Check out American Football’s Teenage Kicks playlist, feat. Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Van Halen and more

When you load up Spotify, a great big chunk of the time you can’t think what to play, right? You default back to your old favourites, those albums and songs you played on repeat when you first discovered you could make them yours. 

This isn’t about guilty pleasures; it’s about those songs you’ll still be listening to when you’re old and in your rocking chair. So, enter Teenage Kicks – a playlist series that sees bands running through the music they listened to in their formative years.

Next up, American Football.

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Metallica – Fade To Black [Ride The Lightning, 1984]  

MIKE: I don’t remember where or when I first heard it, and neither do you. Pretty sure it’s just always existed.  

Fire, Water, Earth, Air, ‘Fade To Black’.  

God? Aliens? Metallica? Who knows.  

But I do remember watching Vic learn to play it in our basement with the pick between his thumb and forefinger while using the other three fingers to pick the high notes, which is something I hadn’t seen anyone do before. Mesmerised, I memorised his picking pattern and would practise it for days with and without holding an actual guitar – on long car rides, at dinner, going to bed. Eventually, I was able to play the song (yay, muscle memory!) and have since incorporated that style of playing into my own songwriting.  

Also, the lyrics are sooooo emo…

Van Halen – 5150 [5150, 1986]  

MIKE: I’m not fully convinced the rest of the band ever let Alex even hear the songs before tracking the albums. There’s something childish/impulsive about his playing and his fills. It sounds like a kid barging through a closed door without fear or consequence of what could possibly be on the other side. Errant kicks and snare hits are littered about like the kids’ dry cereal on the floor in the back of my minivan. It’s like we’re listening to him stumble upon and discover his drum parts in real time.  

While most of what I write now is more measured and pattern-oriented, I’ve always loved how urgent and unpredictable Alex’s drumming is, especially on this particular Van Hagar banger.

Miles Davis – Shhh / Peaceful [In a Silent Way, 1969]  

LAMOS: This song has served as a soundtrack to my life almost daily since about the age of 15. (This means it’s been on repeat for me since 1989 or something. Yikes.)  

Anyway, the song begins with a soft slide between two chords split among three keyboards and electric guitar. But then the piece is propelled – gently and carefully – with a hi-hat-only drum figure and two-note bass pedal; together, they evoke a train headed down the tracks. (The liner notes to the deluxe CD edition of this record note that the working title for this track was ‘Mornin’ Fast Train from Memphis to Harlem.’ I’m not surprised – although, to me, this feels less like a morning ride than it does a midnight one.)  

Against this trance of train travel, Miles (along with John McLaughlin and Wayne Shorter) take turns whisper-narrating their journey. I never, ever grow tired of the ride.  

To me, this is the perfect music for working or resting or travelling or thinking. It’s also ripe for homage: my own hi-hat figure in American Football’s ‘Five Silent Miles’ from our first EP is a direct 5/4 nod to this track.

Bill Frisell – Outlaws (Bill Frisell (with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones), 2001]  

LAMOS: This is the first track off of my initial introduction to Frisell’s music, courtesy of my friend and frequent bandmate Ben Wilson. Ben must have sent it my way in, like, 2003 or 2004 – so about five years after the demise of the original version of American Football, but just before my wife Tracy and I moved to Colorado. Ever since, this song has soundtracked my movement towards the West. (I learned later that Frisell grew up in Denver: this makes so much sense after hearing his music.)  

Frisell’s guitar lines here are spacious and melodic, reverbed out into almost slow motion. The resulting soundscape here feels to me something like Sedona looks: rich with sonic pinks and oranges and tans and purples. Meanwhile, Holland and Jones play with incredible restraint in support of Frisell’s careful exploration. This is an opening track masterpiece on a nearly perfect record.

Gillian Welch – The Way the Whole Thing Ends [The Harrow and the Harvest, 2011]  

LAMOS: I came across this record probably a year or two before American Football started playing again in 2014; it’s been on heavy rotation for me ever since, especially during the autumn season.  

