Cap’n Jazz are about to play a show in Portugal for the first time, just one year after Mike and Nate Kinsella performed at this very festival to commemorate 25 years of American Football’s legendary debut. This time around, the mark is just as significant: the 30th anniversary of Shmap’n Shmazz, the band’s only full-length record, reissued on vinyl in early 2025.
Throughout our conversation, Tim and Victor reflect on the process of rediscovering these songs, originally written in their late teens, with sharper memories and a more experienced musical skillset. We also touch on playing (and being discovered by) an entirely new generation of fans, whether a band like Cap’n Jazz could work in today’s world and how their legacy continues to echo as strongly as it does three decades later.
I know Mike [Kinsella] and Nate (who’s joining you on tour) were here at the festival last year, but this is your first time playing in Portugal with Cap‘n Jazz, correct?
Tim Kinsella: It’s my first time here ever. Very excited.
Victor Villarreal: Mine too. Always wanted to be here.
Does it feel special to bring the Cap’n Jazz songs to new places after all this time?
Victor Villarreal: I’m very grateful for it, I think it's awesome. I don’t want to downplay it or anything, but it represented where we were when we were actively playing at the time. When we play these songs now, it's more about connecting with people, to share and give back. It's not like I'm hoping to make a million dollars or become successful on these songs.
You’re here, doing this tour, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Shmap’n Shmazz, and the vinyl reissue as well. Knowing that the album and the band’s small output represents such a brief, but intense period of your creative lives, I’m wondering how do you process the fact that this music is being canonized while you’re all still creatively active?
Tim Kinsella: I just feel incredibly grateful. In a very practical way, I just love to make music and I feel like what I make now is very much in the same spirit as Cap’n Jazz was then. Like Victor was saying, it feels true to me now in a way that Cap’n Jazz felt true to me then. If playing Cap’n Jazz shows allows me the time and money to make new music, then I feel like the luckiest man in the world. I think of the director John Cassavetes, who was an actor in a lot of Hollywood movies, something he wasn't super invested in, so that he could finance his own movies and they could be whatever he wants. I see that as my business model and I feel like the most blessed human ever born to be able to do that. Every night, there's these 18-year-old kids at the shows, singing along to every word, and I’m always thinking: “how did they find this?” We're incredibly, incredibly blessed.
Do you also notice a generational pattern in the audiences, if they’re mostly composed of newer or older fans?
Victor Villareal: When we first played the show in Chicago at the Empty Bottle, it was the first one in many years. It was cool and funny, like a reunion of people I knew from my past and people that used to go to the shows back in the 90s. Then we played Vegas and it was pretty similar. Other bands that we had crossed paths with at the time were there. And then we came over here and played and, I don't know. It was weird seeing all these young kids, like [Tim] was saying. 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds listening to our stuff and really stoked on it, which was cool.
I know it's been many years, but do you remember what it felt like recording these songs at the time? Was there any sense that the music might resonate with people as much as it does today in a way, beyond your immediate circle?
Tim Kinsella: At the time, we recorded and mixed it in five days. We really have Casey Rice, who engineered it, to thank, because he was so fully invested. I remember we showed up and, when Mike [Kinsella] checked his drums, Casey said it sounded like he was hitting cardboard boxes. We had no money, so we would go to shows and the bands we were playing with would joke about us: “Oh, Cap’n Jazz, the band that plays through the Kleenex boxes.” Because we just had little practice amps, whereas they had real ones. We had to borrow equipment a lot. It's weird because, later with Joan of Arc (in the pre-internet, pre-streaming era), I was a real music collector nerd and obsessed over a lot of 30-year-old records. I remember, making the first three or four Joan of Arc records, being obsessed with the idea of not caring if anyone in the world likes the music I’m making right now, but making records for people to find in 25 or 30 years instead. I was thinking of it as my retirement plan, but I never thought about that for Cap’n Jazz, because we were working so quick. We recorded and mixed everything in five days. There was no self-awareness about anything, even about trying to be popular. We just played for our friends and our friends played for us. There was zero ambition, professionally speaking.
Do any specific songs feel different to you 30 years later, now that you’re playing them in a totally different headspace?
Victor Villarreal: All of them feel very familiar, but since we're older and better musicians, I think we play them a little differently. I try to add whatever I can to something, little flourishes of where I’m at from a musical perspective.
Since you’re talking about adding up new elements or flourishes to those early recordings through these shows, do you find a kind of charm or freedom in how unrefined they are? Or do you always catch yourself wanting to clean up the edges and improving them to reflect 30 more years of experience?
Tim Kinsella: I have a definitive favorite vocal moment that never occurred to me when we were making the record. It's the third verse on the song "The Sands Have Turned Purple", where I sing something like [unintelligible]. It’s just a total non-word, non-melody moment [laughs]. Listening back to learn the songs, I didn't even notice it at the time but now I just go: “yeah, that's the spot!” I'm really excited when we get there every night, because that feels like a pure moment.
Victor Villarreal: It's like a Freddie Mercury moment. [laughs]
Knowing that you didn’t consider yourselves as an emo band at the time, but more an oddball punk outfit, do you think that was a way, in kind of a teenage rebellion instinct, for you all to reject or at least morph the punk rulebook to your liking while still building a serious practice in the genre and scene as a whole?
Tim Kinsella: I mean, there was no awareness that we would have any impact. Like I said, there was no ambition. Punk bands were a lot weirder back then, you know? There were things like the Butthole Surfers. All five of us were into pretty different stuff: we loved Fugazi, Jane’s Addiction, Dinosaur Jr. But then there was also this tension within our tastes. I was really into the Gravity Records and the Powerviolence scene. Mike was really into Ned's Atomic Dustbin and more melodic stuff. Vic and Sam [Zurick] were really into the Shudder to Think. We had to work out our own formula for how to arrive at things that we all agreed with, which is totally different from how it is now. Sometimes there'll be new bands that sound like us, so it's way different for four or five people to be like “we like Cap’n Jazz and want to sound like that” than it is for four or five people to be like “we like different things, how do we find a thing that checks all the boxes?”.
Between then and now, you’ve all collaborated in countless different projects. What’s unique about this particular chemistry, when you’re all together as Cap’n Jazz? And how are you capable of rebuilding that shared language per se, after years of being apart and not playing together through this outlet?
Victor Villarreal: I don't know. Maybe it’s because we've been playing for so long together. We’ve worked together for years and years, on and off, in different combinations, so I think it just feels very natural and comfortable. Like coming home to your living room, you know? It's a comfort feeling.
Tim Kinsella: This will be a funny thing to say since my brother and my cousin are both in the band, but when we're all together, it does feel like a thing that's deeper than family to me. It feels like the most normal thing together, even with our crew involved. Bobby, who's on stage with us, and Nate, who wasn't originally in Cap'n Jazz, both of them have played in bands with us ever since, so it really feels like the most default, simple setting for us.
Cap’n Jazz’s influence has lived on through generations of fans and bands alike, and that spirit of doing things on your own terms has remained important – and almost second nature, like you were saying. Knowing how the music industry and culture has become more compartmentalized and commercialized, do you think it’s still possible for a young band to make something this messy and raw today? Do you think a 2025 version of yourselves trying to make Cap’n Jazz happen would have the same results?
Tim Kinsella: If we were 19-year-olds now doing this? No, no way, totally different. [laughs]. It’s a totally different world. We live on a different planet than the one we lived in. The internet, 9/11, war on terror, MAGA, social media. It's a whole different universe. It couldn't have happened. And in fact, I'm pretty sure that's part of why people resonate with us. We seem like aliens from another planet the way we operate musically.