American Football cut its first—and, for a long time, only—LP in four days, as the spring of 1999 slid into summer. Steve Holmes, Steve Lamos, and Mike Kinsella were college kids who knew that as soon as their album of spacious and tenderly sad songs was done they likely would be, too. Aside from a few shows, they would break up at the end of the school year and perhaps go on to other bands, jobs, and lives. And for a long while, of course, that is exactly what happened: American Football’s sole album was a twinkling and circuitous entry in the annals of Midwest emo, remarkable for its musical tenderness and lyrical ellipses but largely unremarked upon, too.
But what happened over the next two decades is an inspiring saga of wonderful work slowly finding its audience. American Football went from cult classic to emo linchpin, its reputation and sales accreting like sand piling up in some endless hourglass. The little white house on its cover, a physical manifestation of the Anywhere, U.S.A. melancholy of its songs, became a musical landmark. Reunions, reissues, and two new albums followed, American Football finally climbing atop its own steady growth curve and staring out to the massive and enchanted crowd it had created, to the scene it had helped foster. Made at the end of the last century, American Football, or LP1, unequivocally stands as one of this century’s most influential rock records.
When Polyvinyl released American Football in 1999, it was still an upstart label, an outgrowth of a fanzine with a simple business model and a pure passion for releasing the music co-founders Matt and Darcie Lunsford loved. They didn’t gripe much, then, when their new trio splintered into other acts. Both label and band have grown in the quarter-century since in ways neither would have predicted. After a years-long hunt for the original Digital Audio Tapes and a subsequent quest for a machine that would render them properly, American Football has been lovingly remastered by original mastering engineer Jonathan Pines in Urbana’s Private Studios, where it was recorded. The intertwined guitars have more sparkle, the drums more bounce and flash, the occasional bass more depth. This is the definitive version.
