Tom Lynch

For the October issue of Alternative Press, the magazine asked Tim Kinsella to write an op-ed on any topic of his choice. After searching the pages of a recent issue, puzzled by what he could possibly write, Kinsella decided on this thesis for his piece: "I am asking every band that appeared in the August 2006 issue of Alternative Press to break up." He later adds "There's no good reason why `ex-rockstar' shouldn't be the most common job in the future." Bored with the lack of personality of young, popular emo-pop bands and their eagerness to conform to simple, overused trends of songwriting and marketing, Kinsella called for a mass professional suicide to shake up the wildfire complacency, writing that "the most basic requirement we share is kept in balance only if it's shaken in many directions at the same time...We must integrate our politics into our lifestyle."

Of course, he was only half-serious.

"I wasn't being completely sarcastic," he says, "but those bands aren't very nourishing or nurturing for young people's brains."

The article caused a shake-up in the adolescent emo world, prompting Max Bemis of Say Anything to post a response on the band's Web site, labeling Kinsella as a fraud, believing that he's still very much involved within the system and calling him a "fascist neo conservative of rock and roll: the worst kind of hypocrite." Later, in caps: "FUCK YOU KINSELLA: YOUR REVOLUTION IS DEAD AND WAS BORN OUT OF LAZINESS. P.S. I RIPPED YOUR LAST RECORD."

"It's funny," Kinsella says, "it's just so funny, it's like someone asked `Is anyone stupid enough in the room to actually buy this?' And he was like, `Yeah, I believed it!' I didn't expect that every band would break up. But I think if it did happen, that would be incredible."

At 32 and 29, respectively, the Kinsella brothers, Tim and Mike, have already had full careers as musicians. Growing up in Buffalo Grove, as soon as a friend got a driver's license they started venturing to Chicago on weekends to see shows at Metro, go to The Alley or Wax Trax. "The scene, the whole DIY, all-ages scene was a big deal to me," Tim says, sitting in the Humboldt Park apartment he shares with his wife, Amy. "It totally blew my mind--it was an amazing escape from our neighborhood."

Tim had a band when he was a freshman in high school, and Mike would watch them practice. "Watching his band in the basement, hearing them play...there was a desire that was like, `I could do that,"' Mike says. "Instead of shooting baskets this afternoon, I can go practice [music]."

That quickly led to Cap'n Jazz, the influential, teenager-driven and cult-followed (at least in the Midwest) band that included the two brothers, plus Sam Zurick, Victor Villareal and Davey von Bohlen (now of Maritime). The band released only one full-length before jumping ship in 1995--von Bohlen went off to focus on The Promise Ring, and Tim and Mike eventually created Joan of Arc, the quasi-pop, experimental outfit that combined elements of acoustics, electronics and vast, atmospheric structuring. The band helped make a name for Jade Tree Records and, while always off-center and battling the "difficult" tag, maintained a loyal following with strong, inventive records like "How Memory Works" and, later, "The Gap." (As the drummer of Joan of Arc, Mike, also during this period, embarked on his acclaimed, but ultimately short-lived, American Football project.) The band broke up in 2000, the members reportedly burned out by the band's steadfast dedication to consistently recreate itself--it has since reformed, with various lineups, for more records, the most recent released this past summer--and both brothers started Owls, with Villareal and Zurick, for one record in 2001, and then parted ways shortly after when Mike and Villareal left the band.

Mike debuted his Owen in 2001--mostly acoustic guitars and his whispery, fragile voice, he played every instrument and recorded it himself in an effort to learn the technology. He's made four proper full-lengths under this moniker, including this month's "At Home with Owen." "I think I was done with school," Mike says. "I wanted to learn Pro-Tools, how to use it. And I was like, `Hey, Polyvinyl [Records, located in Champaign], would you put this out?' They said yes. I was just recording and trying new things."

Tim, in 2004, went the other route, honing even more directly on his hardcore influences and recruiting Zurick again, Bobby Burg and cousin Nate Kinsella for Make Believe. The band released a striking EP that year, followed up with the full-length "Shock of Being" in 2005 and just last month, another record, "Of Course," on Flameshovel.

