the making of american football (S/T) - featuring mike kinsella, steve holmes and steve lamos 

Intro: 

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

American Football formed in Champaign, Illinois in 1997 by Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos. They were attending the University of Illinois and Kinsella where Holmes were roommates. Kinsella had gotten his start playing in Cap'n Jazz and he and Lamos had also played together briefly in a band called The One Up Downstairs. Holmes and Lamos began jamming together initially and Kinsella asked if he could join. Their friends Matt Lunsford and Darcie Knight were just getting their label Polyvinyl going and they offered to release their first EP, which came out in 1998. By the time they were finishing college, they had enough songs for a full-length album, but the band was also breaking up with Kinsella and Holmes moving back to Chicago. Polyvinyl offered to release the album anyway so they recorded at Private Studios with local engineer, Brendan Gamble. Their self-titled album was eventually released in 1999. 

In this episode, for the 25th anniversary, Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of American Football (Self-Titled). 

Steve Holmes: This is Steve Holmes and I play guitar in American Football, I’m here to talk about American Football, the first album, LP1. I think anyone who is between like 14 and 24, like you're going through a lot of change, you're going through your first relationships and heartbreak, you're on the cusp of one stage of life going to the next stage of life. I think those themes kind of resonate throughout the album. But to me, when I listen to it, it sounds like kids to me, like it sounds like, what it was, you know 20 to 22 year old kids kind of just discovering a way to write songs. And I do think, there's definitely a charm and a magic to it, we did put a ton of like thought into the arrangements and I think the music is good, I mean it stood the test of time for a reason. But when I hear it, it just reminds me of like the people we were at the time. And those kids could never have believed what would come of this little album. 

The band really, the origins go back to high school. Mike and I went to high school together at Wheeling High School. I met him our freshman year of high school after seeing Cap’n Jazz play like in the lunchroom or something like that (laughs). It's very early days of that band. You know, Cap’n Jazz was like the impetus of me to like, go get a guitar and start a band. I think it was one of the things where like, I got a guitar for Christmas and literally like two weeks later, I was in my first band. So Mike and I were friends kind of all throughout high school. 

Mike Kinsella: My name is Mike Kinsella. I am a  guitar player and vocalist in American football.  I was a sort of best friends with Steve Holmes since somewhere in the middle of high school. He was like running around with like some punks and I guess I was sort of running around with punks, and then our punks got friends with their punks. And then, we both ended up going to college together, we were roommates. 

Steve Holmes: When we went to college in 1995, we started at the University of Illinois. We were roommates as freshmen and stayed roommates all four years of college. The origins of the band were really just us being roommates, living together, and, you know, I was in a different band at the time. He was still, Cap’n Jazz had just broken up and Joan of Arc was kind of just starting.

Mike Kinsella: He was playing in hardcore bands, I had kind of, Cap'n Jazz had broken up. I had kind of like a bad taste in my mouth after Cap'n Jazz broke up. It broke up, I was, if I was maybe 18, it was like the summer before college started. And I think it was sort of like abrupt in a way that like, I was kind of like upset about, cause it was just sort of starting, that started to get a little popular or a little more fun. Like we started being able to play further and further away from Chicago, which is sort of the goal, is traveling, kind of seeing the world. So I don't know, I think I was just like, it was easier to go to college in the fall and have a guitar instead of a drum set. So I was playing more guitar, I guess.

Steve Holmes: Mike didn't even own a guitar. So I had, we had one guitar between the two of us and I would say, “Hey Mike, show me how to play, “Ooh Do I Love You,” or whatever, some Cap’n Jazz song. And he would teach me that. And then I would show him some riffs that I'd been writing. So I knew he could play guitar. Even in high school, we actually took, we took a harmony and arranging class together and we would play guitars in that class. And I knew that Mike had written like probably half of the Cap’n Jazz songs. Mike actually would start on guitar and then Vic (Villareal) would make the riffs cooler. And he would help write the bass songs. Like he was integral to the writing and arranging of most of those songs. So I always knew him as a guitar player. And I think like the first time I saw him playing guitar, maybe our sophomore year, he was playing like a Dinosaur Jr. song and singing. And I was like, “oh, this guy can sing too? Sort of (laughs). It sounds like Jay Mascis,” you know, that type of warbly singing. So I knew he could play and he was, Mike's just a natural, he's one of those annoying musicians who's like intuitively good at everything. Like he picked up the drums, I think he originally played guitar. Probably he started guitar in seventh grade or something like learning Metallica, and so he had the heavy metal roots that kind of grounded him in, you know, little technical ability and then switch to drums also in middle school, I think, and picked that up incredibly quickly. But he's just a natural musical person that can kind of just pick up an instrument and figure it out. So I learned a lot from him just from being friends and being roommates and like asking him, “Teach me how to play this song. Teach me how to play this song.”

The alternate tunings really came from Vic Villareal, who was the guitar player in Cap’n Jazz. And he's a phenomenal guitar player. I would say Victor and this guy, Kevin Frank, who was in a band, Gauge, that we all looked up to at the time. Those were like my two guitar heroes of my high school days. But Vic took classical guitar lessons as a kid and whoever his teacher was, that person should get credit for inventing Midwest emo because technically they taught him finger picking and the open C tuning that I eventually stole. And when he had it, it was like EACGCE. And I added the F on the low E string to make the FACGCE tuning that we made famous with “Never Meant” and other songs, but that came from Vic. So there was a couple Cap'n Jazz songs in that open C tuning. 

Mike Kinsella: Victor in Cap'n Jazz, our last couple songs that Cap'n Jazz wrote, he was in a FACGCE. Like he was just sort of stumbling into this like kind of new alternate tuning world. He's just like a guitar freak, he's so awesome. And he was, you know, it was just resonating and hitting these chords that were, you know, they're impossible to hit on a standard tuned guitar. So that was exciting. That was, you know, I was also hitting a, already hitting a wall where, I'm not like technically that good, but I think like I can hear music in a way where I can sort of hear, I'd be like, “Oh, these are these chords and this is what's happening.” And then in standard tuning, it was just becoming too, maybe repetitive. 

Steve Holmes: So that was our introduction to open tunings. And then I think freshman year, we discovered Nick Drake and Red House Painters and kind of like started diving deep onto the fact that, “Oh, you could, every song could be in a different tuning.” And Mike and I got obsessed with that and trying to invent a new tuning for every song we would write. 

Mike Kinsella: At the time we were both, again, living together as freshmen in college and, you know, everything's sort of new and you're kind of like still in this age of discovery. And I mean, I think my brother sent me my first introduction to like Nick Drake and sort of like folky stuff. And we are both getting out of like punk and more like angular shit and angry shit into more like, you know, sort of melodic and maybe like Sea and Cake was kind of like influential on that. “Oh, it's like these like repetitive patterns,” and Stereolab, we were just finding stuff at the same time that was removed from maybe like whatever, again, like sort of indie punk stuff that we had, you know, till that point grown up with. 

Steve Holmes: We came out of the whole Fugazi, Dischord, hardcore scene, like those are the bands that we worshiped growing up. And a big record for us freshman year was Yank Crime by Drive Like Jehu and I think Mike and I decided like, “This band mastered this style of music. Like nobody could rock harder than these guys and have it be more mathematical and the screamy vocals.” And we were like, “Nobody can compete with that.” So when we started this band, we intentionally were like, “Okay, let's do the opposite. Let's try to make a band that's slow and quiet and pretty because we were also into a lot of like Slowcore stuff and Shoegaze stuff and you know Codeine and Low and Red House Painters and the Smiths and so there was that other side that we were into very pretty music and we decided to make a band that was more inspired by that. And obviously there was the whole post rock scene that was happening in Chicago. We discovered Tortoise and Sea and Cake our freshman year as well. And that was a huge influence kind of mind shifting of like, “Oh, okay, there's a whole different way you can play music and it doesn't even have to have words. Like you can be an instrumental band and that was a viable way to make music.” So I think really like when we started this band, because we didn't own any gear, like it really was, it was an instrumental project. I think lyrics were sort of an afterthought and every song was written just as a musical composition first. 

But then officially the band started in 1997, like January, like right after, you know, holiday break, Mike and Steve Lamos had been in a band called The One Up Downstairs that was together for maybe, you know, six months of our sophomore year of college. And they, over the winter break, the band broke up and immediately I was like, “Ooh, I want to start a band with Steve Lamos.” And he and I started playing. 

Steve Lamos: My name is Steve Lamos. I'm the drummer and sometimes trumpet player for American Football. I auditioned for a band maybe Steve was a part of or something and it didn't work out the first time. I think I had just started playing drums and Steve was like, “Oh, we need somebody else.” I ended up playing with some different folks in Champaign, Illinois, and Mike came and saw that band. And I think he might've introduced himself after the show, and he ended up singing with that band for a little while. That band kind of stopped performing. Mike was doing something else, and then Steve Holmes reached back out to me and said, “Hey, let's just play as a two piece.” I didn't know, actually, that Steve and Mike were roommates. 

Mike Kinsella: We knew Steve Lamos, the drummer from, he went to a different suburban high school by us, but he was playing trumpet. Like, he played on a Braid album, so they were, like, friends of ours. I was a big fan of Steve Lamos's drums. I briefly joined a band he was in called The One Up Downstairs, and that band flamed out with a fist fight, if I remember correctly. It wasn't, you know, between us, it was other people. Yeah, it was sort of like a, kind of like a little tiny little scene, and maybe Steve Holmes started playing, they started playing together, like, just jamming, and they would record their practice on little cassette tapes, and he would come home and listen to it. And I just remember immediately being like, “Oh, this is cool.” Like it's not hardcore. It's not like spastic punk shit. It's like, you know, it's obviously guitar noodles and it's a melodic and it was very cool already. And so on the weekends, they were getting together to jam and I asked if I can get together and jam with them cause I had nothing better to do. And that's how the band sort of started. 

Steve Lamos: Steve is one of my favorite players. To this day, I've never seen anybody respond like Mike does, or the way that those two guys work together is really, really unbelievable. I mean, Mike, he really is just an astonishing player, and I just love the two of them together. They have always struck me as fraternal. I know, you know, Tim is Mike's real brother, but I've always felt like Mike and Steve are also brotherly in the ways that, you know, they get along, in the ways that they fight and all that stuff. It is really something. Mike is a special player, Steve is as well, but I think the two of them together is just this amazing thing and they're, neither one is afraid to do alternate tunings, neither one, they love it and they invent things. They sort of invent the guitar anew every time. 

Steve Holmes: So we were super influenced by this record called Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, he’s a minimalist classical composer. And we kind of tried to steal that technique in a lot of our songs, like “Five Silent Miles” is one of the first songs we had written and our concept was, “Let's try to do Music for 18 Musicians with two guitars and drums.” Like how can we basically write a part that stays still while the next part comes in and then that part stays and then the next part moves. And they're kind of just moving over each other and these interlocking parts that if you hear one of them alone, doesn't really sound like anything, but then when you hear them, the way they overlap it's more interesting. 

