Interview: Tim Kinsella of Cap'n Jazz, Joan Of Arc and Owls

Oh, messy life.

The name of Tim Kinsella might not be instantly recognisable to a lot of people, but the bands he has been associated with since the late 1980s surely are. From Cap’n Jazz to Joan Of Arc, Owls, Make Believe and his work as a solo artist and author – Kinsella, along with brother Mike and ever-present sidemen Sam Zurick (bass) and Victor Villarreal (guitar), are four men who you could argue are the most vital players in the creation of both the “emo” scene and Chicago’s math rock hotbed.

Kinsella is basically a legend…well, to me at least. Cap’n Jazz have an almost mythological status in the world of music. Formed in 1989 by the Kinsella brothers and high school friends Zurick and Villarreal they managed just one proper album (the utterly glorious Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards In The Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped On and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over, the blueprint for all the emo you hear today, be it Fall Out Boy, We Are Scientists, whoever) before splitting in 1995 only a year after its release.

Almost immediately Tim Kinsella formed Joan Of Arc (at one time or another the band has featured all the members of Cap’n Jazz) and that band has been creating noisy, messy, awkward music, with Kinsella’s trademark obtuse lyrics, for the eighteen years since. In 2000 Tim reconvened the members of Cap’n Jazz for another record, this time under the name of Owls. Less urgent than Cap’n Jazz, the band released one – again! – album, the brilliant Owls, before collapsing under the weight of madness, personal problems and Villarreal’s drug habit. Perhaps learning his lesson, it wasn’t until 2010 that Kinsella once again got his long-time friends back together for Cap’n Jazz reunion shows, and although that truly is the last we’re likely to hear of that project and despite the four year gap since those shows, that reunion turned out to be the catalyst for perhaps the most surprising news of 2013….that we’d be getting a new Owls record, creatively titled Two, in the early months of 2014. Could lead single “I’m Surprised” be any more appropriate a title? After picking my jaw up off the floor and listening to Two, the sound of four guys who sound….mature would be pushing it, but grown up and less urgent, though still making a record that’s no less hooky, aggressive and indulgent – but with more of a groove than a lot of math rock related albums, and than any other Kinsella/Kinsella/Villarreal/Zurick output. I called Tim at his home in snow-bound Chicago to find out why after all these years we’ve got another Owls record. A shock, never mind surprise, surely?

“I mean, it took us by surprise too!” explains the older Kinsella brother. “We did those Cap’n Jazz reunion shows in 2010…but we are not four men with simple lives.” So it wasn’t any easy task then? “There’s been a lot of…” a hesitant Tim pauses. “I don’t wanna say drama, as that seems dismissive, but there’s been a lot of bad stuff. We first became friends and started playing music together in 1989, and we all have very specific and unique relationships with each other and truthfully, we’ve made as many records together as we can. We’ve always been trying but there’s always life circumstances…and this is the best we could do. We’ve been trying a lot!” Without wanting the conversation to veer off into a celebrity expose, I bring up the issue of drugs and particularly those of Villarreal, who it must be said is one of the great guitarists of his generation. Was that a major factor in not being able to pull it together? “Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s not just drugs,” begins Kinsella, “it’s like drugs, family circumstances, life circumstances like I said, and now everyone is getting their shit together to a degree, and now we’re all back in Chicago.”

The source of the second Owls record can be traced back to those reunion shows of 2010. There are some great video clips of one of the Cap’n Jazz shows at Chicago’s legendary Empty Bottle venue, and when you play it immediately after footage of Kinsella and co back in the early 90s you can hardly hear any difference. It’s four guys who still clearly have “it”, whatever that may be. Kinsella reveals that’s really what kick started new recordings: “It was out of the Cap’n Jazz shows; we really enjoyed playing together,” he states, before revealing quite the golden nugget of information. “I really wanted to name this a Cap’n Jazz record….” Wait, what? So why didn’t you? “Well, I never expected to be a 39-year-old man saying the words ‘CAPTAIN JAZZ’”. There’s a note of regret in Kinsella’s voice here, cursing the steps that led him to give his band that moniker back in 1989: “Y’know, we were fifteen when we named it and it was part of Sam’s comic book about this superhero. We’d seen some free jazz for the first time and we were like ‘these guys are superheroes!’”

It’s really not such a bad name when you think about it, and there is actually another reason why Kinsella didn’t want to use the Cap’n Jazz name, and that reason is former guitarist and founder of The Promise Ring, Davey von Bohlen. Always the outsider of the group, von Bohlen joined the band in 1994 just in time for the album release and will always be tied in as an important part of the making of the record….yet he’s really not part of the heart and soul of the group. Kinsella explains: “So that’s the period of Cap’n Jazz that anyone knows about – when we were a five piece – and while I don’t mean to diminish Davey’s contributions at all, he’s never lived in Chicago and we’ve never had as tight a friendship as the four of us.”