"Joan of Arc broke up in 2000," Tim says, "and it was like, `OK, we're gonna start a new band. That band fell apart. `Okay, we're gonna start this new band' or `We're gonna restart Joan of Arc.' It fizzled. Make Believe started. It was like, `OK, forty hours a week, we're gonna do this, nonstop. So it's like every couple years I get reinvigorated."

There's an undeniable camaraderie between the two brothers in person--they discuss family and old friends intermittently between talking about music, who was at grandma's house, who heard from whom and so on. They joke back and forth and each shows genuine interest in the other's work--they are equals in their music world, given the number of projects they have worked on together. There is no apparent sibling tension, let alone rivalry. Mike enjoys sports--he talks of listening to sports shows on the radio while driving on tour and his three different fantasy-football teams--while it's difficult to imagine Tim, who exudes a bit more mystery, would ever do the same. Yet they give off the impression that they understand each other and how the other works, musically and otherwise, as well as any other two people in the world.

The contrast between Owen and Make Believe is interesting as well, considering the two spent so much time together in bands before now. Owen's all-acoustic, hyper-sensitive indie-folk (matched with stellar, weaving guitarwork) greatly appeals to the younger, heartbroken crowd. Even Mike admits, "It's my fault if I feel stuck in this scene or whatever. I'm a grownup guy playing my songs in front of younger kids, 18- or 19-year-old kids. I'd rather play for grownups. It would be cool if a 30-year-old guy came up to me [after a show]."

Make Believe, on the other hand, produces aggressive, intricate rock based on Zurick's biting, anti-rhythmic guitar parts and Tim's often-screaming, often-speaking howl of a voice. The results are admirable--Make Believe's sound advances on the invention of Kinsella's previous bands into a new realm of rock music. "It's not like we have a specific ambition for what we're trying to sound like," Tim says, "as much as it's an ambition in how we approach it. What's interesting to me is the tension of familiar sound--guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, this traditional rock band sound, trying to see what's possible in that recognizable alphabet."

Or it's just possible that the two went back to their musical roots, with what originally piqued their interest in music when they were kids. Tim: "I was really into hardcore stuff and, uh, more hardcore stuff." Mike: "I love pop music. Any band with a girl singer."

And, with "Of Course" and "At Home with Owen," the Kinsella brothers may have made the best records of their respective careers.

"I'm not sure if it's more personal, but I think I'm becoming more comfortable saying whatever I want to say and the `At Home' is kind of a reference to that comfort," Mike says about the title of the new Owen record.

The record, with uncharacteristic aggression, starts off with "Bad News," a scathing attack on the hipster, go-out-to-be-seen culture of self-deception, and is followed by six more songs, sad, romantic and dreary with tales from the road, plus a cover of "Femme Fatale." ("I wanted to work `cock tease' onto an album," he jokes.)

Typically, Mike Kinsella's lyrical approach is quite forward--whether about loneliness, sex, disgust--but on this record he seems to cut through the barriers even more. Much of that has to do with the changes he's gone through in the last year--marriage (he wed just recently) and death (the brothers' father passed away). "A Bird in Hand," the best song on the record, seems like a direct love letter, as he pleads with his partner to understand that "When I put on a suit and say `I do,' you know I mean it."

"I think the whole album is a product of getting older and married," he says. "The other albums had a lot of whiney songs about girls and having them and not having them, but ever since I got engaged all that bullshit has physically evaporated out of my brain and, in the process, had made room for a bunch of different, more mature bullshit to whine about."

He tours by himself, performs by himself, without a back-up band to rely on. Given the extremely personal, unguarded material in his songs, does he ever feel overly vulnerable? "I usually feel more guilty than vulnerable," he says, "because I know that most of the songs are usually about other people and often they're pretty mean. And I assume they must know it's about them, because in my mind it's really clear. But I've only been confronted a couple of times about it, so maybe they're more vague than I think."

Make Believe wrote and recorded "Of Course" quickly, because of drummer Nate Kinsella's impending jail sentence. Last year, during a show in Oklahoma, he exposed himself on stage, was promptly arrested and charged with indecency. The court threw the book at him, gave him seven weeks in jail, where he was imprisoned with sexual predators, mostly "born-again Christians who had raped their nieces," Tim says.

The band swiftly completed the album, and thus Tim thinks "it's simpler [than the previous releases]. This was written so quick, we didn't have time to get clever."