Mike Kinsella: I do remember writing a couple of songs like specifically sitting on a couch with Steve on a, you know, Saturday morning and just like, he's like practicing looping his part, which is in, you know, 13 or something. And I'm trying to ignore him, but also play my part, which is in 7. And then, you know, they only catch every six cycles around or something, then the 1 lands. And so like, we were both learning like, how to create these patterns. It was less about like, everything's changing at once and these big dramatic changes and more like, “Okay, if I continue and your thing fades out, and then you can bubble up with a different noodle or a different melody underneath the same melody.” It's like repurposing the same melodies or the same patterns. And it has a different effect if you pair it with something else. So it still interests me as I'm writing. That interests me more than sort of like, “This is part A, this is part B.” I mean, you know, writing new music, I'm still sort of like, “Oh my God, my, you know, it's way cooler if I'm playing my part A and you're already moved to part C. But then when I put my B on your C, it hasn't happened yet. And now we're two thirds through the song and we'll call that a bridge.” You know what I mean? Like changes feel so much, that it can have like a different impact. 

Steve Holmes: Thankfully, Steve Lamos owned a guitar and that became the guitar that Mike used in this band. So we, when we would practice, would be depending on who we could borrow an amp from. Cause I had a guitar and an amp, I think I had a tuner, but not even a, like a pedal tuner. It was like literally the Boss one that you plug in, the little cube thing. And Mike would use Steve Lamos's guitar and we'd borrow our friend Blake's amp to rehearse. And we'd have to, you know, borrow a bass amp and a bass. Actually, I think Lamos owned a bass. But yeah, it was really kind of just scruffy, whatever we could get and whenever we could get it. 

Mike Kinsella: I was playing on all borrowed gear, the entirety of the band's existence. So the songs I would write bass on, it was definitely just played through a guitar amp. We practiced in Steve Lamos's living room, so it wasn't like some sort of studio setup. I don't remember if there was a mic or PA set up, maybe eventually there was, but definitely not for a while. And definitely the songs took shape, mostly vocal-less. I mean, I think the guys probably heard any sort of vocals, you know, at a show when I start yelping at the mic and they could hear it or literally in the studio, like that they would be like, “Oh, that's the melody or something.”

Steve Lamos: There's a lot of talk about the American Football house and it's lovely and wonderful. And I've, once I was in the yard of the American Football house, that's it. The real American Football house is now a hole in the ground near Urbana High School, but we would get together two or three times a week in this little one room house that I rented as a grad student. And then my wife and I first moved in together, we wrote everything there. And so I do, I guess I do remember the kind of working two or three times a week in a live setting. They would come to practice with these amazing, intricate things. Again, I think Steve would sort of be a catalyst. “Here's a part,” Mike would do his magical things that he does. They would work through these kind of shifts and interesting things together and then I would sort of, you know, I would just be like, “Well, obviously if they're doing that, this is what has to happen.” I had really honestly just started playing. I have played music my whole life since I was four or five years old. I'd only started calling myself a drummer maybe for the year previous. It was easy in a weird way to kind of, it just felt really comfortable. I remember the word shift all the time in rehearsals. Either Mike would yell, “shift,” and something would happen, or Steve would yell, “shift,” and something would happen, or they would talk about, “Oh this part needs to kind of mutate and then shift into this other thing, or I'll do this noodle and you do that other noodle.” And I think they were doing those things, but letting me kind of bash on the drums a little bit. And so when somebody would yell, “shift,” or they talk about shifts, it became a way for me to orient to, you know, whatever it is they were doing. And I do, it's not verse/chorus-y music. This band got mentioned in a Math Rock book recently, and it sort of got elements of that, but I do think they were deeply interested in trying to make those elements melodic, as opposed to mathy, just for the sake of counting things. I don't think we counted a terrible bunch, you know, it's just sort of like you feel the thing and then afterwards you try to figure out what whatever time signature it was in. 

Mike Kinsella: Just getting to college, I remember meeting Polyvinyl. Matt (Lunsford) and Darcy (Knight), who started Polyvinyl, had set up a show for Cap'n Jazz, maybe a year or two earlier, in Danville, Illinois. which is a small, small town. And they were already putting out 7-inch records by local bands that they were just friends with or bands they liked, which is, you know, again, as like a teenager, that's like, it's like, “Oh,” it leaves an impression. You know what I mean? Like the DIY ethic, the sort of local scene-based ethic of supporting and creating something from nothing. So hat was, you know, impressive and impressionable. And so by going to college, which is in Champaign, just outside of Danville. We would see them outside at shows, and it was like, “Oh,” you know, they knew that I was in Cap’n Jazz, like, we had this sort of, like, brief history together. And then we were just fans of music together for a couple of years. And then when it came time to put music out, they were happy to do it. And it was sort of a no brainer. 

Steve Holmes: They basically started a fanzine that put out a 7-inch single and eventually became a record label. And they were working with friends of ours in Braid and in Rainer Maria before us. So it was sort of a natural fit that when we started playing that, you know, if we were going to put out a record that we would do it on Polyvinyl. And there was no record deal, it was like a handshake, it's like we, you know, Matt came to see one of our shows and he was like, “Oh, we're doing this single series. Do you guys want to do it?” “Yeah, sure.” Handshake deal. And we're lucky that they even wanted to put out a record by a band that A, nobody had heard of, and B, was breaking up. Like the fact that the record exists is kind of ridiculous. And it's a testament to Matt and Darcy sticking up for music that they believed in, even if they didn't think there was going to be an audience for it. In the Dischord model of, “We know this band is going to cease to exist. We never played a single show after we recorded the album. We basically made it and went our separate ways, but we wanted to document the thing. Here was a band that existed. These songs were cool. Even if only a hundred people will care, it's worth putting it out into the world and, you know, seeing what happens.” Cause you know, we never saw Embrace or Rites of Spring, but we love those records. Every year at the end of the school year, we would record like, “What had we written that year? And let's just document it.” So the first year when we'd been a band for like three months, we went to Steve Lamos, his dad's house and recorded on quarter inch tape, the four or five songs we'd written. And that later came out just a few years ago as Year One Demos. Like those were the first few songs we wrote. And then the second year at the end, we did our, that first EP, the three songs that came out and then senior year, we had an album's worth of material. 

Mike Kinsella: We went to the studio to track the full length. We already knew we were breaking up. Two of us were graduating and leaving, heading back to Chicago. So it was just sort of like a, “Oh, like just one final document of the work we've done and maybe what we…” I was going to say accomplished, but at the time it wasn't even an accomplishment. It was just, you know, “Polyvinyl is willing to do it.” And I think they knew at the time too, we weren't going to tour or anything. So it was just like, truly in there minds, it was just like, “Okay, let's document this.”

Steve Lamos: That was very much their language of documentation. And I, I just thought, “Okay, you know, I guess I would rather record this than not.” We had definitely been pretty diligent about, you know, rehearsing and we didn't play live all that much. My memory, I had told people for a long time, “Oh, we played like 3 shows.” I guess we'd played 15 or 20 and Holmes, the vault, I'm sure has names and dates for all of them. So I guess we were sort of working on a live thing, but it really did feel, I guess, most of all, like an experiment or just something we did on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We had already decided not to be a band anymore and I was sort of upset about that. I thought, “This is a, you know, sort of, I'm disappointed, it's a wasted opportunity.” But I remember the recording actually being a lot of fun. And I remember a fair amount of what it meant to be in that garage. It was essentially a garage. The guy who engineered this was named Brendan Gamble. It was really, really a great experience. I remember doing a lot of live takes and then Mike doing vocals later and then us, you know, you had to do the live fader thing back then. So there was like three of us working the board and actually doing the fades in real time.

Mike Kinsella: Yeah I remember tracking the album with Brendan and it was, you know, not my first experience in a studio, but it was sort of my first, maybe my first experience where I was sort of like a front man or anybody who had any sort of say. So I remember him being like super easy to work with and like super, you know, we would just like tell him our, at the time, like in hindsight, very naive and, you know, in a good way, endearingly naive, but we're just sort of like,  like we tracked the songs and realized they were very thin and they weren't very impactful immediately. And so we didn't have bass on most of the songs. So we're just like, “Oh, let's just double these. We'll double every guitar on the album,” like to no click and stuff. So probably wasn't that easy. And I think Brendan did a great job of maybe curating that because we were again, young and not that great at our instruments. Yeah, just like super easy to work with and helpful and like sort of, getting us where maybe even if we didn't know we were going, we wanted to go. 

Steve Holmes: The place we recorded was basically a converted, like a one room. I think it was a garage probably. And that was maybe the C studio (laughs). So it was the cheapest thing we could afford. And Brendan was a local guy who played drums in a band called Moon Seven Times. And we'd kind of, I'd seen him, he was definitely, you know, probably only like seven years older than us, but you know, when you're a 20 year-old, that seems like a lot and he seemed like, you know, a proper adult and real musician and we were just kids. So he was a huge help and the fact that he was a drummer himself, I think he always made the drums sound phenomenal. I think part of the reason those records have stood the test of time and resonated is the way he was able to capture Steve Lamos. 

Mike Kinsella: I believe in my mind, we recorded everything and mixed it all in like five days. Yeah so it was, it was probably a rough, I think we'd do a take or two live. And it was essentially like, “Let's try to get Lamos comfortable and make sure he feels good about his take.” And he was the most proficient and the most practiced, to this day. So we weren't really worried about that. It was, you know, with this stupid band too, it's always like tuning is an issue. So you get a couple of takes when you're in tune and then it starts to devolve from there. So yeah, it's probably just a couple of takes of each. Like I said, then we had to go back and sort of layer each one. Once we like picked which take of those few or whatever, we're like, “What's the best take?” And then there's a little bit of time for some sort of overdub. Like if you, you know, maybe a big guitar comes in for one second, “Okay, then we got to quickly overdub that.” And then, that's like day three, I guess, or maybe, and then, or day two and a half, we're done with guitars and drums and basic tracking. And then some tambourines, some vocals. And then we had to mix for probably two days or something. So it was pretty quick. 

“Never Meant” 

Mike Kinsella: Obviously I remember Holmes’s, the original “Never Meant” melody, you know,  again, referencing bands like Sea and Cake and stuff and it was just, it felt like, it was sort of like an accomplished version of what we were trying to sound like at the time. And, you know, we had a bunch of these other noodles. We had the EP kind of already, recording stuff. So we already kind of like knew maybe a formula, like I was explaining before, like kind of like a part and then another part that might shift that part. So I don't remember writing my guitar part, I just remember Steve's guitar part more. 

Steve Holmes: So that one was one that I started with the famous riff like that, you know, that was a song written in the FACGCE tuning. And I remember being super proud of myself when I came up with that riff. I'm like, “Oh, this is cool.” I don't really have a lot of memory of like actually sitting and arranging that with Mike and coming up with the different parts, but we did know, like we could tell, like, “Well, this is a good song. This is definitely a level up from most of our material.” And I do remember like Lamos said, like after the take that's on the record, he's like, “Well, that's as good as we're ever going to play that.” And so, okay, glad we could capture it. 

