We didnt mean to, but we took another 6 years to put out an album. This one only took about 6 months to make though. (It's called Anyway.) We hadn't seen each other in a long time. After being based in NYC all these years, life wound up spreading us across the country—Ary's still in New York, but Pete's in Dallas now, Luke's back in LA, and James is in Providence.
Back in 2022 while visiting Polyvinyl, we heard the American Football house was in such poor shape and that its then-owners were likely to develop (destroy) it into some newer student housing. When we heard about it, we all couldn't help but say "please don't let that happen". About a year later, we heard that the members of American Football, along with Polyvinyl, and the original photographer who lived there, had bought the house together with the intention, in part, of making it a sort of retreat for other artists. Not a sterile monument, but a garden with roots.
And so we were invited by Polyvinyl as the first band to stay there in May of 2024. There is too much to say in this limited space about the significance of all this to us, but to put it simply: it gave our band a true home to write in, when our only other realistic option was emailing files from across the country.
A quick aside, though. Working on Scott Pilgrim Takes Off back in 2023, there's a scene where Knives Chau & Kim Pine get their feelings of frustration, rage, and loss out through music together in a living room with just a bass & a drum set. When Luke & Pete were working on that cue, they knew they needed to play together in the same room for something musically spontaneous to occur between those two characters. That scene couldn't be written in different studios, hundreds of miles apart. With this invitation into the American Football house, Polyvinyl had given Anamanaguchi a chance to see what kinds of feelings would come out of a similar situation.
All four of us moved into the house in Urbana, under the same roof for a month. We woke up every morning, wrote music and jammed in the living room all day. James and Ary would fire up the grill most evenings, we'd wind down talking about music, and go to bed early most nights (unless inspiration struck and Pete stayed up late making chip stuff on the computer in the back room).A whole range of topics, feelings, memories come through in the album, but none of it would have happened without the house. So why is it more rock than even our very earliest stuff? Why are we singing now? There's a lot to say about it. This is just one house in the story of this album. The second house was Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, NY, on the outskirts of another college town--Fredonia.