American Football

**Mike Kinsella** (0:01)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

**Jesse Thorn** (0:21)
It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Did you play in a band in college? I mean, you're listening to an NPR arts and culture show. There's like a 60% chance that you did. Maybe you and the gang played a few shows around town, maybe even toured a little. And if you were really serious, you might have rented some studio time and cut an EP. Maybe a record. Maybe a whole album. Then, you know, college ends. You get jobs, you go your separate ways. The Marshall stack you got ends up on Craigslist, because you're moving to Philadelphia. Nobody wants to haul that whole thing to Philadelphia. So imagine that that was your story. You did all that. Time goes by, and then that album that you made, more than a decade ago now, finds an audience.
It doesn't just find an audience, but to that audience, your band's record has become like a holy grail in its genre.
That is exactly the thing that happened to my guests, Mike Kinsella and Steve Holmes. Their band, American Football, recorded and released a self-titled album in 1999 Then, not long after they recorded it, they split up and did post-college stuff.
But that record, that they didn't even tour to promote, Over the course of the next few years, it became a sort of cult icon. Fans of emo and math rock decided that it was a landmark album.
So. Eventually, the band did what bands do sometimes, they reunited. And toured. They got like an offer to play a festival in Europe, and they said yes. Even though they were all grownups and most of some of them. had jobs. They made some money and caught up with their college buddies, and it was all pretty extraordinary. But that is not the most extraordinary thing about American Football. After those tours wrapped, after the crowds of 30- and 40-something dads got to see their favorite band live, American Football became, I guess you would say, a real band, by which I mean they started recording again. They made a new album, and then they toured that one, and then another. And because of the emotional rawness of their music, they found that their new fans were the age that their old fans had been when they discovered American Football. It turns out that people in their late teens and early 20s love hard-on-your-sleeve rock and roll music.
Earlier this year, American Football dropped their fourth self-titled record called LP4. Let's listen to a bit of it. This track features Brendan Yates, the lead singer of the punk rock band Turnstyle. It's called No Feeling.
Mike and Steve, welcome to Bullseye. It's nice to have you on the show. It's nice to be here.

**Steve Holmes** (4:45)
Thanks, Jesse.

**Mike Kinsella** (4:45)
Thank you.

**Jesse Thorn** (4:46)
So the two of you knew each other in high school. We had Mike. What was Steve like?

**Mike Kinsella** (4:53)
Feral.
It's so funny because upon reuniting, nobody believes me. Like I said, you know, 15 years later, he's got like a corporate gig and literally buttoned up and polite mannered. Yeah, he used to have like, you know, punk bleach tear and try to start fights with the jocks.

**Jesse Thorn** (5:16)
I got to tell you, you just said 15 years later, it's 30 years later.

**Mike Kinsella** (5:19)
Oh, and we got back together 15 years ago for the second time.

**Steve Holmes** (5:22)
Yeah.

**Mike Kinsella** (5:22)
Original upon originally breaking up and get back together. Yeah.

**Jesse Thorn** (5:27)
Steve, what was Mike like?

**Steve Holmes** (5:29)
Mike was shy, very intuitive, talented musician. Even even then, he was playing drums in a band called Cap and Jazz. Our freshman year, that's how we first met. I saw them play the lunchrooms. I'm like, oh, these guys are pretty good.

**Mike Kinsella** (5:41)
Yeah, we weren't.

**Steve Holmes** (5:44)
Well, yeah, by 14 year old standards, they were pretty good.
Yeah, he was just a punk kid in a different circle of punk kids. And then we made friends and started hanging out.

**Mike Kinsella** (5:56)
I was also friends with the jocks though. Yeah. I have like that.

**Steve Holmes** (5:59)
I love sports.

**Mike Kinsella** (6:00)
Yeah. And so you were on like the fringe side of, you know, you wanted to start the fights. I was trying to keep the peace.

**Jesse Thorn** (6:07)
Were you actually getting in fights?

**Steve Holmes** (6:09)
I mean, I got in like maybe one fight. This is overblown.

**Jesse Thorn** (6:15)
Who was the fight against?

**Steve Holmes** (6:17)