American Football’s True Confessions

Months before Buchanan visited Urbana, Lamos went over to the apartment Mike and Holmes shared—“interesting guys living in the least interesting shithole,” he says, laughing, “like unit 13 behind the fucking dumpster.” His duo practices with Holmes had gone well enough that they asked Mike if he might like to join.

Mike remembered the way Villareal had retuned his guitar in Cap’n 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’s phase music might resolve. The quest became addicting.

“Me and Holmes were both still learning our instruments, so our heads were down, concentrating on whatever stupid idea we had,” says Mike, who didn’t even bring a guitar to college and initially borrowed Holmes’ cheap Mexican Telecaster. “We would sit on the couch, watch TV, and practice. We just played these parts over and over until we were like, ‘Oh my god, it worked.’”

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.

“Because I was still learning drums, I didn’t have to pretend to have a beginner’s mind or a child’s eye or whatever—I had it,” says Lamos, tapping out rhythms on a table as he describes how they would discuss the way each piece would converge. “Each part was allowed to develop. And we were trying not to be noisy.”

Indeed, American Football’s sound was a reaction on multiple fronts. For Mike, the first was personal. He’d played in Tim’s bands for nearly a decade at that point, ceding the final decisions about direction to him. He found his brother’s impulse for obfuscation and misdirection frustrating. “Look, I like every ballad I’ve ever heard—any genre, give me the ballad,” he says, smiling. “American Football was weird time signatures, but it was all palatable. Tim was denying me being able to satisfy that, so I dove in.”

The second was about genre: They wanted nothing to do with “emo.” 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. “We thought we were doing the opposite,” he remembers. “We said let’s do Music for 18 Musicians on guitars and drums.”

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’t 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’t know how to end.