Splendid: First things first: did Joan of Arc ever really break-up before/after that last record, How Can Anything So Little Be Any More? If not, why are there references to "JOA II" within the liner notes of the new disc?

Tim Kinsella: I don't know -- it's hard to say, you know... it's like, we played only two shows in the last two years. We did this tour of Japan two years this January and we never played any shows when we got back, except for two over the summer: one was at a party and the other was announced the day before it happened. But I was working on this record with Sam (Zurick) -- who's my roommate -- since we're together all the time. So we'd recorded all these songs and then eventually it was like, eight out of the last nine people who had played with JOA were playing on this record. We were trying to think of all these band names for weeks and finally I said, "Why don't we just call it JOA?" We'd all been here before so it was only Jeremy (Boyle) who wasn't involved. He was the only one besides me who was always in JOA so it felt really weird calling it JOA without him around. But it made the most sense with the other people.

Splendid: The artwork that was just sent to me says "by Tim Kinsella" -- is that just a relic of...

Tim Kinsella: (stunned) Oh my god, it does?

Splendid: Right at the top.

Tim Kinsella: Wait. That was sent to you printed?

Splendid: It was sent to me for the piece.

Tim Kinsella: Is it a computer file?

Splendid: Yeah... it's the same image present on the press sheet, and you can make it out on that as well.

Tim Kinsella: Yeah... ummm... that's what... That's not so good. That's what Jade Tree wanted to call it. It was like this big sort of "to do". There was a lot of, a lot of, a lot of... it was like two years of...

Tim Kinsella: (after long pause) Well, I started recording this record in May of 2001 and by that point Jade Tree told me they wouldn't give me any money for the recording. It had been a couple of months of figuring out how to start recording this thing without any money. It started out with Casey (Rice), and the two of us were just going to split the royalties, and that way he could get paid for recording. But then, after a little bit of time, he lost interest and we both got busy with a bunch of other stuff. We were still trying to find ways to do it -- the Perishable Records guys let me and Sam start recording, just under the assumption that we would find someone to put it out and pay them, you know? But eventually Jade Tree... (pause) I'd sent them four different versions of the record at different stages and they never took it seriously, even though they could see that I was working on it. They sort of rolled their eyes whenever I talked to them about it. Eventually, though, when it was done, I sent them a copy trying to find someone to put it out and they said "Oh, oh, we want to do it." But then they said, "But we don't want to call it 'Joan of Arc' because people don't like JOA anymore. We need a different name." And I said, "Well, it is what it is, and if people don't like it I can't help it." So anyways, for a while they wanted it to be my solo debut but I felt kind of weird about that, too.

Splendid: You've just touched on something that I was going to ask about, which was this kind of love them/hate them position JOA occupies in American independent music. And I'm wondering if this whole issue of difficulty and accessibility ever prompted you to think there would be a time when you didn't involve yourself with Jade Tree. In my view, a lot of the flak you get is generated by the sounds of the other bands on the label, as opposed to your own.

Tim Kinsella: Do you mean love them/hate them about us or about Jade Tree?

Splendid: About JOA -- either singing your praises or damning you.

Tim Kinsella: ...or kicking sand in our faces. I don't really know what that has to do with Jade Tree (and perhaps it's bad to put in quotes in an interview) but I think they're very conservative with their choices. I still have this residual optimism about indie-rock's potential -- it should be opposed to all the values that make music exciting but get lost once it becomes a brainwashed entertainment type-thing. And Jade Tree doesn't really stand in opposition to that as much as I would like. A lot of the indie-rock scene ends up becoming this mini version of Hollywood -- it's stupid. If I was to consider what I do in those terms than I would be a giant failure. If that's the whole "end" that these people have in mind then we would all have to consider ourselves complete failures unless we were prepared to start writing J-Lo type songs. It's pretty easy to be huge these days if that's what you want to do. Not easy, but you know what I mean, don't you: everyone (in the indie-rock community) is going about this the wrong way if (enormous success) is what their intentions really are. Maybe I'm talking in a circle a little bit, but I'm not so worried about selling records. I like making these things because I want there to be a record that sounds that way.

Splendid: It's as much about the document then, as it is the product.

Tim Kinsella: That's how I see it. Once it's done and mastered I get to hear it once and really enjoy it. Maybe the first time I listen to the mastered copy and it's done and it sounds the way I want it to sound -- it's mine and sounds great and I'm excited about it. Then, after that, it gets surrendered and like, "Okay, mass produce it so people can criticize me for making it." It's just an object then. The document -- I feel an attachment to it at first, and then I have to let go of it.