He says he didn't have a plan for what he wanted the record to sound like. "I very rarely go into something knowing what I want to do," he says. "I think when I was younger I was more conscious of it--now it's more interesting to let themes emerge. It was an intense period [during the writing of the record]. We had been on tour, we got home, my dad died a couple weeks later, we went to Japan for a week after that, got home, did the Joan of Arc record, Nate got his sentence. That was six weeks right there."

The record's intensity stands out at first--it makes you sweat a little. The seemingly spontaneous crafting--inventive guitar playing by Zurick, the haunting, spastic vocal delivery from Kinsella--sometimes suggests a hint of violence, a nervous tension between band and audience. In comparison with Mike, on the other end of the spectrum, there's a certain sort of vulnerability one would have to accept if he adopted Tim's sense of performance, the howling, the visceral movement that offers a union of punk-rock ethos and circus-act fright. "It's not an all-pleasant experience for me," he says. "I feel like my brain is on hyper-speed when we're playing, so there's all these ideas flipping through. Definitely vulnerability. That's part of what's meaningful about it to me, especially because I can't really play or sing very well. In my mind it sort of makes it okay to do."

He calls his early work with Cap'n Jazz and Joan of Arc "confrontational." Does he feel the same about Make Believe?

"It's definitely sort of confrontational," Tim says. "It's just an aspect of what we do. It's not for the sake of being confrontational, it just doesn't allow you to passively accept that this is a rock band. It makes you sort of nervous."

It's not all great, turns out, as both brothers have their doubts. Neither of them particularly enjoy touring, Mike disenchanted by the monotony and Tim by the lack of truly experiencing the places he visits.

"I think it's my fault," Mike says. "It's up to me to change where I play and what I do and how I do it, but it's been stagnant for a while. I've been doing the same thing. It's like `Groundhog Day.' When I'm playing it's just me. Any sort of randomness has to come from me."

"I did like it for a long time," Tim says. "It was really exciting at first to see places. But now I've been to all these places. You don't really see much. Just the Empty Bottle of each city."

Since the days of Cap'n Jazz, Tim has developed a public persona of being an outsider, an impenetrable force of angry mystique, an anomaly to both media and, sometimes, fans. "It makes me very uncomfortable, people thinking they know me or understand me because of a certain song," he says. "Being a persona or something, I'm not interested in that. I know I've done things of my free will to provoke people, which encourages that. Sometimes it bums me out [to be] aware of that sort of persona in some contexts, especially in Make Believe. It bums me out to feel like a lot of people don't hear the music for what it is, that they come with expectations and they're like, `Oh, another record by one of these guys. Throw it in a pile, they all sound the same.' On the other hand, some people check it out because they like something else we did."

"Maybe it's the way our dad raised us," Mike says, "but we're not really performers. I don't have the need to get up there and sing songs to other people. I guess all my songs are [he quotes with his fingers] `sad,' but it's not like [when I'm performing] I'm living the moment when I wrote those songs. Performing is part of what I do, singing sad songs, but I'm not a sad guy. Most nights I wish I didn't have to get up there, I just don't feel like playing a sad song."

Though Tim disagrees, Mike considers his time with Cap'n Jazz and Joan of Arc "the glory days, like the high-school football years or something. You went to a show, you knew everybody."

Tim approaches music differently now. "It means a lot to me to play good," he says. "It's a constant renegotiation with me. But I enjoy it, I enjoy when we're playing. There are whole Joan of Arc tours where we'd be like, `We'll see what happens.' I guess I care now."

They both deeply respect the music scene in Chicago, its vast differences between those of Los Angeles and New York, the sense of true community and lack of competition between artists and the idea that you could survive as a lifelong musician here. Owen, as Mike says, "affords him the lifestyle he wants to lead," and he and his wife, Ryan, live in Rogers Park. Tim, when not on tour, bartends at Ukrainian Village's Rainbo Club. Both say they are happy with married life. Kids? Mike: "Yes! Kids. I'm ready." Tim: " I don't know. Maybe."

Despite their different musical instincts, the two show obvious respect for each other's work and musicianship. "You took to it quicker than I ever did," Tim says to his brother, "picking up any instrument and playing it."

"Yeah," Mike says, "but you took to falling on your face and screaming quicker than I have."

(2006-10-31)

Also by Tom Lynch

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