So, with drug problems out of the way and everyone that bit more matured, did that help when it came to writing new songs? “Yeah, everyone not being on drugs and crazy helps! It’s weird…we all have very different lives and we’re all sort of healthy positive people.” The sound of Two differs from the first Owls record in a number of ways: Kinsella has pulled back on the lyrics (all the song titles come from the first line of lyrics) and there’s more of a groove to Two, replacing the anxious sound of Owls with a slightly more considered turn. I ask Tim what brought on the redirection of sound: “I think this time there’s not the same urgency as there was back then,” he begins, “and the process is totally different too. With the first record we literally wrote it in five days, recorded demos, edited it a couple of months later and recorded the LP. So it was five intense days of writing, a couple months off, practice and then we had this little record. This time it was two years of writing once a week, taking a couple of months off…so it was very slow, deliberate process. We threw a whole record away, there were a lot of false starts.”

It seems that breaking free of the past was a major factor in Two coming together, as Kinsella explains that they didn’t rely on playing or listening to the proto-math rock of the band’s debut: “One thing that we did which really helped us make this record – and this is a weird thing – but not once during the practices did we play an old song,” says Tim. “Which seems weird for guys who’ve played together for so long…it would seem totally natural if we did. Even yesterday, we were shooting a video and Victor was like ‘oh my god look at this old tape I found!’ and he had this recording on his phone of us from 1992 but during recording no-one ever went ‘hey man, how did this part go?’” Never one to worry about public opinion, Kinsella once again made sure he and his lifelong friends stuck two fingers up to expectations. “We never thought about people’s expectations and whether it needed to sound like this record or that record. It just needed to sound contemporary to where the four of us are right now. Before we began – just to give you an idea of how open minded it could be – one idea that we started pursuing and we were all excited about was Mike playing bass and Sam playing drums; not just to fuck with people’s expectations, but Sam’s a great drummer, with a totally different style than Mike…and he’s a great bass player with a totally different style to Sam.”

But wouldn’t people find that kind of unsurprising for Owls? For better or worse, incorrectly or otherwise, people assume that the band are technically proficient players; not perhaps so much in Cap’n Jazz, due to how frenetic that sound was, but through Owls and Joan Of Arc, and their variety of time signatures and intricacy of style, most definitely. “It was just to….y’know, people associate Owls with great technique but we actually don’t care about that,” says Kinsella, disagreeing. “Technique refers to a whole toolbox of skills and it was never the case that we were fixated on technique but we got lumped in with the math rock bands. People would ask us what time signature a track was in and I’d be like ‘I dunno!’ Not only did we not care, we didn’t know, that wasn’t the point.”

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The conversation turns to Kinsella’s career in general and I ask him if it’s just the case that rather than it being a studied career plan, his back catalogue simply comes from doing whatever comes naturally and feels right? How else can you explain one album as Cap’n Jazz and one album (until now) as Owls, yet Joan Of Arc has been going strong for nearly two decades? He doesn’t agree: “I don’t know about coming naturally! Evolution is a painful process so saying that something comes naturally doesn’t mean it’s without suffering, y’know? It’s just one of the many adaptations and one of the skills you need to develop to continue…most bands don’t continue. Gross generalisation, but if you have a family member die and it feels like the end of the world, you adapt, you know? You lose a job or your house burns down and you feel like it’s the end of the world, you adapt. In all sorts of uncomfortable circumstances, you just have to adapt. And I consider anyone who’s not the four of us and what they expect of us to be some uncomfortable circumstance that we need to be aware of but we can’t let it affect us.”

I guess, then, that Kinsella would be quite able to sleep well at night if Owls never made another record…would he have cared if it began and ended with Owls? “No, no. Forever ago….2002,” begins Kinsella, “we started a new record so I’ve had a long time of assuming that it wouldn’t happen. You know that show Curb Your Enthusiasm? They did that Seinfeld reunion episode… and there was a joke, it was like the most offensive joke possible? Everyone always asks for a Seinfeld reunion, and the way they did it was as an episode of Curb that was the most offensive thing possible…and I just really liked that idea for an Owls record! I thought it was would be fun to….because Sam and Victor and Mike all play in Joan of Arc sometimes…I liked the idea of making a Joan of Arc record that was just the four of us and then people would have to sort of get it, like ‘Oh! A reunion!’” Would that have worked though, I ask? “Eventually we decided we couldn’t do that because the expectations between the four of us for how an Owls practice, or a Make Believe practice, or a Joan of Arc practice goes. The way we collaborate is so different and it didn’t make sense…but again, we were just open to all kinds of ideas.”