Steve Lamos: I distinctly remember putting my sticks down, like the snare in my mind's eye, the snare is in front of me. I remember, I put them down and I said out loud, “Well, I'm not doing that one any better than that.” That's the one thing I remember from that particular take. And that's not like, “Oh, it was a great take,” but it was just like, “that's how that one needs to feel and go.”

Mike Kinsella: Having relearned it to like do the reunion shows and now turns into just the actual band shows that we're playing now. I don't know if I'm in the same tuning I ever was. Like, I don't know if I've ever successfully relearned my guitar part. Yeah, I guess that's like a total example of that system of like, Holmes, essentially, I think probably two parts throughout the song. And it's more sort of like me and Lamos were sort of shifting dynamics, either over it or under it. And, you know, like, tell me what the chorus of “Never Meant” is. I don't know. I think the band would disagree with the chorus is. 

Steve Holmes: We spend a lot of time trying to figure out, “How do we make these arrangements as intricate as possible without sounding like overwrought?” Like we wanted it to sound natural and simple, but be very technical underneath. It's like, unlike other math rock bands, where it's super like jagged and insane, we were trying to make it very fluid and beautiful. And if you weren't a musician, you didn't necessarily have to know what was happening to appreciate the beauty of the music. I couldn't actually count while I was playing, I would always be like, “Hey Mike, what am I doing here? I wrote this cool riff,” and then he'd have to sit there and kind of like, “Oh, that's in like 15.” I'm like, “Oh, cool.” But I wouldn't know. I would just write a thing that felt good. And then Lamos would have to try to figure out like, “What are these idiots doing?” 

Steve Lamos: I very recently had to do what they call a playthrough for that one where I, you know, you play live on video so folks can sort of see what's happening, but to that track. And boy, I spent a lot of time. I used AI to scrub out my drums and I spent a lot of time like trying to recreate that experience and it's a really hard thing to do. That's not an easily clickable song. We did everything on LP1 live and it's not that it's sloppy or swimmy, but it's very kind of vibey. They were rehearsing all the time and they were like a unit. It was really, again, it was just sort of magical. So it was one of those moments where I think everything kind of lined up and then to play with it retrospectively is like, or retroactively I should say is like, “Oh God, this is really, it's really, really challenging to do that.” And other than that, I don't remember a damn thing. I don't remember if there were lyrics written when we went into it, I don't remember if Mike wrote them in the studio. Yeah, but I distinctly remember the feeling of being like, “Oh, that one was, that one was a fun one to record.” 

Mike Kinsella: So a lot of the vocals, I mean, I would say probably like, I don't know, 90 percent of them were sort of finished in the studio at that last session. I just had these notebooks with sort of vague high school diary kind of, you know, I'm trying to write songs that sound like  Depeche Mode or The Cure, the bands that I liked, like sort of like, overtly dramatic and they seem at the time like super youthful to me still. But they weren't even like, there wasn't necessarily themes, it was just sort of like lines and then like maybe flesh out a little bit of this line and give like a vague story, but they weren't like mostly that specific or anything. Yeah, “Never Meant” was sort of, it was a last minute Hail Mary and I think it, I think we knew immediately we were like, “Oh, that one's cool. Let's put that first.” That was like, let's make sure people hear that if they're going to like just hit play on the cassette or something. Yeah it doesn't surprise me that that one sort of stands out because I think it actually, that one overachieved maybe. 

Steve Holmes: It makes sense that that's the one that kind of resonated. I think lyrically, you know, it's a classic breakup song and I think the lyrics, like, you know, it's very dramatic teenager-y stuff. And like I think it's funny like that line Mike's like, “Not to be overly dramatic.” And then, “Overly,” like everyone, the crowd sings that every night when we play it. And then he's, you know, he says, “Not to be overly dramatic.” And then says like the most melodramatic line that you can, which I think resonates with teenagers who are, you know, going through those things. 

I think it was in 2020 or 2021, Vulture did like a greatest hundred emo songs of all time and put “Never Meant” as the number one, the list, thanks to Ian Cohen. And it was, you know, it did kind of feel like we were the first retroactive one hit wonder because, you know, the record came out to zero recognition. And then 25 years later or 20 years later, it's like, “Yeah, this is the one of all the songs in that genre,” which is obviously debatable. But it's flattering that anyone thinks that. 

Mike Kinsella: Like “Never Meant,” am I surprised it's like sort of popular? No, it's like, I'm like, “That's a great little fucking pop song.” Am I surprised the whole album though? Like people stick around and listen to the rest of the album and, you know, cause I feel like the bookends are the best, maybe parts of the album. So yeah, I'm surprised (laughs). 

“The Summer Ends” 

Mike Kinsella: If we were, you know, whatever, I guess if emo's the word or I don't know, I think we were just sort of like a quiet understated sort of like emotive band. He uses a trumpet as an instrument, like the notes he's hitting is like, so like, yeah, it's like a gravity to it. And I knew him sort of as a trumpet player before a drummer, so I knew he had like that skill. And it was like a cool skill, yeah, in a rock band. 

Steve Holmes: The horn melody too, in the beginning, I think one of the things that gives the band, the kind of sad feeling is Lamos's horn parts like that, you know, this is one of the few songs I'm playing in standard, but Mike is in like an open E major tuning and the music is E major. Like it's a major key part, but Lamos is playing a minor key horn melody. And he actually, the kind of blue note he comes in on, very Miles-inspired. It's in a different melodic world than Mike and I live in. Like, that's not a note either of us would have ever chosen to play, but that's what makes it interesting. I think his melodic voicings are very different than Mike and mine. And that comes from his kind of jazz upbringing. And I think that's a lot of what gives the nuance and the melancholy to these songs. 

Steve Lamos: Because I'm not a singer, I'm afraid to sing, you know, those sorts of things, I think that was sort of my attempt to contribute something melodically. And again, when we had a lot of these songs that were sort of instrumentally based, I think it was just like, “Well, I'm hearing this thing, you know, can I play it for you guys?” And then I imagine I did that probably more than ended up on the record, but I think some of these things then ended up, you know, they just made sense in the context of the song. And that trumpet melody is, is clearly one of them that sort of made the cut. I played the trumpet for whoever would let me, in whatever setting they'd let me, for no money, because I really wanted to be a drummer. And so all these bands down there, like Braid for instance, I played four or five trumpet things for them over the years. I loved it, I was grateful that they wanted that, and also it just got me in the studio, so I could sort of see how things work, and talk to people. So because I had studied trumpet so intensely as a younger kid, and then put it away, some of those parts are pitchy like as the adult me is like, “Oh boy, okay.” You know, when you put the horn away, as I learned in 2014, again, when you put it away for a long time, like that whole embouchure thing, just out the window, it goes. And so it must've also been the case that I had picked it back up and was just starting to practice again. And I'm glad that people are happy with the emotion of some of those parts because some of the actual tune is like, “Oh boy.” 

I listened to almost nothing but jazz, especially to that point in life, but I love it so much and I think it's bubbled up into whatever this is in ways that I hope are at least true to the spirit. You know, jazz is sort of like, this amazing cultural expression in this country of love and joy and sort of, you know, African American struggle and freedom and all these sorts of things and then here's me as, you know, sort of a white kid from the suburbs. Just that music was so incredibly meaningful and important to me and I think if nothing else, it's just sort of given me a frame of reference for trying to understand what like music is about, I guess. 

Steve Holmes: He'd only been playing drums when we started this band for like two years. Like he didn't pick up the drums till he was like 21, but he's a natural musician. He started playing violin when he was four years old and played in his dad's polka band when he was a child and played trumpet all through high school and had later picked up bass and been in rock bands. But he, yeah, he started playing drums as like a 21 year-old, and my freshman year of college, they asked me to join this like post-hardcore band he was in. And the funny thing was like, the reason I didn't join it, I was like, “Ah, the drummer's not that good.” I had a band from my high school friends that I was still playing with on the side and I was like, “Well, I'll stay with those guys.” And then fast forward six months later and just from learning from these little seventies jazz books, he sounds like John McEntire from Sea and Cake. And that just, shows like both what a great musician he is, but how dedicated he is to practice. Like he rehearses more than any person I've ever met in my life, still to this day, he practices like a madman. And it shows, like he's an incredible drummer and I really think super underrated. I think the reason this band, we're talking about at 25 years later is because of how creative the drums are in large part. So “Summer Ends,” that one started with the opening riff, that's Mike's part, which is kind of like a lilting 7/4 slow moving melody. And to me, like that whole intro and the arrangement of that song, to me, like the reason it's interesting and powerful is really about the drums. I think that this song is a good example of Steve Lamos’s approach to the drums as a musician, like he's a very musical drummer. He doesn't think of the drums as, “I'm just keeping time and I'm going to do a straight rock beat.” He's thinking about what's happening in this part of the song and, “how can I contribute to the mood and then how can I move it along as it gets into the next section and the drums are very syncopated when the whole band comes in after the horn part?” And then like the snare rolls and the outro, like he does a lot of really interesting things where he puts a lot of thought into the arrangement. And I think like, as a musician, like he was 100 percent an equal songwriter in all of these songs and his contributions, you know, without them, the songs wouldn't be the same. And probably no one would care about this band. 

Mike Kinsella: It's almost insane to think like, that's the drum part for a, such a capable drummer that he has the restraint and whatever, or like, it's like, I think it's like, yeah, restraint and like sort of forethought of like, “Okay, this is going to pay off later. If I just hit this single drum for a few minutes, when I finally come in,” or when something happens, every little thing has like a greater impact if you're doing less, you know what I mean? That's just happening today. You know, we’re writing new stuff. I got like rock drummer brain and I always want a big crash out of every one. I want a big crash on every one, two, three, four, actually. But it's not correct, it's just how my brain hears music or whatever. So Lamos still, like, to this day, just doesn't really give big crashes and it's like, it's almost like you hear it even more because you expect the big crash and when it's not there you almost hear it more and it has, like, more weight in some sort of bizarro way.

Steve Lamos: That one was very minimalist on purpose. It seemed like the parts that the two guys had come up with were so minimal that to play easily sort of trampled on or easily sort of ruined. Again, I don't remember if that, some of these songs had vocals when we went into the studio, some came later. So I actually would be curious to know whether Mike had the lyric for that. And, you know, say I was writing the drum part to that, or it was just like, “Man, this is so open, we can't play anything.” And then we'll see where the, you know, where the lyrics land. That is not one that I remember, honestly, which order things went in, but I think delicate was kind of the vibe there. And so I imagine that's why we ended up playing it the way that we did. 

