American Football - The Art of Staying Home

Something more than a long-awaited comeback, that of American Football: the cult band of midwest emo left behind their debut and masterpiece in 1999, then promptly vanished from the scene that had seen them born. It took seventeen years for news of a reunion and a new album: after a few "trial" shows, the band hit the road to meet the fans who over the years had worked tirelessly to keep their name alive, spreading far and wide the songs of that classic which still sounds today like a fragile, heartfelt generational anthem for outsiders. Before the show at Circolo Magnolia in Segrate (Milan), the only Italian date of the tour, we met Mike Kinsella and Steve Lamos to retrace the steps of a singular artistic journey, between the band's past and present.

The first time I listened to your second album, from the very first notes I felt like I was coming home after a long journey. Do you feel something similar, going back onstage with your old and new songs?

Mike: It feels very different from how it used to be: now we're playing for a lot more people, it almost feels like being in a completely different band. It's fun playing in front of more people who are actually interested in the band - before we used to do it in his [Steve's] living room, practically for no one.

Steve: Yeah, it's more fun this time!

What was your first show at the Pygmalion Festival in Champaign-Urbana like?

Mike: It was fun and exciting. It was the most nervous I've ever been.

Steve: I wish we could do it again. We had fun but I don't know how it sounded (laughs) Before that we did a kind of trial gig in a bar, but outdoors on a big stage... I was really nervous too, but it was great!

The cover with the house in Champaign-Urbana has become a kind of icon. I've read that a lot of young bands go there to play just to get a photo with the house in the background. And isn't it actually that important to your music too? - I mean as a place of intimacy where you can talk about yourself in total honesty.

Mike: I don't know why we picked it: we just liked it, and there's a friend of ours, Chris, who took a ton of photos. I don't know what the reasoning was, but I liked it. Looking back, it makes perfect sense.

Steve: Watching it evolve and watching people latch onto the idea of the house makes sense in hindsight, but I don't think it was conscious. Last night we were at a metal show, I was walking around looking at all these people wearing these t-shirts... I don't know that world of scary stuff and so on, but there's a theme running through metal bands, and I guess ours is the opposite of that.

Mike: Staying home!

Steve: (points to my t-shirt with the photo of Slint) I mean, this is an icon, but why? It's just a bunch of weird guys wandering around, they're young and cute and having fun.

Have you ever stopped just to look at it, thinking about its evocative power?

Steve: I'd never been there, I didn't even know where it was!

Mike: It's a small town, so if you're driving and you see it you go: "Oh yeah, that's the house."

Steve: Did you see that some kids spray-painted a mark on the sidewalk? So they can take photos from the same angle, like it's some kind of trend now.

You also offered another perspective on the second LP.

Mike: Like I said, the first time it was just a photo, we thought it could work. And this time it was intentional, the same house but from a different angle.

Steve: And of all the images, the one from inside was the most interesting, then we started thinking about the lyrics, that's why they have a lot to do with the time when you got what you thought you wanted to get when you were young.

Mike: It was the same photographer, we asked him to go back to that house and take some pictures. So this one was taken recently.

When talking about your music, obviously, there's much more to it than just a certain kind of lyrics and musical style: they're all equally relevant aspects, but for me it's always been especially a matter of "feeling", because that really changes the whole perspective. Most of your lyrics, read as they are, come across as sad if not almost suicidal; but when you listen to the songs, they become full of sweet melancholy, ultimately even tinged with hope. Is that the result of lyrics being added after writing the instrumental pieces?

Mike: Usually the songs already exist, finished or almost finished, before the lyrics come to mind. The band has a musical style and I have a writing style: even my stuff under the Owen name sounds like the gentlest music in the world and then, like, "I want to kill myself" (hums mournfully), because if I just think about love songs they'll come out saccharine, it's a bit too much, so I think they need to have a bit of an edge.

Steve: But sometimes they're funny! When I hear something Mike says or his lyrics, if you take them literally they're strange, but they're not meant to be taken literally, they're somewhere between serious and tongue-in-cheek. The whole point of this is to be hopeful, my God! Otherwise what are you doing it for? You can talk about whatever you want, but if you don't listen to music to feel better in some way, then what are you doing? Go do something else!

We still write the instrumental parts first, you don't come to this band with lyrics and say: "Hey, write some music around this", it's always been the other way around.

