by Nicholas James Von Pless, http://news.bbc.co.uk
Posted in on Thursday, Feb 9
Tim Kinsella’s not only the man behind Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Pit er Pat, and Make Believe. He’s also a very humble man who doesn’t seem to think much of his work; it’s just what he does. Tim to his music is just as a sailor is to the sea. Or, perhaps, a trucker to a highway.
The Chicago kid has been a part of the scene (the real one that actually mattered) since the early ‘90s, when many of us were just starting to wonder what this different music was, after we had been inundated with Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Ace of Base. He also probably remembers the first Bush, and most likely had a breakdown when Fox News announced that the new man in charge of the Free World was a Texas dumbass. I’m hoping that he wasn’t watching Fox, though.
In talking with Kinsella, I realized that he was more than just your run-of-the-mill starving artist. He’s well-read, intellectual, and has a sharp political and humanitarian mind. There’s a certain amount of due respect to go with his constant pursuit of musical endeavors, and continued hunger for new ideas.
Make Believe, with a roster filled out by Sam Zurick on guitars, Nate Kinsella on drums and Bobby Burg on bass, will release their debut full length on Flameshovel Records on October 4th.
1) First, let’s talk about Make Believe. How did the band form, and what goals did you have in mind?
Make Believe evolved out of Joan of Arc’s touring line-up from 2003. We were playing every night for 3 months, and the songs were getting louder and more wild every night and it was a lot of fun. So we decided to pursue writing songs as a unit when we got home—playing music as a unit was already happening, but writing songs as a unit was not. Three out of the four of us lived in the same warehouse space where music was always being played at the time, so it was pretty easy to coordinate.
My brother Mike and Ryan Rapsys were both in early versions of the band, but neither was down with the practice schedule the rest of us imagined—i.e. constantly. Bobby moved back to Chicago from New York to do it. We really just wanted to be a live, rock band, something Joan of Arc had been slowly slipping away from more and more for years.
2) When Make Believe first hit the road, you were playing basement shows (and maybe you still are, now and then). What is it like for you to go back to that kind of atmosphere? Did some pretty nice kids along the way take you in?
I don’t feel as if we’ve ever gotten too far away from that, so it wasn’t much of an effort to return to anything, if we were in fact returning anywhere and not just still somewhere. It wasn’t any romantic, nostalgic thing for us, it was just the only way we knew how to start a band that made sense.
Me and Sam had been a part of a couple different things in the past that had recorded and released records before playing our first shows, and we knew we didn’t want to do that all, and we knew that no one else was gonna help us. So really the only decision we ever made was ‘let’s play constantly,’ and beyond that everything just sort of lined up as it could or had to without much discussion as to specifics of the inevitable at first.
As for meeting a few nice kids, of course it would be impossible not to meet a few. But I’m an old man now (relative to our audiences) and this scene we operate within. So I meet less and less people that I can really relate to. But the people I meet that I can relate to I can relate to better than anyone I may meet under any other circumstances.
3) You’ve been, to this point, an extremely prolific writer. What releases do you think have been the strongest, or that you’re most proud of?
I couldn’t really answer that. I have impressions of how each record has come together and each one has its own frustrations and limitations to confront. But I certainly don’t care for one more than another because of the frustrations one had and the other didn’t.
For example, my mom says I was a totally silent and catatonic infant and Mike was screaming non-stop. But that doesn’t mean my mom loves Mike less just because he was more of a pain as a pip-squeak. Perhaps even the opposite might be a little true because more work had to go into it.
If this is the case, then my favorite record I’ve been a part of would be The Gap. Poor The Gap, she needed such an impossible amount of love and attention to come together but she was like an affection-black hole—just swallowing and disappearing whatever love she was given, but never really getting any more nourishment from it; but instead just getting more difficult and distanced every day.
But really I’d be the least qualified human on earth to have the right to have any opinion on the relative effectiveness of each record. I haven’t heard any of them except the new Make Believe record in a long time, so I don’t really know what any of them sound like.
And honestly I’m not particularly ‘proud’ of any of them in any sense beyond how a snail might be proud of its slime tracks. At best, with any of them, I’ve expressed my ideas as best I could within whatever the specific context is. Realizing that ambition should be just a matter of focus and attention—really no great feat to achieve.
I think beyond that, the weird stuff people get proud about regarding their bands seems more often to be pride about how many people know their band than pride about the music itself. That is slimy and unpleasant to be around in my experience because most often when people get like that, they fail to recognize what failures they actually are by their own standards they’ve established. Like if that’s what it’s about then Limp Bizkit or 311 or whatever really are the coolest. Music has so many humans that are so creepy!
In the way my brain is hard-wired, any pride seeping into the music will corrupt that too. All the most expressive music I feel is done with the exact opposite attitude, with humility. Do you think Jimi Hendrix played like that and was thinking the whole time, “I am the Shit! No one can touch me!”? I don’t think he could’ve played like he did if that was his attitude. He was devotedly humble. Of course there is the ancient Buddhist mirror maze garden we are approaching about one getting proud of how humble they are, etc., but this answer has gone on long enough!
