Joan of Arc's music ties together a lot of opposite things at once: electronic and acoustic instruments, pop and experimental musics, sad and celebratory feelings. Yet underneath the occasionally choppy shifts that give it movement, their music reveals a clear, unified sense of harmony. More importantly, it communicates.

Guitarist/singer Tim Kinsella spoke with me from his home in suburban Chicago a few weeks prior to Jade Tree's release of the band's debut album, a portable model of. The following is part of that conversation.

Some information to guide you through this interview: Tim, Sam Zurick (guitar) and Tim's brother Mike (drums) are best known for their time in a great skewed emo band called Cap'n Jazz. Electronics manipulator Jeremy Boyle didn't play in that band. The Promise Ring's Davey vonBohlen did, however, and he appears briefly on a portable model of. Azita Youseffi (a.k.a. AZ), who yells twice on the album, was in two great Chicago No Wave bands, the Scissor Girls and Bride of No No. She can also really tweak a synth.

AARON: So I'm still in the dark about some of the album.

TIM: Like what?

Well, like the idea that it's a concept album...

You mean, what's the concept?

Well, is there a personal revelation coming out in it, or...

I guess the concept is, um... We spent a long time on it—like, when any other bands we've been in would record, all the songs would be written, and then we'd just go in the studio and record them how they sound, and then the record would be done. But the recording process for this album took a couple months. We still had work and school and stuff, but this was just our whole lives for a while. We figured out the sequence of the songs about halfway through recording and then rearranged a couple of the songs accordingly, and I rewrote a lot of the lyrics accordingly so that it would work as a whole.

And there's a sense of closure when you have the opening track repeating at the end of the record, and Azita coming in and screaming after one song and before the other...

Yeah.

How did you meet up with Azita?

I've known her for years. The Scissor Girls played with Cap'n Jazz a lot, which was a weird phenomenon because all our friends hated them and all their friends hated us. So we have that in common with Cap'n Jazz— Joan of Arc is trying to irritate people just like Cap'n Jazz was. But anyway, she lives with Elliot [Dicks, who co-engineered the album at his own loft studio in Chicago]. So we were over there recording every night, and she'd be sitting around, and originally I yelled, "Explain water to the fish!" but it just sounded dumb. So we were like, "We need another voice. Azita, you yell it."

Did you do a lot of constructing the album in the studio? I mean in terms of playing with editing and using the studio as an instrument...

Yeah, but I kind of hate the record right now just because I've been around it too much, and I think it's not really as successful as I hoped it could be. I think we're a better band than that record displays. But we're learning how to do it; we're figuring out what we want to do.

What goes through your head when you read reviews like the one in Magnet that called you derivative of certain things?

You mean the Gastr del Sol/Palace comparison?

Yeah. Do you see a lot of those things expressly coming out as influences in your music?

Well, I like those bands a lot, but there's so many bands I like a lot that I find it strange that those would be the first two someone would notice. I don't know what I think the first two would be. I think that comparison was probably more applicable for the first single because it was a lot more one-dimensional than the record. As for those comparisons... I mean, Palace, probably just because my voice cracks a lot. I've been in bands for a long time, and my voice has always cracked. I never heard Will Oldham singing and thought, "Oh, I'll make my voice crack"; it was more like, "Oh, good. Now I don't have to be so embarrassed by my voice cracking." The Gastr del Sol thing, I don't know. I think we're a lot different; we're a rock band, for one thing. We probably have some similar intentions at times. [Long pause.] I don't know how to put it. I would hate to say what their intentions are.

The impression I got from interviewing them was that they consider themselves to be derivative of certain things. If you compliment them they'll say, "'Oh, no. Definitely give credit to this band, because their music influenced us." But I think people in general need to trace lines to things. It gives them something to grasp onto...

But I don't know if "tracing the lines" to a band like [Gastr del Sol] would be as accurate as saying we're tracing the lines to the ideas of what we're trying to accomplish. There's so many resources of different sounds in the universe; I think [Gastr del Sol and Joan of Arc] are similar in that neither of us limits ourselves to a certain format for what each song has to sound like. Obviously there's songs on our record that just sound like guitars, bass and drums, and that's fine. I like that, and for those songs, it works. But I think that kind of sound is what people would initially see as us having in common with [Gastr del Sol].