Here, near Boulder in Colorado, the sun takes on a different, lower angle during autumn: whereas the mid-summer sun here feels hot and harsh, our autumn sun feels warm and soft and comfortable – even as it also hints that winter’s cold and snow aren’t far off.  

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings somehow capture this feeling perfectly in ‘The Way the Whole Thing Ends’. There’s something magical about how they sing and play together, as one organism, with equal parts joy and melancholy. Even a final lyric that might feel slightly trite in another context – “That’s the way the cornbread crumbles / That’s the way the whole thing ends” – works perfectly here somehow. This track is, to me, the masterful conclusion to the absolutely perfect autumn record.

Steve Reich – Music For 18 Musicians [Music For 18 Musicians, 1978]  

HOLMES: This is sort of a cheat as a “song” since it’s an hour-plus piece of music, but I can’t think of anything more influential in the music we would pursue when we started American Football. This recording, as much as anything I’ve ever heard, reconfigured my brain and expanded what I thought was possible in music. Mike and I first discovered this record during our freshman year of college in 1995, and it was our first exposure to minimalism. About a month after first hearing this record, the Tortoise album ‘Millions Now Living Will Never Die’ came out, and I remember being blown away that 10 minutes into the opening 20-minute track ‘Djed’ they employed the Steve Reich trick. Something clicked when I realised that bands could make a version of this music. When Mike and I started writing songs together, we wanted to borrow from Steve Reich in our arrangements of repetitive patterns and interlocking parts that slowly shifted over time. We explored that in one of our earliest songs, ‘Five Silent Miles’, and again in ‘Stay Home’, and it has remained a staple of our songwriting throughout the American Football catalogue.

Bob Dylan – Standing in the Doorway [Time Out of Mind, 1997]  

HOLMES: When Bob Dylan’s ‘Time Out of Mind’ came out in the autumn of 1997, I was 20 years old and starting my junior year of college. We were consuming music at a furious pace back then and constantly on the hunt for new inspiration. I’d not really been into Bob Dylan up to that point, but the rave reviews for what at the time seemed like Dylan’s potential swan song had me interested. Even at 20, I was impressed and curious that a 56-year-old who had seemed washed up could produce a late-period masterpiece. Ironically, what seemed like his late period at that time has continued on for the ensuing 27 years, delivering at least four more late-period masterpieces along the way. This is the record that got me into Bob Dylan and, while it may not seem like there is any direct influence on American Football, it’s definitely in there. ‘Standing in the Doorway’, a languorous, nearly eight-minute break-up song, manages to somehow be more lovely than sad; the grit and resignation in Dylan’s vocal delivery keep it from ever edging into maudlin. Upon hearing the record, I instantly fell in love with this song and would listen to it on repeat, trying to figure out the trick of how an eight-minute pedal steel and organ-driven half-time 6/8 shuffle never got boring. The lyrics were heartbreaking at times, but the overall vibe managed to deliver a mostly optimistic feeling. Picking up my guitar tuned to an open E major for ‘The One with the Tambourine’, I soon discovered a technique that we would use to great effect on much of LP1: setting a major or major 7 or 9 against sad lyrics (see ‘Never Meant’, ‘Stay Home’, ‘For Sure’, ‘The Summer Ends’, basically the entire record).

Tom Waits – Come On Up to the House [Mule Variations, 1999]  

HOLMES: Tom Waits’ brilliant album ‘Mule Variations’ came out in the spring of 1999, just a month before we would head into the studio to record our first album. This was my introduction to Tom Waits, and as he is an acquired taste, I was mostly not ready for it at the time. But this one song stuck with me, and I dubbed it to cassette after borrowing the album from a friend. I can’t help but think this song may have subliminally influenced our choice of album artwork, as we picked a photo of a nondescript little house a block over from where Mike and I lived. Tom Waits was 49 when he recorded ‘Mule Variations’, another late-period masterpiece that would bring new waves of fans on board for the next phase of his career. As we near that age ourselves, I can’t help but continue to take inspiration from artists who were making some of the best music of their careers in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. American Football’s albums ‘American Football (25th Anniversary Edition)’ and ‘American Football (Covers)’ are out 18th October.