes is misnomered.

“I don’t want to even call it underground because it’s not that far underground,” he says. “It’s just under the radar.”

So is change good? Preston Klik certainly thinks so.