Mike Kinsella: “Summer Ends,” if I remember trying to capture what we were trying to evoke  back then, I think we did a good job. You know, I think we were like totally conscious of, we didn't want to be like a rock band, blah, blah, blah. I think it's got a nice pace to it. I'm not sure at what point the vocals, I think that one was pretty last minute sort of just like, “I got some lines written down, I’ll try to make them sound nice in the song.” Everything up to that point, you know, if I started writing for the songs and I was a sophomore in college or something, you know, I had maybe one major relationship and a couple less major relationships that failed and then I moved to college. And so everything up to that point was like everything that had any sort of gravity was just things changing and things ending, you know, in these, usually around school or something starting. So I sang, sang what I knew, yeah. 

Steve Holmes: Mike's like his approach to writing lyrics was always, you know, he loved The Cure and the Smiths, so the lyrics should be kind of like an upbeat major key song against, you know, a sad lyric. That was kind of always his mantra of writing lyrics. And when you're a kid, your life is based around summer break and then back to school. And you know what I mean? The cycle of life with the seasons, I think is just embedded in the DNA of people who live in the Midwest. 

Steve Lamos: The record I would say as a whole has lots to do with the endings of things and the new beginnings of things. And the sort of melancholy that surrounds both of those kinds of changes, right? Here are sets of things that felt a certain way and here are these new kinds of uncertainties. And that must, that undoubtedly is part of the attraction to this, I think, is this sense that, you know, especially younger people are engaged in that kind of thing all the time, right? Here's the end of one chapter and you see that with mixed emotion, you know, there's this new chapter, you're excited, but you're also nervous. Then I think some of the lyrics on LP1, hit that on the nose, some get at that a little bit more obliquely. And so it must be the combination of the lyrical material and the sort of emotional things with that, along with the way that the record unfolds from start to finish. It must be those things together. I don't think the record would work if it were instrumental, I don't think the record would work if it were spoken word, it's gotta be all that stuff together and maybe that's, you know, maybe that's just one of those interesting things. I mean, you know, we were lucky enough to be part of it and watch it come together. And now it does whatever it does, independent of us. 

“Summer Ends” is a, I think it's a nice, we've had to learn the record in order for these reunion shows. And I think the sequencing makes so much sense to me at this point. It's a perfect sort of like, if it's like, you know, a lineup in baseball, it's a perfect second hitter. You want your lead off on base. The second person is just supposed to, you know, do things and like, keep momentum going, but it almost flips things around. “Alright, let's slow down, let's sort of be deliberate.” The trumpet thing announces something. I think the rest of the song is so stayed and relaxed. And then the next song, “Honestly?” is this kind of, you know, driving upbeat thing. Like what a three hole hitter should be. And, you know, off we go.

“Honestly?” 

Steve Holmes: “Honestly?” is, you know, one of our more rocking songs (laughs) for American Football, kind of starts in the kind of a straight 4/4. And the conception of that one, so Mike wrote that opening riff and we're basically playing the same part. So he's playing, like the melody that we're playing is the, like the intro before the drums come in. We're both playing that same thing, but he's on the upbeat and I'm on the downbeat. And it's kind of funny, like, it feels like it has like a stutter start, like almost like a mess up and what people don't realize, like that's on purpose, that's because what you're hearing is the upbeat and then we come in on the down. So it feels like an abrupt thing when the drums come in. And so that basically the two guitar parts, it's just like one is chasing the other the whole time. 

Mike Kinsella: Yeah, I guess writing “Honestly?” was the first time, I mean, I can't think of another example. I don't know where he got the idea where we play the same exact part, but I just play the same thing on the ups right behind him. And it's it, all it is, is it gives a delay effect, which you could very easily mimic on a pedal, but you know, we're sitting on a couch and we were bored and we had, for whatever reason, we were both interested in this. We thought it was clever enough that it was, it warranted practicing. So yeah, and then I remember trying to play this one when we had to relearn it for the reunion shows. I don't know if there's a version where I was singing and playing originally, I don't remember doing that, but realizing that I have to play the ups and then sing on the downs and sing, it was like, “Whoa, this is a mindfuck,” so that one, just muscle, muscle memory. 

Steve Lamos: I think we used to even call it, like, the “Rebel Rebel” song, like there's that David Bowie thing. And I remember them figuring out, “Well, all right, so it sounds like David Bowie, what are we going to do with it?” And then they started staggering it almost round style, you know, downbeat, upbeat in the way that only, you know, like young people would be like, “Oh, this is cool.” I still love it though. Like it's still one of my favorite ones to play. 

Mike Kinsella: Well, I remember tracking the vocals to “Honestly,” and filling these big gaps with the high, like (sings) “teen dreams.” Like there was just space there and we realized like, “Hmm, Is there anything we can put in here to sort of like fill this out?” Cause there was just too much space. 

Steve Holmes: I think that was actually Lamos's idea. So he, so basically the guitar part is sort of in a call and response style. And he's like, “Oh, what if the vocals did the same thing? So why don't you double yourself? Like say the same line in a call and response style to kind of mimic what the guitars are doing.” 

Mike Kinsella: So possibly my most cringe worthy lyrics in some aspects, but I'm also like, ah, it solved that problem all right. And it's so fun to be far enough removed, like if you were doing this as a five year thing, you know, I'd be so embarrassed by all of it that I'd probably just said no, but now as a grown man, I'm kind of like, “Oh, that was, that's why, you know, a kid version of me did this, made this choice or whatever.” And I'm still singing them for the world to hear. So I wasn't too embarrassed, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I stand by it all now as a grown up, but it took some time. 

Steve Lamos: I can imagine Mike doesn't necessarily like singing it because lyrically it's very rooted, you know, in that time, but I think it's such a fun, driving thing, and then there's the shift,  there's a whole vibe shift right in the middle, right? There's this kind of the “Rebel Rebel” thing, and then Steve and I do this thing, and we still do it live, and we still do it the same way, and then the end is one of my most enjoyable moments of any live show, and of that record, too, frankly, is the kind of big sweeping, you know, J. Mascis, My Bloody Valentine guitar thing and the bang, bang of the drums at the end. Yeah, I liked that one. I still like that one. And so even though the lyrics are sort of rooted in a certain moment, it's a blast to play that song even still. 

Steve Holmes: The long extended outro we wrote around this little cyclical riff that I had, which is, I'm basically in a 4, but Lamos is playing a 6/8 against it. So there's a lot of, you know, polyrhythm happening. And then Mike does, you know, his version of a guitar solo over that outro part. The outro, I think was like kind of our version of, you know, inspired by My Bloody Valentine or some of the noisier Red House Painters tracks. We wanted to have like a kind of a big swirling part. And then I, that's like one of the few that has a synth part. I played the little Profit, whatever keyboard they had at the studio that has like a roiling low bass note. That's just kind of rumbling under the whole outro. 

Mike Kinsella: That might be the only, is that the only synth part on the record? You know, we had to drop some low bass, like low end synth note, and then there's like percussion, you know what I mean? We knew we wanted to build that out. I'm trying to think maybe, what, you know, 20 or 21 year-old me is, what would be the inspiration for that part specifically? I don't know.  Some of them I know like, you know, “Oh, I'm trying to sound like Ida, or I'm trying to sound like whatever,” that part, I don't know. That might be more like maybe Lamos took over on that one and sort of pushed it into like a weirder zone. 

Steve Holmes: That was like one of our main tricks (laughs). It's like, if we take a part, play it forever, but there's sort of subtle changes within like the drums do like a different thing on the tom to kind of build it up. And then Mike kind of switches from that, that bendy part into these little spindly kind of single note melodies that he does and harmonizes. And then at the very end, like in the studio, I wrote like with like a minute left in the song, there's this other riff that comes in and I kind of wrote that last minute to sync up with the little spindly guitars that Mike's playing. 

It was engineered well, I mean, kudos to Brendan for doing a great job, getting great tones and great sounds on everything. And I think part of that is because like that record probably could have been recorded anytime from like the fifties to yesterday. Like there's almost no effects. It's all just like regular guitars. We didn't own any guitar pedals, you know, it's clean amp tones and there's, you know, next, there's like maybe two effects on the whole record and, you know, those couple little minimal keyboard parts. And so I think that's part of the reason that it has stood the test of time too, is that it doesn't necessarily feel like it's of any specific era. Like it feels like it could be from the 90s, it could be from the 2010s, 2020s. Like it could be from any era, which is cool. 

“For Sure.”

Steve Holmes: That was actually the first song this band ever had. I wrote that probably like the, you know, winter break, right before we started the band. I had just got my first acoustic guitar and I wrote, I actually have a recording that my friend just unearthed that we did at his house over that winter break. And this was the first song that I brought to Lamos when we started playing together  and that was in the FACGCE tuning. So that was the first song I ever wrote in that tuning, which as far as I know, maybe I invented. Like I stole Vic's thing and added the F as far as I know, that was at least to me, that I had come up with that. And then Mike played bass on that song. So there's only bass on two songs on the album and it's just the two that he played bass live. Everything else is just two guitars and drums. So all the low end just comes from us doubling the root notes. 

Mike Kinsella: “For Sure.” would be one of the two bass tracks, or bass parts on the album. I think Holmes's part moves so, it's like really delicate and it moves so subtly that it didn't need a,  you know, it just needed a little melody. And so the bass is just holding the root notes and essentially, I wrote a separate song under Holmes's cool noodle. You know what I mean? Like, it's like his noodle can go on forever and it would just like drift in the air. And then the bass sort of anchored it. Holmes's part's so floaty, kind of could go on forever that like, you know, when you hit like this other note, it's like, ooh, like it's like a exhale each time or something. It unfolds so slow and I think it only goes around. I think he goes around with the bass holding or maybe it goes around without the bass. And then, yeah, I mean like the whole thing, essentially it's just one cycle, which I, you know, at the time to anything we could do that we thought was like. different than verse, chorus, verse, chorus, you know, we were excited to try and do.

Steve Holmes: Again, this one is about the horn melody. I think Lamos's part really kind of accents the kind of, the song is not in a minor key, it's in like a major nine and he gives a minor feel to it that really just makes it interesting. 

Steve Lamos: You know, I don't think we set out to make a 6/8 almost like quiet waltz or whatever. Evidently the trumpet part came about at some point. I don't know if it came before the lyrics or after, but I just, it's one of my favorite little gems on that record. 

I could also go back and punch my earlier self. Like, “Why do you write these hard trumpet parts?” Like it starts high and like, when I do it live, now I have to kind of like modify it a little bit because I can't always hit that first note. But I like that melody. I think it brings something to, to what those guys are going for in the song.

Mike Kinsella: I think like, “For Sure.” specifically like, his trumpet line would dictate, you know, the vibe of the song, where it's going to go. And then he comes in small in drums, and then I would take over, and it was, you know, he set the tone, and I know I wrote, the second note, it's like, (sings) “June seems,” that seems is like a note, probably up until that point, wouldn't have seen, or it's (sings) “June seems too late,” that, whatever those three notes are, is an absolute me trying to make Steve Lemos like me. I'm just like, “What's a melody you would like? I'll sing it for you.” And, you know, it didn't come natural to me, but his like jazz background, I know that that influenced how I was kind of like writing at the time because he was introducing literally new notes to me. You know, I worked with him like these melodic configurations. I think it's probably fair to say we were all trying to like, you know, impress each other. You know, he was such a unique drummer and I knew he had a jazz background. So on that song, you know, maybe vocally, I'm trying to, it's sort of my pop world, the way I'm moving the song. And then I'm adding maybe like his little jazz notes just to make him happy. 