Splendid: When it comes to those criticisms in light of the effort you put into your albums, would you rather someone approached it with enthusiasm and not "understand" it as opposed to those who would attack it because they think it should be understood through intellectualizing it?

Tim Kinsella: I would personally think the first way would be a much better way of listening to it. I don't know that it could be approached in the second way and appreciated. You can intellectualize anything, but then it becomes a pretty disgusting, self-absorbed thing. But I'm the last person in the world to really know how people are really hearing it and what they think of it.

Splendid: You've made the comment that the JOA audience was becoming a really small group of people who were holding onto the music and its context in a similar fashion and you were getting disappointed by that. Is the new album an effort to open things up a bit, or does it never cross your mind?

Tim Kinsella: No, I certainly don't think about it as "the sell-out record". I've never set out to alienate people. But that said, I've never tried to please people like some spineless shit who is trying to make everyone happy. I'm not worried about making everyone happy, but I've never alienated people just for the sake of alienating them.

Splendid: Is the live setting a way to make that desire clear? Because you're always so engaging, and I think it's a very different thing to see you perform than it is to sit at home and try to create some sort of biography about the anonymous creator based upon what is presented on the discs.

Tim Kinsella: Whatever sort of engagement with the audience that happens live is probably far more for our sake than theirs, just because if you see us play in Montreal or Toronto it means we've been playing every night for a while to get there and we need to play every night to get home. We need to keep ourselves interested, so drawing upon the audience is a way of mixing it up. I mean, we can play our songs, there's no challenge there (laughs), so we need to make it interesting somehow -- "How is this room going to be different than last night?" We just need to keep ourselves engaged every night or else it's pretty easy to get bored playing the same songs every night.

Splendid: So you're going to tour behind this album in the new year?

Tim Kinsella: Yeah, March to July.

Splendid: Who will be in the band for the upcoming tour?

Tim Kinsella: Me and Sam playing guitar, my brother (Mike Kinsella of Owen, ex-American Football) playing bass and my little cousin playing drums.

Splendid: Yeah! So it's really a family affair now?

Tim Kinsella: (laughing) It's like the Ramones.

Splendid: Well, I'm going to ask, since we're on the subject: with the new Owen record, the divide between your approach to music (Friend/Enemy, Joan of Arc, etc.) and your brother's approach seems to be widening. I'm wondering if you see it that way and if there was some sort of seed planted in your formative years that caused this split to occur?

Tim Kinsella: We've never really talked about it, although we joke about it sometimes. We're aware of it, but it's not a conscious thing. We get along quite well and he's one of my best friends. I know I benefit a lot from working with him just because he brings a more musical aspect to what I do. He has a knack for pulling things back when they're getting totally strange and unrecognizable -- he can add a simple thing that makes it more of a pop song.

Splendid: That's interesting, because I always assumed he took a more passive role in your projects.

Tim Kinsella: Certainly not. I mean, in JOA he's always half rolling his eyes at what we bring to him to contribute to, and things are more established before he's involved. The tracks are laid down and the path is set before he has his input. But Owls is very much an even democracy between the four of us (songwriting and arrangement-wise), and he always has a huge influence on that. For this latest JOA album, we already had the guitars recorded before he came in to record the drums and bass -- he'd never heard the songs before and I'd been re-working them for over a year by the time he heard them. And he would sit down, listen once, say "okay" and then in the next pass get everything in the first take. It's deceptively simple, but there are all these things that blow my mind, all these weird hidden complexities that he can play the first time. He's really, really good that way.

Splendid: Will there be another Owls record? Do they still serve a purpose?

Tim Kinsella: Yeah, we're excited about it. But we're in the middle of a line-up change right now so we aren't sure what's going to happen. We had the record about eighty-five percent written last April and then decided we weren't sure if we liked it enough, so we took a short break. And when we came back to it at the end of the summer/early fall we realized we had a lot more to do. So we rescheduled to record in November and then had to cancel that because one of us was having problems with disappearing for weeks at a time. So now we're well behind schedule but we're talking about how we're going to do it when we get back from the JOA tour. It will be a different line-up and probably sound a lot different but it's definitely happening.

Splendid: With the new album, you made the comment that the "Mac and ProTools approach" to working on the JOA album alone began to complicate things a little bit over the course of the two years. I was wondering if you could speak a little more about that?

