Months before Buchanan visited Urbana, Lamos went over to the apartment Mike and Holmes shared\u2014\u201cinteresting guys living in the least interesting shithole,\u201d he says, laughing, \u201clike unit 13 behind the fucking dumpster.\u201d His duo practices with Holmes had gone well enough that they asked Mike if he might like to join.<\/p>\n
Mike remembered the way Villareal had retuned his guitar in Cap\u2019n Jazz. Tim, too, had taken to dispatching the occasional mixtape to his younger brother. He remembers Stereolab and Steve Reich, Nick Drake and the Red House Painters. They could tell something was different about those guitars, too, so they experimented, turning tuning pegs until they found riffs they liked. They would play different lines at different times, waiting for them to intersect the way a piece of Reich\u2019s phase music might resolve. The quest became addicting.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe and Holmes were both still learning our instruments, so our heads were down, concentrating on whatever stupid idea we had,\u201d says Mike, who didn\u2019t even bring a guitar to college and initially borrowed Holmes\u2019 cheap Mexican Telecaster. \u201cWe would sit on the couch, watch TV, and practice. We just played these parts over and over until we were like, \u2018Oh my god, it worked.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Holmes, Lamos, and Mike all possessed what can be called a useful naivete. The guitarists were playing intricate parts whose mechanics they were still trying to understand. And Lamos was a rather new drummer, so when the pair would show up at his house with a new riff sorted, he was responding intuitively.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I was still learning drums, I didn\u2019t have to pretend to have a beginner\u2019s mind or a child\u2019s eye or whatever\u2014I had it,\u201d says Lamos, tapping out rhythms on a table as he describes how they would discuss the way each piece would converge. \u201cEach part was allowed to develop. And we were trying not to be noisy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, American Football\u2019s sound was a reaction on multiple fronts. For Mike, the first was personal. He\u2019d played in Tim\u2019s bands for nearly a decade at that point, ceding the final decisions about direction to him. He found his brother\u2019s impulse for obfuscation and misdirection frustrating. \u201cLook, I like every ballad I\u2019ve ever heard\u2014any genre, give me the ballad,\u201d he says, smiling. \u201cAmerican Football was weird time signatures, but it was all palatable. Tim was denying me being able to satisfy that, so I dove in.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second was about genre: They wanted nothing to do with \u201cemo.\u201d Sure, they had friends and family whose stock-in-trade that had become, but they wanted to be pretty and clear, like a bunch of bells. It was, says Holmes, a credo of sorts: We are not an emo band. \u201cWe thought we were doing the opposite,\u201d he remembers. \u201cWe said let\u2019s do Music for 18 Musicians on guitars and drums.\u201d<\/p>\n
They were, for a time, purely instrumental. Mike had wedged his way into The One Up Downstairs in order to sing, but he was reluctant to try it with American Football. Their first several shows were wordless and rather painful, one noodly song that they sometimes couldn\u2019t figure out how to end followed by minutes of tuning that could feel like an infinity followed by another noodly tune that they also didn\u2019t know how to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Months before Buchanan visited Urbana, Lamos went over to the apartment Mike and Holmes shared\u2014\u201cinteresting guys living in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[1784,441,7,2047,72409,13173],"class_list":["post-786763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-football","tag-music","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116159966503297515","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}