4) What brought on the creation of Owls? Despite what some may think, I believe it was very different from many other projects you were involved in. Was there something that you weren’t finding in other projects that Owls provided?
Owls started specifically to play a memorial show and benefit for a friend of ours that had passed away at I guess 22 years old maybe. Even though I knew it at the time, the older I get, the younger and younger that seems to me to die.
Joan of Arc couldn’t do it and we’d all been hanging around together a little bit for the first time in years. A Cap’n Jazz reunion was suggested and Owls was, I guess, our mutant version of that idea.
We wrote all the songs that would later be on the record in one week of intense practices for that show. Of course they were tweaked a bit before recording, but we basically wrote 95% of everything we’d ever come up with as a band in the first week we existed. We played the one show, recorded the record and then tried to cling to the band for dear life for 2 impossibly frustrating years.
The only variation in approach Owls really brought at the time was a more live band [approach to] songwriting. Really the best part of being in that band was just learning the lesson of how bad things could really get if you hold on too tight and refuse to just walk away from a bad situation. I’m getting a stomach-ache right now even thinking about having been in that band.
5) Looking back on Cap’n Jazz, which was arguably a foundation for much of today’s independent bands, what was it like to be “different” from what the alternative “norm” was? What kind of feedback did you get at the time?
We were pretty immersed in our little scenes. We had our friends from high school and then we had the small local punk scene and the small national network of these emo bands, the heart attack scene, etc. so we never felt that different ourselves. It was more a matter of being a part of something different, these communities that at least seemed to be about something else than the dominant culture. There was very little daring on our part; we were protected by this network. Every punk band in Chicago knew each other, every emo band everywhere knew each other, so really in a lot of ways, we were trying to fit in just as much as we were trying to be different.
Conformity to a small community shaped us just as much as rejection of the rest of the world did. But we really weren’t much different than a lot of the bands at the time. We were mostly just trying to sound like Gauge and they were mostly just trying to sound like Fugazi.
6) What are you working on now? What can we expect from Joan of Arc?
I’m quite consciously taking my time and working on things in the most casual manner possible for the first time in my life. I’m hoping this will allow various projects to all find their own form over time. There’s still the same urgency I’ve always felt regarding making things, but diversifying a bit and having been through it a little bit by now, I am beginning to have a better sense of how I work best and what seems interesting to pursue at different times.
There will probably be another Make Believe record before another proper, fully flushed out Joan of Arc record. Joan of Arc and Pit er Pat will be splitting the soundtrack to a documentary my wife is making that myself and Rob from Pit er Pat helped her shoot a while ago. It’s called Ladies and Gentlemen and hopefully that will all finally be wrapped up by spring.
I’ve mostly been spending a lot of time writing in a lot of different ways to a lot of different ends and I’m enjoying it very much. It’s always been important to me to feel like I could feel fine walking away from playing music at any time. This is as true as it ever has been, and even though we continue making plans and continue working, if I don’t play another show, write another song, or put out another record for the next 10 years or the rest of my life, I’ll feel fine about it.
7) Who has influenced your style of writing? How has working with your equally talented brother affected your writing process?
I have some favorite songwriters lyrically; Daniel Higgs, Will Oldham, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, but I don’t really know how much what I end up writing is affected by them. I more appreciate that some of them have perhaps shaped models that I now have to reference as head starts of my own model I must shape to live within.
And I have favorite writers; Rilke, Rumi, Alan Watts, Kenneth Patchen, and Norman Mailer pop out at first to me this morning, but they too are more just people I enjoy returning to than people that I feel I aspire to write like.
If anything, I feel most influenced perhaps by Gore Vidal, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky on the one hand, and David Icke and Alex Jones on the other. It’s hard not to get hung up on what these people have to say these days.
I truly feel so alienated by our current cultural and political environment that it has made me question my entire cosmology. And this in turn has made me recognize the beauty in things with a more keen eye and sense of wonder.
I can really only see darker days ahead, with the end of cheap oil and the attempted global domination by fundamentalist Christians. These prospects seem so scary to me that I become forced to re-evaluate everything I grew up being taught and later assuming life was somehow about. Detachment and withdrawal seem the easiest options and hope and engagement are really tough, but the most vital qualities to retain. Holding on to these and maintaining my balance are probably the greatest influences on my writing. Making something musical out of the dreaded news has perhaps been my greatest ambition.
And as for my brother, Mike, he and my cousin Nate are both infinitely better musicians than I could ever even aspire to be. They are both able to pick up any instrument and play any song they’ve ever heard on it immediately and pull melodies out of the air like shooting fish in a barrel. Between them and Sam, most of the structuring of everything I’ve been a part of has been made possible and realized. And I think realization is probably the greatest effect anything could have on one’s process.
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