Steve Holmes: This was the first one that we tracked in the studio and Mike had a cold the week we were tracking. And so he couldn't actually sing in his like full voice. So he was doing like this whispery take and we were like, “Oh, that sounds cool, it sounds like Elliott Smith.” So that, I think it was sort of just happenstance that he did more of a kind of a subdued vocal on this song that totally fits the track. And just was because he was under the weather and, you know, felt better a couple of days later. 

Steve Lamos: This is some of my favorite lyrics from Mike ever. I love them. I love, it's so, oh my gosh, it's just like perfect to me. The way that they work, the vowel sounds he uses. I love that this is just a straightforward song on a record full of this, that, and the other kind of odd time or change. It almost reminds, even still, like, some kind of, like, 50s, 60s doo wop. I don't know, that doesn't make any sense, but, like, there's something about the picking pattern that's really kind of, for me, it harkens back to something earlier, and I know Steve's a huge, like, Beatles fan. Something in the early days of, sort of, pop that would have been sweet and sort of, you know innocent in a certain way or something, and it links back to that in a way that, you know, I still sort of appreciate. And the fact that it's so clean, I don't think it necessarily sounds super 90s, I think it's the cleanliness of a lot of the sounds that those guys picked are a little bit harder to pin down in terms of what decade they might have popped out of. And so that one, I feel like the way that that song works allows it to tie back to something that feels, I don't know, fifties or sixties to me somehow. 

It's quick, it's over fast, and I think it serves a nice, again, in the overall sequencing of how that record works. I just think it serves a nice little purpose. A sort of transition away from, “Here's this teen angst thing we were just doing real loud, this is now a kind of a calming and then some of the songs to come are a little bit more technical and a little bit more mathy.” So it's this kind of breath like, “Hey, you know, there's like a regular song in this mix at some point too, you know.” 

“You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” 

Mike Kinsella: If the other song had the most cringeworthy vocal line, this guitar line always, it cracks me up every time we play, just like it's definitely not something I would write currently. I think it, the way the song fills out and the way the song moves, I really like it. I think it gets somewhere. This song actually, even though it's vocal less, almost has a chorus. The (sings guitar line) “be do do do do do do,” like when the shakers come in and then late most of the beat is like very melodic. He's like doing a little rim shot in two times. So when the song kind of gets going, I'm like, “Oh, this, this is cool. I understand why these 21 year-olds wrote,” you know, in our heads, I'm sure we're again, trying to sound like all these Chicago bands that like, it was like percussive based and rhythm based instead of rock based, you know. 

Steve Lamos: It feels the mathiest of the things on that album. And I do, I think I've come to appreciate it maybe more now even than then. I suppose too, I'm a huge fan of skate culture. I'm the world's worst skateboarder. I won't even look at one anymore. But the way that the instrumental nature that reminds me of something I would see or hear, I should say, in some of those early Powell Peralta videos, there was something about the kind of music that they would soundtrack those skate videos to that was very kind of like, was energetic, but as often, it was often instrumental as it turns out. And I just, something about that felt like skate video to me. So I don't know, it's kind of like us doing skate video music. 

Mike Kinsella: Yeah, this is just, maybe, I don't know if vocal melody never came to me, or if we ran out of time. I don't remember why there's no vocals. Currently, I think it lends itself to vocals a little bit, so, I don't know.

Steve Holmes: You know, I think, like, the instrumental  songs, like, you could wonder, like, “Oh, was it instrumental on purpose, or did Mike just run out of time and not write lyrics?” I think we were totally, like, you know, if Don Cab (Don Caballero) can put out a full record of instrumental tracks, who cares? We can, half our songs can be instrumental, and most of our songs were, even the ones that had lyrics, like half the song would be instrumental sometimes anyway. So it just felt natural to us that like, “Yeah, of course we'll have a few songs that have no lyrics.” I think we just were like, “Oh, it needs a title.” Like every song in the album besides that one, and the last one are titled by just whatever the last line was of every song. So that's every title is the last lyric. And then on our second album, we did the reverse with it. Every song title is the first lyric, which was, I don't know, laziness probably the same reason the album is called American Football. 

That was another one that I started in a tuning that I made up. That was basically just standard. And then I raised the G string to an A and it's, that one's all about kind of polyrhythms. So it has a lot of shifting time signatures. The opening part is in a 6/8 and then the next part is in a 5/4 and then it goes to a 4/4, but it's kind of 4 against 3 between my part and Mike's part.

Mike Kinsella: Maybe the, “This is Leaving Soon” would be an example of my, A part.  hen Holmes plays a part, but then my B part, Holmes is mimicking my A part. So on my A part, I have harmonics, but then when I start hitting the lower notes, then he moves into his part, he does like a slide with a harmonic thing, and then he stays there, and then he goes to chords, which would mimic my B part, and I go to like a sort of syncopated picking thing. Yeah, it's cool. Like in the relearning process, it was fun to sort of get back to the mental space of like, “Oh, this is why we did this, this is why it's cool.” Some of the cool shit we did, I think we did so subtly that I'm not even sure, you know, you can pick up on, like, these little details.  

Steve Lamos: So I'm playing a lot of snare off, kind of tom figures throughout most of that song. And it's again, very part, part, part, part, part. But then there's this middle part where there's a three against two thing. Like Mike is doing a three and three, and I'm playing kind of these rolly fours, the snare’s back on. I remember that sticking with me as like, “Yeah, this whole, all this weirdness at the beginning is the payoff for that kind of three against two thing.” And it only happens probably 16 bars of that song. And then it shifts back to that first riff. 

“But the Regrets Are Killing Me” 

Steve Holmes: “Regrets” is another one that I wrote in a tuning I made up that was, we called C sharp/G sharp. It's basically standard, but he D is dropped a half step and the G is raised a half step. And this was actually one that I was originally going to sing on the album. So I wrote the lyrics to this one too, except for, I think Mike added one line. And like when we got to it, I was just like, “Ah, I can't do it.” So I did like a guide vocal and I was like, “Well, you sing it, Mike. I don't want to do it.” 

Mike Kinsella: “But the Regrets Are Killing Me,” this one I think was less than the sum of his parts. I really, I think like it has a few of my favorite guitar parts or favorite moments. But we just didn't, I think the arrangement or something, like we just kind of didn't quite get there with this song. It didn't reach its full potential.

Steve Holmes: Yeah if I can remember, this is, I think the last song we technically wrote as a band. And then we had maybe one or two unfinished songs after that, but this was like the last kind of final track. 

Steve Lamos: I remember Steve wrote the lyrics and he was going to sing it in the studio. So they had this part. And again, this is another, I would say in the way of “Leaving Soon,” this is another sort of, one of our mathiest things. And then, I don't know why he didn't, maybe he tried it and got nervous because he hadn't sung before. But I remember this one is Holmes writing the lyrics, Holmes was gonna sing it, but he didn't. And so I think it's interesting to hear Mike sing essentially what Steve would have sung and I think it puts Mike in a different zone. It's melodies that Mike wouldn't necessarily sing in the same kind of way. And so it's this interesting kind of frankensong. 

Mike Kinsella: This one's sort of, again, hard to play live. I think it exists somewhere in the world, I think it should have been a rock song, but it never got to be a rock song. So then when we play it live, it's ambiguous would be a word. Like it's sort of like, “Should we play this faster or slower or louder or quieter?” Like we still don't know, like to this day. We're playing it on this tour and some nights it's got a great vibe and when we get through it, I'm like, “Oh, that's fucking cool. That's a cool song.” And some nights it feels like, you know, I listen to the album, I'm kind of like, “Hmm, what did we miss there?” But yeah, I guess I'm also maybe just self conscious of knowing that the vocals were sort of an afterthought. And so they're always going to feel like an afterthought instead of like an intentional thing. 

Steve Lamos: Not necessarily my favorite one, but I've come to appreciate it and actually now having to relearn it and play it. It's a fun moment in the live set because I think there's a lot going on. When I was relearning the parts, I was like, “Man, there's a,” as a drum nerd, there are a lot of drum nerd parts here that I think, if nothing else, reflect a whole range of things. I guess it's up to people to decide good things or bad things. But I'm like, “Ah, this is a drum nerd song, okay, I can get behind this, you know, whatever.” This is very part-y and very like, you know, 24 year old-me or however old I was back then. So that's another one that feels very kind of mathy to me. 

Steve Holmes: Another weird one where like the meter is very weird and changing like that opening part. It feels trickier than it is. It's basically one bar of 5/4 then three bars of 4/4 but it’s just an extra bar in the beginning just makes it have this bizarre feel and then it switches to like 3/4 for the rest of the song I think. My favorite part of that whole song is there's like a bridge toward the end where Mike is the only song he plays acoustic guitar on and that, like, I love that section of the song. It's really cool. 

Mike Kinsella: Yeah like those sort of aside backing vocals on Regrets.” And I think it's on “Honestly?”and stuff. It was just sort of, I knew I wanted this sound of like a radio or a distance or subconsciously a different voice. I knew I wanted this sort of specific effect and I didn't know the language or how to do it technically. And I remember. singing these lines into paper towel rolls, like sort of yelling them from paper towel rolls to give it a radio kind of like an aside, like a different voice kind of effect. I don't know if it worked or not, but I mean, I don't know how much you've listened to like Joan of Arc, but like that whole band was like, essentially capturing, every record was just capturing discoveries like that made. Like, “how do you record a thing that you hear in your head? You know, how do you get this sound? What happens if two different drummers play the verse and chorus?” So that's the song totally sounds different. Yeah. I was living in that world. I was doing Joan of Arc sort of like part time when I would come home to Chicago. So going back and finishing this record, I'm sure I just had these ideas of like, “Oh, recording and how to get this sound, but I didn't know how to do it.” Like now there's absolute filters that you could use. And obviously with Pro Tools, it'd be a lot easier. 

“I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” 

Steve Holmes: “Emotional” is another one that I came up with in like an open E tuning and Mike played bass on this one. And I think like our generic name for this one, we wrote, it was like, “The Pop Song,” like this was kind of maybe the closest thing we had to like a more normal emo band from our scene. Like this was kind of our version of The Promise Ring or something.

Steve Lamos: I think we used to call this one “Promise Ring” or “Pop Song” or something. Like this is another one, like, “Alright, we got to have like a normal,” it just felt sort of like a normal song, you know, relative to the other things that we were doing. You know, when I say Promise Ring, I was like, “Oh, this is, this is the kind of song we would write if we want it to be a real band instead of whatever this thing is,” you know? And I thought Promise Ring was like a paradigm in my own head of like, “Oh my God, here's a real band. And they like write songs, they're lyrically driven, they're hummable, they're catchy, all that stuff.” And I think this was sort of our homage to that kind of thing. 