Have you found that what the music you're making now is throwing a curve ball to people who either remember you from Cap'n Jazz or can connect you with the Promise Ring?

Yeah.

In a good way or a bad way?

Well, it's good to us, and it's bad for them. [Laughs.] We went on tour last summer before we'd released anything, and people would be at the shows just because the fliers would say: "Ex-Cap'n Jazz." People would show up and expect us to rock out and jump around, and so we had this double task of not only playing and writing these songs successfully how we wanted them to sound, but playing them to an audience that had completely different expectations of us. I don't know if that makes sense, but...

It does.

It's like the thing we were talking about with the reviews. There's a strange fulfillment in disappointing people, you know?. [Laughs.] It's empowering.

What was the period of growth like for you between Cap'n Jazz and Joan of Arc, since the two things are in some ways similar but really different in the ways they are different?

I think Cap'n Jazz was a lot weirder. I know it better than most people, but if you listen closely, there's a lot of strange stuff going on. But it was also a lot more rockin', so, I don't know, Joan of Arc and the Promise Ring both make perfect sense to me because when we were writing Cap'n Jazz songs there was always two of us that wanted to be stranger and two of us that wanted to be more rockin'. And then Davey went on and started the Promise Ring, which is more rockin', and that's what he wanted to do; and me and Sam went on and started something stranger, which is what we wanted to do.

But I was wondering how you personally felt you were growing between those two periods. I guess it hasn't been a very long time in terms of years, but...

Yeah, there was a year, and it was strange. I was 20 when Cap'n Jazz broke up, and I was the oldest member of the band. We were young and idealistic, inspired to jump around and rock out, and... I'm probably just more cynical now or something. [Sighs.] See, that just sounds so stupid. But that's what it is, you know? I can't just be excited to think, "Oh, this song will rock hard." That just isn't interesting to me anymore. Maybe that has to do with a lot of sitting on my bed after Cap'n Jazz broke up. I don't know, man. I see Joan of Arc as very much a continuum. It's the same idea in that we don't really know what we're doing, but we're just doing a lot of stuff, and maybe something will come out of it. It makes sense to me.

Do you write all of the lyrics?

Yeah.

In terms of this album, and this gets back to what I was asking you earlier, I was thinking there was some grand concept behind the whole thing where every song was related...

Oh, they are.

Really?

[Laughs.] Yeah, but I don't know how to answer your question. I just don't want to ruin it for anyone, you know? I'm very much from the reader-response school of criticism, and I don't think I could have anything much better to say about my lyrics than anyone else. Obviously I have my own ideas, which are probably a lot more thought out than what anyone else would think because I know most people probably don't read the lyrics to a rock album, and I can't blame them. But if you had a specific question I could answer it.

Well, I was asking about there being some sort of self-revelation in a song like "I Love a Woman (who loves me)," like when you sing, "Too smart to be a pop star, not smart enough not to be..."

Okay, here's the total self-realization: I played the record for my mom, and she's like, "So you think you're a pop star now or something? That's so egotistical!" And I'm like, "No, that's not about me at all." But then I rethought it after that, and one side of that is me even talking to you right now. I'm a smart enough person; I know my own flaws and shortcomings, and those of my band, and if someone was to like us, like you were saying about that Gastr del Sol thing, I could totally say it seems stupid to me because I know people who do it so much better, who inspire me. The other side of that is, I'm a vain person like anyone else, and if someone's like, "Do you want your picture in a magazine?" I'm like, "Sure!" [Laughs.]

I was also wondering about the words that are printed in green throughout the CD booklet, if those are connected in some way...

Well that's the whole concept of the album; that's the whole title: a portable model of how memory works...

[Looking at CD booklet.] Ah, okay. Now I'm seeing it.

I don't know if people will get that. I guess the concept would be how experiences happen and then we... compartmentalize them; like tracks one through 13 are different angles of the same experience. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Basically it's a pretty lame concept, which is why I don't want to say it. It's like every other record ever written. It's about a girl or something.

So it is about a girl?