There's a whole string of indie bands that end up becoming "cult" a few years after recording their albums. Your self-titled debut is one of the clearest examples of this trend: in other interviews you've said you never expected it to happen, but was there a point where the appreciation for your past work became overwhelming? We found so much material about you over the past few years…

Mike: I think it's a case of oversaturation, for sure. I mean, it was cool and we were surprised that everyone was listening to the record and cared about it, then we were excited to be able to do all these interviews, but I think maybe it's a bit too much. If you followed our Facebook page around the time we released the new album, it was like "promotion! promotion! promotion!". I don't follow the band's website or anything because it's too much. But it's the only way to stay relevant: every day you wake up and have to remind the world that you exist.

Over these years, did you sense that a kind of myth was building up around you?

Steve: Maybe you, Mike, definitely not me.

Mike: Not on this scale, not at all. I thought it was the same hundred kids who used to come to Owen shows. I had no idea it was spreading like this.

Steve: I have to say that, making new music, I appreciate it when other people appreciate that we're trying to do new things and keep ourselves current, because we're not going to keep making just the first album over and over again. We've done thirty shows since the reunion and we can't do that, there's no point in continuing to play if we can't also play something else. That's how we feel like a real band.

A couple of years ago the Guardian published an article headlined “Emo: no longer rock’s dirtiest word,” referring to a new generation of American bands like The Hotelier and TWIABP, who moved on from the overwrought suicidal themes of the 2000s to a punk-rock nostalgia inherited from the 90s. Recently you poked fun at these “bloody” stereotypes with the not-too-serious video for “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long”. Do you think the term “emo” should be cleaned up, or that it simply shouldn’t exist at all? And do you like what these younger bands are doing with (or without) it?

Mike: I’d lean more towards the term not existing at all, but we don’t worry about it. If we did, we’d never be able to leave the house. It’s not like we can go out there and say, “C’mon, we’re not an emo band.” Obviously at this point we are, so we just don’t think about it when we’re writing or doing anything musical.

I’ve played a few shows with TWIABP: it’s a sound I’ve always had around me, kind of like the stuff I started getting into when I was twenty.

I’m a huge fan of your singer-songwriter project, Owen, and I think there’s been a shift in the 90s alt-rock/emo scene towards a more acoustic, singer-songwriter style. Why did you decide to go down that path?

Mike: I don’t know, honestly it was more a matter of logistics, but I guess the easiest way to answer your question is that I hate band rehearsals (laughs). But I love playing guitar: I’ve got four of them lying around the house, and every time I walk into some room I pick one up and start strumming, and then I go, “Ok, this could be a song.” I don’t have to go through some sweaty six-hour band rehearsal! (they laugh)

Steve: You really do hate band rehearsals!

Mike: Honestly it’s just logistics, and also I was about to get married, so… I was still playing in other bands – I was playing with Joan Of Arc at the time – but this is the easiest thing, or whatever comes out of me right now.

Looking back at your career as Owen, it feels like I’ve watched your life unfold, almost like a musical counterpart to the film “Boyhood.” When you were searching for love on “At Home With Owen,” when you had a daughter on “Ghost Town” (my favorite Owen records…). What does the future hold?

Mike: It’s getting harder and harder to write: it was easy when I was single and putting out records, since I was much more sociable, so I could turn those experiences into songs more easily. But now it’s about making dinner every night, and then it takes an hour and a half to get the kids to sleep. If I wrote a song about the struggle of putting the kids to bed, there’d be this tiny slice of the audience that would relate to it, and most people either aren’t interested or don’t have time to listen to music and buy records. So it’s tough, I have to write vaguer things or project myself outward much more. I have to go out and invent situations among the people I see, because I’m not living them myself. American Football is more fun than doing something like Owen – I get to travel with my friends instead of driving around on my own.

So what should we expect from the band?

Mike: We’re excited to still be able to write new songs. The only way to keep this going is to keep writing. We can’t be nostalgic forever.

Steve: And I think from this last album we’ve learned some new things that we’ll keep doing the same way, and others we might do differently.

Do you think you’ll manage to keep up a faster pace than before, or will you take whatever time it takes?

Mike: It’ll definitely be sooner than 17 years. We’re already working on it.

Steve: The last album was written in about two or three months and recorded in another six weeks – we had to, we had no choice. But I think now we have a better sense of what this new version should be, because the first one wasn’t even supposed to be anything – the fact that it even existed is kind of a small miracle. With this one we’ve really learned what it means to be a band, so hopefully we’ll get there faster.

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