Steve Holmes: So this is the one that has, you know, our version of studio drama. So, and I wasn't there for this, this happened, I went home for the weekend and while I was gone, apparently Lamos decided that he didn't like the bass. It wasn't locking in with the drums. And so he re-recorded the bass for the entire song. And as far as I know, Mike's bass is not on the song. I think it's actually Lamos playing on this song and they were fighting about it. I think Mike was mad that he re-recorded his part. And he wrote a part too, in the, in, I guess, what is the chorus, this song is actually maybe the only one that has a normal, like verse chorus, verse chorus, outro. In the chorus part, he wrote, there's like a bass part that does an additional melody, that Lamos came up with.  

Mike Kinsella: Again, there's bass guitar. And I remember tracking, “I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional,” we tracked it and sort of moved down from the basic tracks and Lamos wasn't happy with my performance of like bass locking in to his, it's like, he's got very technical drums. There's like all these like intricate kind of like little shuffles and stuff within his beat. And I wasn't locking in so good. I'm sort of, again, like I'm a big, I'm kind of like a crude, crass man, maybe (laughs). Just like my existence, like the way I like cook food and the way I sort of even play like a soft acoustic melody. I find myself like, “Why am I playing so hard?” Like, it's, I'm just sort of, I'm not good at subtlety. So I was playing sort of maybe bigger, wider notes and he wanted to like, (sings bass line) “duh duh duh duh duh,” like really lock in. So I think we probably had a fight about it. And I think I walked away like, “Okay, redo my bass.” And I think he redid the bass. I don't know, cause I left the studio, I remember that day. So I'm not sure which version exists on the record, still. I just remember he was upset about it. 

Steve Lamos: What I remember most about this, I felt like my drumming was really sloppy  on this one. And ironically, now I feel much more comfortable with what I'm doing than I ever did back then. It felt really swimmy to me. I recorded it a couple of times. It was like the opposite of “Never Meant.” I'm like, “Oh, I hate this one.” Mike was playing a real open bass line. And I was like, “Man, can you do something to mask, you know, what's going on and the drums are swimmy.” He's like, “Ah, I'm not doing it.” And I’m just like, “Look I'm doing something,” and I sort of hacked on bass a little bit and I added a couple of these little figures that essentially I felt like just kind of covered up the swimminess of the drum part and almost worked like a second drum or something like that. And so on that recording, there's actually these kind of double bass things happening. Mike's is sort of the real bassline and mine are these noodles that were designed to cover up the fact that I didn't like my drumming on it very much. And that, you know, that just became like, sort of a running joke, like, “Oh, we got two bass lines.” You know, again, some of the bands we liked had two bass players, but it was very much my own sort of insecurity. That song, like, it's my wife's favorite song we've ever done. Like, people who like, I suppose, pop music more than the kind of mathy elements seem to gravitate toward this song. You know, it plays a role in the record again, not necessarily one of my favorite ones personally, but it plays a role. And I do remember that moment of like, “Oh, I'm going to cover up whatever's going on on the drums.” And now all these years later, it is what it is. 

Mike Kinsella: In my mind, it's sort of like, “The band's breaking up and nobody's ever going to hear these anyways. Who cares? Let's just, you know, here's the song. Let's go.” As a grown man looking back and maybe with the knowledge that a bunch of people would hear this and, you know, “Okay, great. That's a good job. You know, you were correct, you should do the better job.” I was also crabby, I think I was literally like, leaving. You know what I mean? I was already like mind on “What am I gonna do when I get home?” I just finished college and whatever so.

I think I remember Holmes, you know, he started most of these songs. I'm trying to think, yeah, I mean he started the bulk of these songs. And so when Holmes first brought “Emotional,” like the guitar part, it's so dense. It's non-stop strumming loudly. So, you know, I think I was probably  like, “I don't know how I fit in there, noodling or it doesn't need to get bigger.” We're not really a big band. So yeah the bass was just sort of, “Okay, let's move it melodically. And we can arrange the song around that kind of.” Cause the guitar is just so, it's almost like a shoegaze song. I mean, if you think about if there was a different pedal on it, it would totally just sound like My Bloody Valentine or something, cause it's just kind of like relentless strumming, which is different than the rest of the album. 

Steve Holmes: I think this one might have the most lyrics of any of the songs, probably because he was playing bass and it's easier to sing than it is on the other ones where he's playing guitar. And now when we play it live, he just plays tambourine and just gets to stand and sing like he's a proper singer. It's a pretty straightforward kind of 4/4 rock song, but the outro switches to like a 6/8 and the beat and the outro is kind of almost directly lifted from this band called C-Clamp, which was a Champagne band at the time. And they actually just had their whole catalog reissued by Numero Group. So go check out C-Clamp, they're awesome. 

Mike Kinsella: “I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional,” I remember specifically writing the lyrics to this song. In a way, I said like, a lot of the songs are sort of lines or like little, you know, independent little phrases or something. This one, I sat down and wrote from front to back during, I had like an introduction to speech class. And I was, I keep referencing Depeche Mode in every interview I've done for 30 years. This one, more than anything, it's like, it's sort of got like the total like, you know, all the words are like dramatic and, you know, three syllables. I was like, “This is,” I remember intentionally writing this song as opposed to like, just like, “Oh, whatever comes out, comes out.” I kind of stand by this one still in a way, maybe I don't stand by all of them, you know, or I'll stand by them as like a representation of a youthful version of me. But this one I'm kind of like, “Yeah, it's cool. I like it.” Even though the final line, “I'll see you when we’re both not so emotional.” It's sort of like, it's so like a heart on sleeve, kind of silly, but I like it. It's kind of a goal still writing is to like sort of write something that is plain spoken, but also like, well, if you think about that, it's like, you know, it sounds like, it's very conversational, like it could be, you could actually say that to somebody and it would fit, or you can like sing it melodically and it fits. 

“Stay Home” 

Steve Holmes: “Stay Home” is like probably my favorite song we ever wrote. If I was going to play one song to a person who'd never heard American Football, I think this is sort of the quintessential American Football song from my perspective. It kind of has everything that we do as a band well. 

Mike Kinsella: This one might be the one I'm sort of most proud of. Like this one would be, I think “Stay Home” is the one that sort of stands the test of time best. 

Steve Holmes: It's very Steve Reich-inspired. The riffs are in a kind of a cyclical 7/4 pattern and Mike and my part kind of interlock together. I can actually, I have like a sense memory of like sitting on the couch face to face, like working on these parts together and kind of trying to figure out how the changes would go and writing the B section. And then Mike coming up with that descending riff. And we were just like, “Oh my God, that's so cool,” (laughs).

Mike Kinsella: “Stay Home” was, a vivid memory of, you know, me and Holmes having our own little band practice over a breakfast or whatever, like just, what am I, I don't know, I don't really count again, I forget the numbers, but if he's in 8 and I'm in 7, you know, we only loop every seven times or eight times or whatever it is. If you distill maybe the elements of what we were trying to do, you know, some odd times, again, like the parts are sort of morphing together instead of like quick, abrupt changes.

Steve Lamos: I still don't really know what they're doing. 25 years later, the first notes, there's like this release of tension in the back of my head. I'm just sitting there. I'm waiting to do my thing. But that whatever time that initial figure is in, Mike plays it, Steve comes in. I sort of like retreat to the center of my head. And I'm going to do this because I know like physically what I need to do next is like, it's the cymbal hits for a while, and then there's this whole sort of, like, unfolding of, “Alright, here's a certain tom figure. Now the Tom figure builds. Now there's a full drummer thing.” And now, you know, now that Nate's (Kinsella) in the band, “Oh my god, here's my thing!” Now Nate added this gorgeous bass line, and it's just like, “Oh yeah, this is my thing.” I have never, never been bored listening or playing to that song. You know, and it just, there's just something about it that just feels like watching, I don't know, like, it's just like, cells dividing or amoebas, whatever, do whatever amoebas do. Like there's something very like lifelike or something. It's like watching something grow very organically. 

Mike Kinsella: I was in a big Stereolab phase for, I don't know, five years or something. So I'm into that, like repetition. I think like you can play the same thing for three minutes, but something it'll sound different three minutes later than it did when he started, even if it's the same exact thing. So, you know, this is sort of relentless in a way that I'm proud of. It's like I said earlier about, I forget which song where just the slightest little change, like has like a lot of weights. So this is, you know, we'll do a whole cycle and Lamos is on a ride and then we'll do another cycle. And all he does is add, you know, a soft crash with it. And it's just like, well, like it's just, it's like nothing big, but like it just shifts how it feels. And then he'll start clamping his hi-hat loud for a third. It's like the smallest little shifts. I mean, in my mind, like it's, it's almost like instead of vocals, like it, something needs to happen. And I think everybody's default is like vocals or something. I think we are aware we are at least trying to explore, like, “Maybe not, maybe it's just like this one little shift and the whole ground moves.”

Steve Lamos: Like my kids will come down and be like, “Oh, this song doesn't go anywhere.” You're right. Except that, you know, it's so deliberate and it takes its time and you have to be willing to, you have to be in the headspace and mindset to want to go on that trip. And I can understand how folks, you know, maybe they wouldn't want to, but man, I cannot, that's a trip I've never gotten tired of. Like there's just something about being along for the ride as it unfolds that I, you know, I just feel like that song plays us. On the right night it has nothing to do with us as people. It's just like, “Oh, this is a really interesting energy zone and in the universe,” or however, you know, whatever I want to say and it's like, “oh, we just get to plug in for a little while and let it do its thing.” And man, the older I get and the more music I do, that's where I would like to spend my time in that kind of zone of almost like flow state. And I just feel like, that must be attraction for a lot of folks in a world of hectic, like the one we have, to be able to plug into these places where you really do sort of feel like you're beyond yourself. It seems to me like that's an important thing to think about and seek out and if you're lucky you get to be part of it, you know.

Steve Holmes: And even now, like I love playing this song live because it's one of the ones where you forget you're on stage performing in front of people like you kind of get, you know, the analog to sports would be like, “I’m in the zone. I am in a flow state.” And can kind of just close your eyes and just feel the music and that sounds corny, but it's true like that's, I think that's what we like about these long kind of meditative mantra parts And then like the subtle movement over time. 

Steve Lamos: God, I don't remember a damn thing about how we wrote it or what it meant to record it. I think maybe because it's so  engaging for me every time, like it just like every single time I sit down to either listen or play to that song, it's like listening to it again. I'm a big fan of Miles Davis, I've said this in 10,000 interviews too. But there's this track called “Shhh”/”Peaceful” off of a record called In a Silent Way. And it has that same sort of like organic, like, it's just like watching, you know, life happen or something. And I feel like this is my chance to shoot for that feeling that I get from listening to that Miles record, but like it's my band, you know. And yeah so I honestly, I think my love of that song has erased any memory of how it actually came together.

