For the 25th anniversary of American Football (Self-Titled), we take a detailed look at how it was made. The origins of American Football began with Mike Kinsella’s band Cap’n Jazz, who were hugely influential in the punk scene in the Chicago suburbs. Steve Holmes went to high school with Kinsella and was inspired to learn guitar after watching Cap’n Jazz perform. Kinsella and Holmes became close friends and ended up going to college together and were roommates at the University of Illinois in Champaign. During college, Kinsella briefly joined a band with Steve Lamos called The One Up Downstairs. When that band broke up, Holmes and Lamos began jamming together and when Kinsella heard their practice tapes, he asked if he could join. The three of them ended up forming American Football in 1997. Their friends, Matt Lunsford and Darcie Knight were just getting their label Polyvinyl going in nearby Danville and they offered to release a three song EP in 1998. By the time they were graduating, they had enough songs for a full-length album, but the band was breaking up as Holmes and Kinsella were moving back to Chicago. Polyvinyl offered to release an album anyway so they booked time at Private Studios with local engineer, Brendan Gamble. The American Football (Self-Titled) album was eventually released in 1999.
In this episode, Steve Holmes describes the guitar style he developed with Kinsella that was based on alternate tunings and shifting time signatures, inspired by music they were listening to at the time like Steve Reich, Nick Drake, The Sea and Cake and Red House Painters. Mike Kinsella talks about switching from drums to guitar and writing lyrics inspired by the few romantic relationships he had up to that point. His lyrics came from a diary and were heavily influenced by the melodramatic lyricism of bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode and The Sundays. Steve Lamos discusses his musical upbringing and deep love of jazz, which found its way into the American Football sound with his trumpet playing and compositional approach to the drums. The three of them describe the unique sound they found together and the unlikely story about how even though the band broke up early on, the album still managed to reach people years after it was a released. From recording the week after graduation to constantly having to borrow guitars, amps and tuners to embracing repetitive patterns and avoiding traditional verse chorus structures to singing through paper towel rolls during recording to lyrics about relationships ending and the transition into adulthood to the album cover of the now iconic American Football house, we’ll hear the stories around how the record came together.