Tim Kinsella: Well, when Casey (Rice) and I started recording, we went into the studio and recorded all the guitars to click-tracks. We envisioned this sort of My Bloody Valentine/Black Sabbath kind of thing, with totally loud electric guitars, and everything else would be these computer things. And then, when Casey and I were never in Chicago at the same time, I just sat in my room, chopped them up and rearranged them over and over again. There was a good year that these songs were on my computer and there were twelve songs with at least four versions of each one, and each version had six different guitar tracks and each version was a totally different arrangement with piles and piles and piles of processed sounds. By the end of it, I had to have four totally different songs for each song, and I was like, "where's the fucking song here?" (laughs) "I don't understand -- which track do I go with?" So I knew to get this done at all I would just have to rewrite all the guitar parts into a single piece and then it ended up being a combination of a little riff of one track with a little part of this track. Instead of layering, it forced me to arrange the songs for one guitar and vocals, and start from there with people who hadn't heard the songs over and over again like me so they would have a fresh approach to it.

Splendid: So you haven't necessarily abandoned the process -- it's just become more of a disciplined thing?

Tim Kinsella: Yeah, and it's sort of been a slow abandoning thing. Owls started because JOA had become so immersed in computer music, just smoking pot and keeping our headphones on all the time. And we were like, "What about ten years ago when we were in live bands and practiced and wrote songs, and practiced and played shows and then recorded?" So we started leaning towards just getting it to tape. And then Friend/Enemy took things even further by saying "Let's go into a studio, let's record to tape, but let's not bother writing the songs first." And everyone got there and looked at each other, and everyone looked at me and said "What the hell are we doing here?" And I said, "I don't know, but I'm spending a lot of money, so we better get started." This new process evolved from that. I feel as though I've gone through it now. I've been done with this new JOA record for a few months and I've been more and more interested in working with my ProTools again, making noisier and noisier stuff. It's certainly a pendulum that swings back and forth, and now that it's swung so far that way (as far as writing straight songs), it certainly swung back further the other way than it ever has.

Splendid: So is music a full-time job, or...

Tim Kinsella: No. I mean, I bartend.

Splendid: ...you're just able to find the hours in the day?

Tim Kinsella: Yeah. I really lucked out with this bartending job because I'm able to make the same amount of money working twelve hours a week as I did working thirty hours a week waiting tables. It's hard, and obviously it's late at night, but it gives me all day to do music. I've got a couple different bands right now and a few other things to juggle, so it certainly takes up more than forty hours a week working on it and thinking about it, but it doesn't feel like a full-time job.

Splendid: I thought I would ask -- just for interest's sake -- about you name-dropping Cassavetes in your latest biography. It's always interesting to see which film reference is going to pop-up in an official JOA communication.

Tim Kinsella: (laughs) I just think he's the greatest. It was more The Gap that I was really obsessed with him. I was watching The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)...

Splendid: That's my favorite of his.

Tim Kinsella: Yeah! And I found the alternate edit of it with twelve extra minutes dispersed throughout the whole thing, with a few scenes rearranged. I found a copy of that (it seems like forever ago) and I just watched each version four times over the course of three months of mixing and editing The Gap. That's the record with John Cassavetes' name in the title ("John Cassavetes, Assat Shakurm, and Guy Debord walk into a bar... "). Have you heard the Ronald Simmons/Gene McDonald CD? That has a picture of Mr. Sophistication (a major figure in the aforementioned film) on the cover.

Splendid: Film is obviously something you really enjoy, and it works its way into your other creative outlets.

Tim Kinsella: Yeah. Maybe it's because I don't have the discipline to read that I used to. Although by my last year of school, everything I was doing seemed to tie itself together. (Tim has an English degree with a double minor in Film Studies and Women's Studies) Actually, my girlfriend and I have been working on a documentary for over a year now, so I'm sort of trying to make my first film.

Splendid: What's the documentary about?

Tim Kinsella: A trans-gendered political action group in Chicago. They have an annual fund-raiser party, so we shot over the six month period of them planning this party. We followed the people on the party-planning board and... it sounds really dry and boring, but it's actually really quite interesting.

Splendid: What's the name of the group?

Tim Kinsella: It's Time, Illinois (now called Illinois Gender Advocates). There are three principal people we follow -- they're all very different, but they're sort of forced together by this political group to discuss their politics and discuss what makes a good party, how to raise money for the politics and how some aren't interested in raising money for particular political ends.