Steve Holmes: Actually in the reissue, there's a version of this where you can hear, there was originally a third part. There was like an extra  part. That was actually pretty cool, that for whatever reason we got rid of, but you can kind of see like how the songwriting evolves over time and you come up with a bunch of ideas and you kind of whittle it down to like, “What is the essence of the song?” And it's super repetitive, but there's like very subtle movements happening and it's kind of like loose structurally. Like we're not necessarily counting, like, “How long does this part go before we change?” It's more based on feel and like, actually like signals, like Lamos give us the look, “Okay, now we're going into the next part.” So it was very loose in that sense. And when we recorded it, it was just like flubs and all like this is definitely not a perfect performance and none of these songs are played to click track, it's all just three guys in a room playing live. And you can hear like there's definitely like missed notes or not perfect like performances because these parts are very intricate and like you know every note is picked and it's easy to miss one. But I think that kind of adds to the overall feeling of like, there is a naivete of like 20 year olds writing music, but being ambitious about it, like trying to like, “What is the coolest thing we can do with our limited talent and resources and just pushing at the boundaries of like, we're barely capable of playing this.” And so that gives it a very vital feeling of like the wheels could fall off at any moment, but it kind of just stays. The momentum just keeps it going. 

Mike Kinsella: It took me a long time to like, consider myself a writer. I think I was just trying to write what the song felt and what, you know, Again, like what I was only listening to, like The Cure and Red House Painters and The Sundays, like these bands, like they're singing like sort of sad, heavy shit. And so I just thought that's what music was. So I was more than willing to like transfer, you know, the vague few lines I had written in a diary or whatever and do a song. So, you know, there's not like a lot of turn or phrase or anything. It's pretty straightforward. It's pretty plainly stated. At that time, like I didn't really know how to write songs, I just thought songs were happening. Like, “Oh, this is a song cause it's what's coming out.” “Stay Home,” I think we wrote, you know what I mean? Like, I think we put effort into like arranging it correctly. And, you know, vocally, I planned it, where things land and stuff. So, yeah, I mean, I guess “Stay Home,” it’s sort of representative of the whole thing. And like I was saying, like, I don't really listen to like fun music, you know, I listen to music to get some sort of a reaction. And so when I'm writing, I kind of want to invoke that same thing or evoke the same thing. But you know, ending on a sort of like heavy, you know, downer seems appropriate or it seems worthwhile. What's the, you know, “Have a great day.” Like what's the alternative to ending, you know, a sort of heavy album like that. 

It seems like the appropriate closing song on an album. Well, I know there's a closing song, but that's like an aside. 

“The One with the Wurlitzer” 

Steve Holmes: And then like live when we play it, we actually segue it into “The One with the Wurlitzer.” That song originally live was actually segued out of “The One with the Tambourine.” And then now we kind of have paired it with “Stay Home” because that's where it lives on the record. So I had to rewrite “The One with the Wurlitzer” in 7/4, in a different key, in a different tuning to like cram it on the end of “Stay Home,” which is really cool. And we just play it as like one long 10 minute piece. 

The Wurlitzer was just because the studio had one, and I was like, “Ooh, this is cool.” And so I wrote that little part and played that. And then the title was a reference to “The One with the Tambourine.” So we said, “Oh, ‘The One with the Wurlitzer’ is kind of a callback to where the song came from.” 

Steve Lamos: I remember Holmes playing the Wurlitzer in the studio. He loves to fiddle around. He's like, any toy in the studio, he immediately starts banging on whatever. It was generated to that. And I think, you know, the drum beat for that song is the same exact, it's like that kind of, would have been Bossa Nova or whatever it would have been as the very first track that we ever did on the EP.

Steve Holmes: So “The One with the Wurlitzer” was originally like in our live set, it was the outro of “The One with the Tambourine.” So it's in that same open E tuning. And it was basically just Lamos and I, it was a horn, basically it's a horn melody, like that song is a feature for the horn and then Mike would be retuning or picking up the bass or doing whatever. And then when we were done, I would retune and he would introduce the next song. 

Steve Lamos: Tuning was a nightmare for this band live, the first iteration. And so I'm not shocked at all that we would have figured something out to do. So it must also be the case that whatever he's playing for that part was in the tuning that we were just in, or we would build a set around that tuning so that he and I could mess around and just cover space, you know?

Steve Holmes: It was embarrassing because we would play, you know, we would play like a 30 minute set and every song would have, you know, a painful five, seven minutes of tuning in between where it's just awkward silence. And we literally like, you know, I would unplug my guitar from the amp and plug it into the tuner and stand there tuning for a few minutes. And you know, God forbid I break a string. Now you're in trouble. So yeah, it was, it was incredibly awkward. We only had, you know, like I said, Mike didn't even own a guitar, but we had one guitar each and had to borrow tuners because he didn't own a tuner. So our live show was incredibly awkward. And the only reason we're able to play live now is because we have this amazing guitar tech, Mike Garzone, and we travel with like six guitars between us and he's tuning and swapping out guitars every single song to make it look like we're actually a semi-professional band.

Mike Kinsella: We have a version live now and it's less Wurlitzer. The Wurlitzer as an instrument in general, to me, it exists only in this like 70s, you can't help, but your brain going to this one specific spot. So that song, we play it now with guitars and I think it fits a little better in our world. The same trumpet line, you know, it's like, it's still like this melancholic trumpet line, which is beautiful. It's just more guitar noodley though. 

Steve Lamos: I think that one probably was just me messing around with the horn in the studio. These days, that song, we've morphed it into “Stay Home,” right? And so they kind of crossfade. And I think we started doing it because it's like, “Well, the record does it,” but they now feel like a whole 12 minute thing, you know, to me at this point. And so it's funny to hear it on the record because it feels, you know, it feels more like a studio noodle. And now when we do it live, it feels more like, “Okay, this is a whole coherent, like, this is what it means to inhabit this space for 12 minutes.” 

Mike Kinsella: That's sort of like a Holmes melody and baby. It's not really a vibe that I, again, it's not in my world melodically or anything, so I didn't really know how to write to it or anything. I think it fits whatever little jazzy elements or like homage to jazz that we have. If there's a spectrum of what our sound is, it would be like the far end of one side of the spectrum. So it fits in our world, which I like. And it's sort of like, it actually pushes the spectrum wider. So now, you know, more things are possible.

Steve Holmes: Lamos is for sure to me, like the star of this track. Like it's a great melody, great performance and totally unique. Like none of the bands in our scene would play anything like that. And like I said, like Mike and I would never think to come up with that kind of melody that really came from, Lamos was obsessed with like Weather Report and 70s Miles, like all the jazz fusion stuff in the early 80s, mid 70s. And you can definitely hear that in the melodies that he writes. And then to me, the most exciting thing about this song is we just put out this covers record for the 25th anniversary and John McEntire, who, you know, is a guy that was enormously influential on us, you know, member of Tortoise, member of Sea and Cake, probably my favorite drummer at that time. And to have him cover a song I wrote is kind of just mind boggling. 

Mixing was very, very difficult. It was all hands on deck. So we were, we, I remember all of us literally being on the board, doing live faders. Like it's funny, like that mix could never be replicated cause it was all just, you know, three or four guys on the board, twisting knobs and pulling faders in real time. And probably too much like I think because we could like, “Oh, we'll put a fade in on this. We'll put a fade out here.” We were over-fading because it seemed fun to like move things on the board. And this was, you know, my personal second time ever in a studio. So we were just total novices and children playing basically. 

Mike Kinsella: You know, I was kind of like again, foot out the door, like last day. I don't like singing and I definitely don't like singing in a studio, like recording, just cause it's not that easy for me to hit a note. So, you know, it's frustrating. So I'm sure after vocals, I was kind of like  maybe, even moreso, one foot out the door. I bet I had a few strong opinions and then the rest I was kind of like, “Figure it out guys, I don't know.” I'm guessing, I said, “We should put “Never Meant” first and “Stay Home” should be last. That feels like a front one, that feels like a back one. You guys figure out the middle maybe.” 

Steve Lamos: I remember going in, so Brendan Gamble worked for this place called Private Studios. The man who just remastered the DATs we found in, somewhere in the Polyvinyl basement where they dug them up was a guy named Jonathan Pines. I remember actually going to the studio with the first DAT and then him, I didn't know what mastering was, so he sat me down in a chair. He was like, “Well I'm going to show you how this works.” I think I was the only one at Mastering because I was still in Champaign. Everybody else had already left. So I remember hearing it, you know, in that setting and thinking, “Oh, this sounds cool.” I remember playing it for some friends, which I also learned you should never do. And them just being like, “Whatever.” And one person in particular being like, “I don't like this at all.” And I thought, “Oh, I shouldn't play records that I'm on for people in front of them because I don't want to hear that they thought this sucked, you know.”

Mike Kinsella: Overall, you know, it ended, I don't know if we were fighting, but we definitely all were kind of like, “Okay, see you guys later.” You know what I mean? Like I think, we were just heading towards different things at that point and didn't really look back too quickly or anything. So, you know, album came out and I think I remember being somewhat proud of it, you know, like, “Oh, that's cool.” I, you know, I probably obviously hadn't heard those songs until the album came out months and months later. So I was like, “Oh, that's cool.” I mean, knowing we weren't going to play any shows or anything, it was, there wasn't really a, I didn't get too excited. I don't remember, like showing it off to people or anything. It just was a thing that existed. I was so, more than anything, I just, I was excited to be, you know, continue to have this relationship with Polyvinyl. You know, that was a stepping stone to keep doing what I'm doing with them. And it was an accident that Polyvinyl would even have any interest in putting it out, knowing we weren't going to promote it in any way. So that's, that's a total, like, just dumb luck on my part. 

Steve Holmes: So Mike and I moved back home to the Chicago suburbs and, you know, I got my first job. I was working at my first job, by the time the record came out and we did maybe two or three interviews for press and then that was it. We're kind of just like, “Okay, we made this thing and, you know, had moved on with our lives.” Basically, I think Mike was already trying to figure out playing solo. He might've been tagging along on a Rainer Maria tour in the fledgling days of what would become Owen. So yeah, we just kind of figured the band, in our minds wasn't, it wasn't enough of a thing for us to consider like, “Oh, should we commute back two and a half hours to Champaign to like rehearse?” And we're like, “No, that's crazy.”

