American Football will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their seminal debut album ‘American Football’ (fondly referred to as ‘LP1’) with a completely remastered version of the 1999 album, as well as a covers edition of the record featuring contributions from an array of talented artists including Iron & Wine, Ethel Cain, Manchester Orchestra, Blondshell and more. Both the remastered ‘American Football (25th Anniversary Edition)’ – lovingly adorned in a spot embossed and silver foil gatefold packaging with a 24-page booklet, and the ‘American Football (Covers)’ LPs will be out via Polyvinyl Record Co.on October 18th, 2024.
Now, the band gives fans a taste of what’s to come with the newly remastered ‘Never Meant’ paired with Iron & Wine’s warm and transformative interpretation. Accompanying the latter is an official music video, with phantasmal footage of Beam transposed across the walls of the iconic American Football House in Urbana, IL. A full track listing for the covers LP can be found below.
After a years-long hunt for ‘LP1’ original Digital Audio Tapes, and a subsequent quest for a machine that would render them properly, American Football’s ‘LP1’ has been lovingly remastered for the first time 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. ‘American Football (25th Anniversary Edition)’ is the definite version of the beloved album.
What’s more, the new edition arrives alongside ‘American Football (Covers)’, an ingeniously programmed set that highlights not only the way American Football fueled an eventual “emo revival,” but also and perhaps more important how their songs and sounds infiltrated and inspired so many corners of music. From string-swept and imaginative folk to idiosyncratic international pop, from intricate instrumental splendor to open-road shoegaze wonder, (Covers) traces—or at least teases—the endless ways the source material has cut across borders of generation, genre, and geography. It affirms just how important the nine songs three college kids cut in four days remain.
Sam Beam of Iron & Wine’s take on ‘Never Meant’, recorded with producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Indigo De Souza), leads the way as the first track to be revealed from the covers LP. “My neighbor Brad Cook and I have been circling each other hoping to work on something for a bit,” shares Beam. “When I was asked about this project, it felt like the perfect opportunity. Especially a song that I knew meant a lot to American Football’s fans. Honored to be part of this and hoping we did it justice.”
For American Football’s part, Steve Lamos expressed the band’s gratitude for Beam’s involvement in the project. “When the first Iron & Wine record came out, it threaded the needle between Townes Van Zandt and Elliott Smith. It felt like if Nick Drake grew up with us listening to Fugazi before pivoting to making bedroom art folk. In other words, it was exactly what we would have been making if our first record came out when we were 28 instead of 22. Sam Beam is an incredible songwriter and interpreter of song, and it is beyond flattering that he would take the time to interpret one of ours.”
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 American Football wrote and recorded these nine songs in 1999, they were also punk kids who were becoming interested in jazz and modern classical. The touchstones that always appear are Miles Davis, Steve Reich, and The Sea and Cake, but the bigger lesson is their interest in engaging other textures and approaches than distortion and drive. That’s clear in the sparkling guitars and shifting rhythms, in the traces of trumpet and whiffs of keys. And it is obvious on (Covers) in the assorted shapes these songs take.
On the sidewalk outside of the famous house on the cover of American Football, several lines mark where Chris Strong likely stood when he snapped the photo. They are invitations to capture the scene, just as Strong did in 1999. But on the cover of (Covers), nine different images show the home during subsequent phases of the night, the glow from the upstairs window eventually overrunning the frame. That’s more fun than a mere replication, the same lesson that this compilation holds: Eschewing mimics for acts that took a little bit of American Football and made their own way, (Covers) is a testament to the imagination not only of the original but to those who continue to find it twenty-five years after the band assumed they were done.
‘LP1 (Covers)’ tracklist:
01. Iron & Wine – Never Meant
02. Blondshell – The Summer Ends
03. Novo Amor & Lowswimmer – “Honestly?
04. Ethel Cain – For Sure
05. Yvette Young – You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon
06. Girl Ultra – But the Regrets Are Killing Me
07. M.A.G.S. – I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional
08. Manchester Orchestra – Stay Home
09. John McEntire – The One With the Wurlitzer