Splendid: So all the requisite in-fighting is featured.

Tim Kinsella: Yeah, so hopefully it all comes together. We have 170 hours shot but it's been buried in grant applications for the last couple of months, so we haven't gotten to chopping away at just yet.

Splendid: I wanted to quickly touch on the collapse between your academic background and your creative interests. I've always felt the academia shines through your writing if the listener has an awareness of the references. I, for one, don't have a literary background, so a lot of that is lost on me, but I understand the film references.

Tim Kinsella: It's never been a desire of mine to name drop a few books, but it is what inspires me to keep working and it ends up coming out. If my cultural interests come through naturally, I think it's fine, but it's not a design. I would hate for the music to be alienating in any way because of it -- that seems so hoity-toity. Honestly, if you looked at my day-to-day life, it would probably be easier to label me a useless pothead than an academic. (laughs) It just doesn't seem to be a very fair impression of me.

Splendid: Lastly, sparked primarily by the track "Mr. Participation Billy" on the new album, detailing a series of episodes in the lives of these people in the narrative -- it struck me like a lightening bolt that I've always assumed there was always a clear line between fiction and autobiography in your work. Now I'm wondering if the abstract stuff is far less abstract than we think, and is the clear stuff actually quite muddy?

Tim Kinsella: I don't know, I mean... we were talking about filmmakers and there's that whole idea of Godard's that fiction is the greatest non-fiction, and non-fiction is the greatest fiction. And I think there's always that tension in songs about "is the (song's) speaker really that guy (the songwriter)?" Because I know I couldn't be the speaker in each song, and if I was, the songs would sure get really boring really quickly. I think I would feel it was a cop-out if I was just writing autobiographical stuff all the time. Realistically, at this point, for the amount of time I put into all of this, I don't have much of an autobiography to put into these things. (laughs) You know -- this is my whole life. So, sure, it's autobiographical because it's my observations and my choices about these things, but (the songs) are certainly not always the way I feel about something. And I've never really felt the songs are so "abstract", which is a word people tend to use a lot for my songs. I think about it more in terms of wanting each line of each song to be its own self-contained thing, where it works on its own but the next line will always make the line before it resonate differently. I don't want things to be to "paraphrasable" -- they don't seem done to me if they can be paraphrased. And I feel if it was an autobiographical thing then listeners would just think, "Let's see... here his girlfriend dumped him." It just doesn't seem like enough work for them.

Splendid: What you're saying here makes me realize that you're living a life very similar to (American avant-garde filmmaker) Brakhage.

Tim Kinsella: Stan Brakhage?

Splendid: Yeah. Your work captures both your life and your world view -- and that work is art.

Tim Kinsella: (modestly) Maybe I had the wrong role models growing up. and I think that sometimes. I wish I never thought the lousy, workaholic/alcoholic grump was such a cool guy when I was eighteen because it's far too easy of a goal to achieve.

Splendid: To make the connection complete: Brakhage isn't just living the life of an artist, but first and foremost he is living life as a human being and the physical documents of his art will one day be the proof of his existence.

Tim Kinsella: Sam found these old yearbooks of ours from high school a couple of months ago, and we were looking at them for the first time in ten years and laughing. We were thinking how funny the yearbook photos are, because we're so formal and composed and fixed in the moment. And we were looking at each other's pictures and Sam was like, "I remember you at fourteen and that's not how your hair was." And I said, "Yeah, my mom made me get my haircut." And then we started talking about our records like that. It's like looking yourself up in the phone book and thinking, "Weird, I have a number. I'm another person in this long list of people."

Splendid: I think there's a bad joke in an even worse Steve Martin movie (or maybe it's a good Steve Martin movie) -- he's at a gas station, picks up a phone book, sees his name is in the phone book and he screams out "I've been published -- I am someone!"

Tim Kinsella: (laughing) Isn't that in The Jerk (Carl Reiner, 1979)? Because there's that scene at the gas station with someone shooting at him and Steve Martin screams out, "Take that, anonymous asshole!" It's sort of like that -- maybe in a way I like having my yearbook photo taken once a year. But now, as a collective, my pals and I have started gaining momentum and saying to one another, "Well, maybe we could take two 'pictures' a year?" That's the purpose these albums we make seem to serve. Maybe that's a bad analogy...

Splendid: ... but it seems to be working.