Steve Lamos: So my dad passed away about 20 years ago. He didn't like rock music. He didn't like that I played in rock bands. He was always disappointed that I quit playing trumpet essentially, you know. When he died, one of the things I found was a box of stuff that he had bought. We were in CMJ magazine. Like there was a little CD and like a little review of the record. He had bought the damn thing and kept it. And it said something like, you know, you know, “Stephen's band,” or whatever. That was one of those moments that's kind of stuck with me. Like, “Oh my God.” So, you know, this guy, my dad, who didn't seem to appreciate any of this, seemed somehow to like, you know, he thought this was interesting or important enough that he put it in a box somewhere. And then I would, I found it later and I was like, “Oh, okay.” So I remember that more than anything else about the American Football LP1. Cause you know, again, like whatever, ‘99, 2000, I'm finishing up my PhD. I'm out here five years later. I think I probably had two or three students in those 15 years who mentioned it to me in some way, shape or form, you know, this world of Boulder, Colorado is not indie world. The kind of music the kids like here is very different, at least generally speaking. So, you know, finding that box of my dad's is really the last sort of impression I had of the record for a long time. So that is sort of, you know, a little bit bittersweet, both sort of pleasant and a little bit sad to think about. But that's kind of where I was at for all, you know, that 15 years at a time. And then the phone calls, I think probably started in 2013. Steve had found this, you know, this box of tapes, sent the tapes to Polyvinyl. There were murmurings then of, “Alright, we think we should reissue this record. Would you guys play live?” I think the initial responses were “No, no way in the world we're going to play live.” And then they just kept coming. And then, you know, again, really, I didn't know anything about it. Cause I had had just those couple of students, I wasn't really big on internet culture. You know, we were lucky in ‘99 that the internet was just a baby. And then even though I personally didn't participate in it, obviously the timing of that and the ways in which this music, the fact that it didn't have real faces attached to it. Mike, of course, was attached to it, Mike was doing his own solo stuff as he still does. But the band itself, it's easier to be mysterious if you don't really exist. You know, and I think about Neutral Milk Hotel and some other bands that have stories that are at least a little bit like this, Slint in a certain way, like the less you play, the better, if you want to be somewhere sort of weird cult band, like let people write onto the record whatever they want. And so I didn't know boo about it until 2014. And I think even since that point, it's still sort of mysterious, you know, you could never replicate it if you wanted to in a million years, it just, in that sense, it's very sort of chance based. Much more so than anything deliberate. 

Steve Holmes: For me, it didn't really sink in until we did the reissue and eventually agreed to what we thought was going to be two shows to celebrate the 15th anniversary reissue. And now 10 years later, we've played, whatever 150 shows around the world. So I was only vaguely aware that anyone heard of this band or cared about it. It didn't really come up in my day to day life. And like, I was aware that Polyvinyl would send us a check every year, like probably, you know, a few years and we started to get royalty checks and that kind of happened once or twice a year, sort of indefinitely in modest amounts, but would like trickle up modestly over time. And I think like five years after the record came out, Matt from Polyvinyl reached out and said, “Hey, people keep asking if we should put this on vinyl.” Cause originally it was a CD only release. And we're like, “Yeah, sure, you can press vinyl if you want.” So that was maybe the first inkling that people still cared. But in, in my mind, I just assumed like, “Well, Mike has been playing as Owen and still kind of in and out of Joan of Arc,” and I just assumed that, you know, “whatever relevance it had was just fans of Mike's that were finding out that he used to be in this other band.”

Mike Kinsella: I had been playing solo as Owen for the whole time to the same amount of people. Just, it wasn't like a growing thing. It was, I was already a dad and it was a part-time job. And then our manager at the time, out of the blue, without asking anything just like put out some feelers like, “Oh, if you did an American Football reunion, you know, what kind of room would it be? Where would it be at?” Blah, blah, blah. And the offers were ridiculous. I mean, like it was a Pygmalion festival, which is in Champaign, like our hometown, but it was a headlining offer, which is like, “Oh, that would be crazy. If people stuck around to watch us,” 15 years ago at the time and then, New York at Webster Hall, which I believe is like 1500 cap. Yeah and we were like, “How the hell would we sell that out?” Or, you know, we had no idea that we were popular or  that enough people in New York or beyond that would care. So, you know, we hadn't talked in years. Maybe we just started talking cause Polyvinyl was reissuing the album. So there was some email threads or whatever. And then I remember just getting really excited. Like, “Oh, let's just play these two shows  and we'll have, that's it. We'll learn the songs, play two shows. It'll be like fun to dust the shit off.” And then we were like, I knew I wanted my cousin Nate to play in the band, so I was like, “Let's play these shows, my cousin Nate's going to play bass.” Like I couldn't imagine playing an outdoor festival and a large like club without any sort of low end with these songs and stuff. So we recruited a bass player and, you know, two shows turned into four shows. And then we did those and then they were so fun. It turned into more shows. And then that turned, that was so fun that we turned into a second album. And that was so fun it turned into the third album. And now, it's crazy. It just, it's so, again, just nothing but total luck. Everybody I know was in a band in high school and college. And for whatever reason, this one people kept listening to. So I feel lucky. 

Steve Holmes: And it wasn't until we did the reissue that I kind of realized like, “Oh, this thing has a life of its own.” And I think the first time I heard someone call like the, you know, quote unquote, iconic album cover, I thought they were making fun of us. I was like, “Really?” Like, I didn't know that was a thing. I had no idea that people were like going to the house and taking pictures and getting it tattooed on themselves. Like that was all a shock to me. The house that's the album cover was, you know, I mean, dumb luck. I guess we just randomly, our friend, Chris Strong had taken photos, he was going to do the artwork and I can't even remember picking it. I mean, it's possible Chris said, “Use this one,” but my vague memory is we had a handful of photos to choose from. And we said, “Oh, this house looks cool. We'll go with that.” Dumb luck.  And, you know, I'd been to that house. They used to have punk shows there, but I didn't, you know, it wasn't really a thing that was, you know, a big part of our lives. But I think because of the era we came up in and the fact that we hardly ever played shows, we didn't really tour at all. Nobody had seen this band and there was no, hardly any photos of us or any video footage. So I think the house became sort of a totem of like the band. This was like one of the only images associated with the band. And so fans kind of took that up as, you know, like a, the only thing to latch onto, I guess. And then the fact that it's a physical place, people realize, “Oh, this place is a real place. You can go and see that.” Eventually it became, you know, kind of a pilgrimage opportunity for super fans. 

Mike Kinsella: Honestly, I don't know why. I mean, Chris is an amazing artist and photographer and he took a beautiful shot and I know why we picked it to be the cover of an album when we were making it. I don't know, I don't understand anything. I feel like we're, like everything, every part of this, I feel like I'm just like the butt of a joke. The joke that keeps on happening though, you know, and I keep getting supported doing it. So, you know, I guess it's the most relatable thing in the world. Like I've said before that the album maybe endures because everybody becomes a teenager and goes through transitions. It's unavoidable, you know what I mean? It's not like a concept album. It's not like Queensryche writing a concept album about priests that are supplying drugs to prostitutes. Okay well, not many people can relate to that. Some of us happen to love their guitar tones, but, you know, it's not like everybody in the world is going to love that. You know, this is all about life transitions and breaking up with girlfriends while everybody, at 17 or whatever, it's happening to them and they can relate. So then, you know, everybody finds it at that time and then it sticks with them because it's catchy, I don't know. You know, it's not like, it's challenging enough to be interesting, but it's not like musically like, or it's not challenging to listen to. Yeah so the house is the same thing. It's the most relatable thing. Everybody was from, everybody has some old house that they, you know, pine for, long for, or hate. And you know, it evokes something. 

Steve Lamos: I just thought it was a cool photo, but it has been really interesting to watch folks use the house. Something about that particular image of the house, in tandem with the music has allowed people to access. It's so nondescript in the way that Chris framed it, it makes the  non-description of the image incredibly powerful, like, “Oh my God, this, here's twilight, here's this yellow light in the middle of kind of nothingness,” and, you know, it clearly invites people in. 

Steve Holmes: It's still mind boggling to me that 25 years later, we're talking about this and that people care. And the fact that more than a thousand people outside the Midwest have heard of this would have been a shock to us then, and is still kind of a shock today. 

Mike Kinsella: I absolutely would not be playing music today if LP1 didn't happen. It was an accident in many ways. It was also like, you know, going back to relearn the songs. It was, I'm impressed at myself and all of us for, it definitely wasn't flippant at the time, you know, it took effort and it took sort of like thought. But getting back together for a couple shows and realizing as adults we all get along superbly. We're all grown men and our egos are maybe put aside a little bit and yeah we're all like fucking great dads so we have that in common. And I get more and more excited and proud. I just, I was telling, in the past few months, I started wearing all my band's own merch all the time. I had this like revelation of like, “Oh my God, I like my band.” You know, I'm like, it's like a sports team, like if the Bulls can just wear, you know, all Bulls gear all the time, like, “Why don't I just wear my band's gear all the time?” It's so fun that I'm in this cool gang with my friends. So, you know, even like going back talking about the album 25 years ago,  all my recollections of it, they're, you know, I feel like I was kind of like this, maybe I wasn't as easy going to hang out with and I wasn't as good at songwriting. So I, all my emotions are tied to sort of selfishly maybe embarrassed about a little bit that it ever was made or whatever, but then fast forward and I couldn't imagine my life now without it being made. And I feel so lucky and proud to have been a part of it. 

Steve Holmes: The American Football 1999 self titled album or LP1 is really, I mean, for us, it's a gift that keeps on giving. It's the reason we've been able, you know, in our middle age to get the band back together and be able to play shows around the world. We've performed in, I don't know, something like 20 countries at this point. And we're just so lucky, like we recognize that everybody we were friends with growing up was in a band. And almost all of our friends put out records or music of some kind and it does feel like, you know, we won the lottery somehow in that our record of all the records happened to be one that caught on and and caught a following. And I could name a dozen records by friends of ours and peers of ours that are just as good or better that for whatever reason didn't have the long tail of this record. So I think when I think of this record and especially this year, we're out doing kind of 25th anniversary shows and we have this covers album and a remaster coming out. I'm always just appreciative of the fact that we had this special moment and it's given us a second life as a band and what a privilege that is to be able to go out and play for people.

Steve Lamos: So LP1 to me is an interesting distillation of a time in my life and in Mike's life and in Steve's life that really does tie to what we were talking about earlier. It was very much endings of a certain time, you know, undergraduate life, say, and the beginnings of kind of adult professional life. I think it was awfully sincere. We were awfully sincere when we tried to make it. And I think it captures that moment  reasonably well. And it's flattering and really kind of touching to think that it has meant something to other people. Because I do think it was very much a statement of kind of who we were in that time and place. And that it resonates with other people is really, really pretty special and kind of humbling too. 

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about American Football. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase American Football (Self-Titled), including the 25th anniversary edition. Instrumental music by The Junior Varsity. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Never Meant"

"The Summer Ends"

"Honestly?"

"For Sure."

"You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon"

"But the Regrets Are Killing Me"

"I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional"

"Stay Home"

"The One with the Wurlitzer"

Steve Holmes: guitars, Wurlitzer

Steve Lamos: drums, percussion, trumpet

Mike Kinsella: vocals, guitars, bass

Recorded by Brendan Gamble at Private Studios in Urbana, IL

℗ © 1999 Polyvinyl Record Company

PRC-025

Episode Credits: 

Intro/Outro Music:

“The Big Little City Killing Cycle” by The Junior Varsity from their album, The Great Compromise

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam