Kings Of All Alone: American Football

Had it not been for how profoundly the internet has expanded the concept of word of mouth in the years since, it might all have ended there - with one album, one EP, and a clutch of house and bar shows around Champaign and Chicago to their name. Mike continued as a musician, recording solo albums under the name Owen and chipping in towards a raft of other projects, like Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc and Owls, all of which were masterminded by his similarly prolific older brother, Tim. Holmes went into IT, making use of his degree in computer science. Lamos moved out west, to Colorado; he’s now a professor of English at the university there (and has a page on my RateMyProfessors.com with a comments section that’s littered with American Football puns from students).

It was only when Holmes found some old live recordings, fifteen years later, that it became clear that LP1 had morphed glacially from obscurity to sleeper hit. Polyvinyl took the unreleased tracks and packaged them with the record for a fifteenth anniversary reissue - the demand crashed their website when it went on sale. The reissue led to a smattering of sold-out shows, which then became a sporadic world tour built around their existing commitments. Against all the odds, in April of 2016, Mike, Nate, Holmes and Lamos walked through the doors of ARC Studios in Omaha, Nebraska to commence work on one of the most improbable sequels in history. They approached the making of it in a manner that had them approximating the sound of the first - by asking themselves the question, “what do people expect from American Football?” and then doing their best to construct something to that blueprint. This time around, they’ve taken the opposite approach, rearranging their sonic fabric by tossing out the familiar and throwing caution to the wind.

“We just wanted to open up a whole big box of toys and play with all of them,” says Mike of their new, anything-goes mindset. “Making the second album, we were surprised to have an audience at all, so we just tried to make what we thought they wanted to hear. We reacted to that this time by letting the songs breathe, whether that meant fewer guitars to leave some open space, or adding things into that space that just weren’t guitars. We kind of planned it that way - fleshing out the demos, so when somebody sent something to somebody else, it wasn’t clean, there was a real indicator of how we were hearing the finished song. Nate took a much more prominent writing role, too, which was a big asset, because he went to school for composition.”

Nate’s increased involvement on LP3 marks a major turning point, not just for the band but for himself as an individual; his eagerness to raze the proverbial house to the ground is telling, because that kind of bold thinking couldn’t be any further from how he felt when he first joined the reunited lineup in 2014, as a live bassist. He was in two minds about doing so. The first American Football record doesn’t have much bass on it, and to tamper with something that so many - himself included - considered perfect seemed risky. After all, if the bass parts were deemed to spoil the songs, then he’d be the one up there doing the spoiling.

“I absolutely felt like, ‘oh, man, I’m just going to try to be invisible,’” he says with a chuckle. “I’ll stay as close to the low end as I can, and just fill out the sound. But once the first shows went well, it opened me up to the idea of playing bass more often, because I didn’t do much of it before I joined. I came to really love the space it takes up, and how I can write around what Mike and Steve are doing to shift how their parts appear. It fits my personality, too, because I’m not really one to be out front and centre.”

You might beg to differ on the evidence of LP3; his influence is huge, both in terms of the sheer textural heft his bass lines provide - the complexity of his playing on ‘I Can’t Feel You’ makes the song, as does his ominous turn on opener ‘Silhouettes’ - and on the structure of the tracks; according to Mike, more of the record’s eight songs began with Nate’s ideas than any other member. “I contributed a couple of songs to the second album,” says Nate, “but I wasn’t a writer on the first one, obviously, so I was pretty timid, and happy to be in a supporting capacity. With this new one, I became a lot more confident with the idea of trying to write things for what I thought American Football could be now. It’s shifted, and we’ve all settled into new roles.”

The new sonic ideas are myriad, and they aren’t mere accoutrements - they’re the ballasts around which these songs are built. ‘Heir Apparent’ goes up an emotional gear at the climax, when the Omaha Children’s Choir step in handle the outro. On ‘I Can’t Feel You’, the arpeggiated, melodic guitars that comprise the band’s calling card are accompanied by fizzing reverb and a chiming twelve-string. Violins flutter in and out, with a friend of the band, Kristina Dutton, given carte blanche to write her own parts rather than any that the group outlined for her. As Mike relates, the conviction throughout seems to have been that more is more. “On the last tour, it felt like the highlight of every show was when all the bells and whistles were going.”

Still, the essence of what earned American Football this second life all these years on remains; the eccentric time signatures, the melancholy brass work and, perhaps most crucially, those oscillating, harmonic guitars. Mike acknowledges that, even as they were pushing as hard as they could in a different direction to before, there were always going to be certain parameters that were immovable - which, going by the example he cites, is probably for the best. “We weren’t going to start writing Anthrax songs all of a sudden,” he deadpans. “I can’t project my voice that way, and there are natural boundaries to what I can do with that - certain keys I’m never going to be able to reach.

“Plus, Steve went so many years without picking up a guitar that it’s almost like it’s stunted his playing, somehow. When he plays something now, it just comes out sounding like American Football, so that tethered us to the original sound of the band. You can get past environmental things, like explaining to the two Steves how recording works now, because they hadn’t been into a studio for seventeen years - but there’s certain other factors that lock us in, in a lot of ways. Which is a nice foundation to have, actually.”