Up to this point I’ve tried to avoid asking if there’s a future for Owls, as deep down I think I know the answer. The Kinsellas, plus Zurick and Villarreal have been consistently making music in various formations of the original Cap’n Jazz quartet since 1989 – not always the four of them together but at least in some combination. I have no doubt this will continue for a long time yet, but I get the feeling there’s too much history and baggage between the four (and we’ve not even talked about the relationship between the brothers…yet) for Owls to last very far beyond Two. But, I ask Tim what he thinks about Owls in the future: “I dunno…..it’s really hard to say. The ten songs that ended up on the record came from fourteen that we recorded, but those fourteen came from about thirty that got started. Some of them seemed really great to me, you know. They fell away for whatever reason they did…it’s hard to imagine us not making more music.”

Would he consider touring? “That’s to be determined at this point! There’s talk of it happening but we got to a point in the making of the record where we stopped and had to back away from it for a while because we were getting frustrated with what we expected from each other. It was like, ‘once the record is out we have to do this tour, and this kind of thing…’ and so we had to all agree that we weren’t going to think about any of that, we’re just going to think about finishing this record. So we finished recording in July and the four of us never actually saw each other – or even spoke I don’t think – until we had a band photo taken right after New Year’s. Then we didn’t see each other again until we began shooting our video yesterday …so we’re just starting to talk about maybe playing some shows…but we’re all pretty happy with our lives at the moment, so no-one wants to go and live in a van.”

I mention that in a recent interview Kinsella had requested that if anyone spotted him planning to go on tour again anytime soon, they should “kick him in the balls”. Is he still of this mind? “Well, that was different. With Joan of Arc,” he explains, “I was on tour 175 days last year. But since saying that – and that was like day 30 out of a 45 date tour – we went to Japan for four days and had a totally great time, and we’re going to Seattle next week, then upstate New York for ten days. I’m happy to do these short trips, it’s just the idea of getting into something so deep that you can’t see the end anymore.” But there’s more practical reasons behind his touring reticence: “I start a new job later this week which I’m very excited about….and it’s the first job I’ve had that’s exciting at home. I’ve always just had whatever shitty jobs, bartending and stuff.” Tim is perhaps one of the most well-known bartending musicians, with it even being documented in song by his brother Mike, so does he still grab some shifts in Chicago? “Yeah, yeah! Still bartend! Just a couple nights a week; I live above the bar I tend at, it’s very much my community and my home – I mean, quite literally my home, I don’t have a different mailing address to the bar! It’s easy to pick up a couple of shifts. I also teach creative writing classes at the university here. Everything has always been based around having the opportunity to tour, and now I’m taking a job that will restrict that to a degree. But I’m pretty happy about it, because this job is more satisfying than touring.”

We end on the subject of album artwork; I do this because I want to talk about the relationship between Tim and Mike Kinsella, and how this affects Owls. The cover art for Two is split into quarters, and in each sector there’s a collage. In one section, the collage shows Noel Gallagher with blood pouring from his eyes and mouth, and I suspect this is the work of one of the Kinsella boys…so I ask Tim to explain the cover art. “Part of what I’m trying to talk about politely is,” he tentatively begins, picking his words carefully, “we are so insane in how the four of us collaborate! At Make Believe or Joan of Arc practices, everyone in the room has an opinion on the drums, everyone in the room has an opinion on the bass line…everyone is writing everyone else’s parts. Owls is like ‘I’m doing this! Don’t you fucking touch it! Back off!’ Every band in the world records a record and is like ‘hey, what should the cover be?’ but we decided that everyone gets to make their own image and no-one gets to say what it is. So all four of us made a collage, and no-one was allowed to say anything about each other’s collage…and you know, my brother has a lot of issues towards me!” Ah, so it’s Mike dealing with his relationship with his older brother? “Yeah. They’re beyond my control…the way he decides what’s meaningful about this record is to take an image of a famous big brother in a band, and beat him up. So that’s 100% Mike’s doing….obviously I think it’s not cool, I don’t know what his problem is with me.” Isn’t that just typical of brothers in general, though? Especially when they’re in such close quarters? “No, people say that ‘it’s just brothers’ – but it’s beyond my control. I can only be my best self to him and he can accept it or not. If he wants to publicly demonstrate that his investment in this project is just that he wants to beat up the older brother, there’s nothing I can do about it”

And there, in a few sentences, is why we don’t have as much music from Cap’n Jazz or Owls as we perhaps could or should have in the past twenty-five years. Relationships are tricky at the best of times, but even more so when there’s so much emotional and physical baggage to be carried across the years. I guess we should be grateful that we have three or four records that document the brilliance of Kinsella, Kinsella, Villarreal and Zurick, and although Tim seems fairly positive that the four will work together again, I reckon it’d be wise to love and cherish Two as much as you can…it could be a long time before you hear from Owls again.

Two is released on March 25 via Polyvinyl.