You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Just a heads up, there is some explicit language in this episode. The band American football had a short lifespan originally.

They formed in 1997 and broke up in 2000. In that time, they released an EP and an LP to a small but passionate fan base.

But over the years since, more and more people found their music.

14 years after they broke up, they re-issued their LP and booked some shows. The LP ended up being a surprise hit, landing on the Billboard charts, and their tour dates sold out.

I asked if they'd do a song from the LP for Song Exploder, but here's guitarist Steve Holmes.

This is how unexpected that anyone would give a shit 15 years later. We don't have the master tapes. They don't exist.

After we recorded the actual album, we left them at the studio. Can't find them. Don't exist. Probably lost or thrown out. So I happened to keep the single.

So in this episode, the very first song recorded by American football from their debut EP. It's called The One With The Temporine.

I'm Mike Kinsella, and I play the guitar and sing in the band American football. And I'm Steve Holmes, and I also play guitar, but I do not sing.

Mike and I were 20 to 22 when this was a band. It was sophomore through senior year of college, basically.

So Mike was in a band with Steve Lemos before this band, and that broke up. As soon as our band broke up, I said, oh, I'm going to steal Steve Lemos as my drummer and start playing with him.

I think the idea to have Mike join was because the previous band, if anyone's heard of it, the One Up Down Stairs, the guitar playing in that band was ridiculously good.

And Mike and I thought the two of us together would be as good as him alone. So that was the plan.

Steve would go practice with Steve Lemos. He'd come home and he'd like had a cassette. He's like, oh, this is what we're working on. And it was this song. I was like, oh, that's a cool riff.

Mike and I discovered alternate tunings and it all took off from there. You mess around, attune this up, or I'm trying to hit a note that this will be much easier to hit if this string is half a step lower or half a step higher.

And you play until it sounds good. This song happens to be a big E major seven chord, which I don't think I knew at the time. It just sounded cool. It's E B D sharp G sharp B E. That's what I'm in. Mike is in a slightly different tuning.

So stupid. It's so stupid.

The challenge of it is you're now you're stuck in that key, which you know, you can't write 10 songs in that key because they'll sound ridiculous. But it sounds really cool for one song.

My name is Steve Lemos and I'm the drummer in American football. I was teaching myself drums at that point. My father had a drum kit when I was a kid and he had these 60s era books kind of teach yourself different beats. And Bossa Nova was one of the beats that I was trying to teach myself.

And for whatever reason, it sort of fit with the riff that Holmes was playing or at least the main part of it.

That was the name of the song until we went to the studio and actually recorded it. We called it the Bossa Nova because that was the drum beat.

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