They did find a way around those vocal limitations that Mike talks about, though - one that likely represents LP3’s the most dramatic alteration to the American Football DNA. On his Owen records, Mike has routinely featured female singers as a foil for his own vocals, but until now had taken on the responsibilities for American Football alone. With the group in such adventurous mood, though, they chose first to tap up Elizabeth Powell of tourmates Land of Talk, who sings in French on ‘Every Wave to Ever Rise’; “I wrote the lyrics, but I don’t speak French, so she did some surgery on them, which was fun.”

Buoyed by how easily that first collaboration went, they set their sights high when they decided that ‘I Can’t Feel You’ - the closest the band have ever come to shoegaze - needed an experienced hand in the field. “It had that sound to it that reminded me of Slowdive, who I loved growing up,” Mike recalls. “You know, that repetitive kind of groove that you just get lost in. So, we reached out to Rachel Goswell. I don’t think she’d ever heard of us before, but she liked the song and said yes, which was pretty incredible.”

Around the same time, it came to the band’s attention that Hayley Williams of Paramore was a fan; it’ll have done their ever-burgeoning fanbase no harm, either, that she was announcing as such to her five million Twitter followers. Increasingly, ‘Uncomfortably Numb’ was developing into a track that crystallised the album’s themes; of ageing and parenthood, and the insecurities that plague both. Just Mike’s voice wasn’t going to be enough; the song would be better served, he reasoned, if it morphed into a sort of almost-duet. “That one was turning into more of a dialogue, especially on the chorus, and we thought about Hayley as somebody who could handle the kind of theatrical treatment we knew it needed. We were still shocked she said yes, though. We were really very, very lucky on all three, especially because, listening back, I can’t imagine anybody else singing those songs now.”

‘Uncomfortably Numb’, in particular, feels like the one track that the band really needed to nail; if the panoramic mid-life crisis of ‘Doom in Full Bloom’ serves as the album’s musical axis, then ‘Uncomfortably Numb’ is the cut around which its emotional weight revolves. If there’s perhaps a reason why American Football, however belatedly, have found the sort of audience that Mike’s Owen albums have yet to, it’s because the words he penned for LP1 were imbued with universal appeal. Lost love, late-collegiate regret, vicious arguments, the wistful glow of the summer twilight - most of us can empathise. As Owen, on the other hand, there’s a hyper-specificity to his writing; in that respect, if you wanted to compare and contrast, The King of Whys makes a great companion piece to LP2 - they were released within three months of each other in 2016.

The little things add up on albums like that one. The direct references to his kids, the name checking of people, records and places, the general sense that he is describing the actual events, rather than being abstract; it all ends up feeling a long way from the old American Football. He lands somewhere in between the two on LP3, and tracks like ‘Uncomfortably Numb’ capture the balance perfectly; that approaching middle age has yet to bring answers to the anxious questions of his youth, or that parenthood can sometimes amplify his feelings of being adrift, is both personal to him and relatable to many.

“For a long time, with the Owen stuff, I’d just go with my first instinct,” he explains. “And I’d justify it by saying, “well, that’s my voice,” figuratively speaking. If that’s what came out of me, then that’s what should be on the record. I’ve started to take my time more recently, because what I found with this record is that if you let your ideas sit for a while, you can come back to them a month later and see them from a whole different perspective. I never would have come up with the concept for Elizabeth’s contribution if I hadn’t done that. Another big influence was Jason Cupp, our engineer and producer, who was challenging me to move towards making the words more inclusive, a little more open to people who find themselves in similar situations to mine.”

Had a third American Football album not materialised when it did - if he’d gone on and made another Owen record instead - these songs never would’ve taken shape; he’d have been back to writing “for a smaller niche, in a cruder way, for listeners who already know me.” He’s sure of this, he says, because he’s already set tracks aside for the next Owen release. Before then, though, plenty more American Football is on the agenda; they’ll hit the road as they did after LP2, in short sharp spurts that prevent them from being away from their home lives and their careers for too long.

That was a challenge they weren’t sure they could overcome when they first reformed, but they handled it elegantly. That balancing act between family and band is playing out all the time, anyway, not just when they’re on tour; Mike opens the conversation with the immortal line, “how’s it going? Oh, hold on. My dog’s choking.” Nate, meanwhile, jumps on the call late, after he’s put his baby daughter to bed, only for her to loudly announce that he’d failed in his efforts minutes later. “We still feel like we’re figuring it all out, somehow,” says Nate, and his daughter’s protests suggest as much in the background. “We’re still turning things down because we have other commitments, other lives. We’ve got a two week tour coming up, which is the longest straight stint we’ve done without going home. Hopefully, that works alright, but we’ll be sticking to that same, sporadic model as last time, for the most part. At least, until we can start paying for our health insurance with this band. Until we hit the big time!”

‘American Football’ is out now via Big Scary Monsters/Polyvinyl.