Home is where the emo is

“These bands kind of operate in these houses. They play live shows in basements, they don’t play at bars.”

Image credit: Tiny Engines

A Google Street View stroll through Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, the 207th-largest metropolitan area in the USA, is extraordinarily boring. Clapboard houses — generously spaced out on large plots of land with rolling front lawns and tin mailboxes adorned with little flags — create an inoffensive, low-density sprawl that stretches as far as the eye can see. 

704 W High Street, three blocks from the main campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is smaller than other houses on the street. A single window sits above the porch, perfectly centred beneath the home’s A-frame roof — the kind of house a kindergarten student might draw. The place is unremarkable to many, except those fond of midwest emo music.

American Football by American Football. Image credit: Polyvinyl.

A photo of 704 W High Street features on the cover of the eponymous 1999 debut album by midwest emo band American Football. American Football, one of — if not the — canonical text in midwest emo, is one of many reasons why houses are endemic to the subgenre which, as the name suggests, originates from the midwestern United States. The sound was effectively created in the mid-90s, when bands took the confessional lyricism of their emo rock forebears and traded intense, punk influences for a layered, unexpectedly melodic sensibility. The lyrics to almost every track on the album are sparse, attempting to articulate the overthinking anguish of young adulthood. “Don’t leave home, again / If empathy takes energy / ‘Cause everyone feels just like you” vocalist and frontman Mike Kinsella whines on ‘Stay Home’. The marriage of twinkly guitar lines and lyrics lamenting summer’s end with a dimly lit, low-angle cover photo that milks all possible edginess out of a boring looking house feels like a match made in heaven.

“I think I remember having the film processed and looking at it a bit more than actually taking the photo,” said Chris Strong — photographer of the iconic cover and resident of the house at the time — when interviewed about it on Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show in July 2020. However, he doesn’t remember what he was trying to achieve with the composition of the photo.

Jessie Knoles, resident of the house from 2013–14, also told the same show that visitors came by often, trying to pose and take photos on the part of the pavement where Strong had stood 15 years earlier.

“I’d be sitting on the porch and I’d kind of just sink down hoping to not be in their photos.”

Despite modest commercial success and critical acclaim following the album’s release, American Football quickly disbanded. The album slowly but surely accumulated a cult following online, leading up to a reunion and two further albums — both also named American Football — released since 2016. But while American Football slept for 17 years, the houses-on-covers phenomenon didn’t. Among their contemporaries in the midwest and beyond, the band was well at home with other releases adorned by melancholic photos of houses big and small.

Image credit: Teagan Greene, Virginia’s Basement at The Rose Club

The Age Of Octeen, the 1996 album by fellow Champaign-Urbana emo band Braid, features the roofs of two houses against a darkened sky on the cover, with the bottom two-thirds of the image being cut off by a block of pale yellow. A young girl and two hooded figures wearing jeans and masks stand in front of a withered white house on Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006) in a photograph called ‘Untitled #44’ by photographer Nicholas Prior. The cover of Home, Like Noplace Is Here (2014) by The Hotelier, an acclaimed ‘emo revival’ album, features the title painted across the facade of a large pale blue house, replete with outdoor window shutters and a double garage. A cartoon house at night time consumes the cover of You Know What Sucks? Everything by Emo Side Project and another burns up-close on the cover of old gray’s slow burn (2016).

Image credit: Sweet Peach and Ben Quad

“We’ll listen to American Football / Sing along to Never Meant” Eddy Brewerton sings on ‘Carbis Bay’ off of Moose Blood’s debut release Moving Home (2013), on which a house sits at the end of a street. Meanwhile, a pug looms in the window of a dormer beneath a clear blue sky on Let’s Split Up (2019), a split EP by Ben Quad and Sweet Peach. And the list goes on. 

“These bands kind of operate in these houses. They play live shows in basements, they don’t play at bars. They play to their friends at home, and it just carries this really emotional meaning,” journalist Sean Neumann told The 21st Show.

Today, communities still form around these kinds of places and the music that’s played in them, with The Rose Club on Stinson Street in St Paul, Minnesota being one such example.

Occupying the basement of the sole house on the street that isn’t white, beige, or grey, The Rose Club is the venue — and residence — owned and operated by Evan “EOC” O’Connor and his roommates. O’Connor bought the duplex in early 2019 and, over the ensuing two years, accumulated more roommates and friends to jam with — fitting out the basement with lights and a stage in the process. In August 2021 they hosted their first show and have been hosting them frequently since April of this year.

“House shows provide a space and a platform for the artists to connect with their friends and fans in a very intimate setting,” O’Connor says.

“Even artists that have gone on to achieve more commercial success enjoy doing smaller, more intimate shows now and again. I believe that's because we can agree that a large part of the beauty of music comes from sharing the emotions that come from making, performing, listening, and personally interpreting it.”

Friend, roommate, vocalist, and guitarist of resident emo band Virginia’s Basement Santana “Santi” Vigil agrees.

“Playing in a house has a more intimate feeling with fans directly in your face. While on stage, you feel like you're towering over them,” he says.

A number of acts have toured through O’Connor’s basement in recent weeks, including fellow midwest artists Heart to Gold, Oftener, and Your Arms Are My Cocoon to name a few.

Planning and organising these shows has given O’Connor the full experience, from super fan, to performer, to promoter; from the cleanliness and comfort of the space, to blown out speaker cones and having to consider the financial viability of continuing to host shows.

“Many of our days here are spent thinking and planning about shows… And we only want more and more of that” he wrote on The Rose Club’s website.

“I can also feel what it means to the people that are listening to these artists every day and love seeing them live. I know it means a lot to them, and I have no doubt that it makes their connection with the music even more profound,” O’Connor says.

“It absolutely lights a fire in my heart to be a part of it.”

American Football is perhaps the best-defined example of the connection between houses and the music itself. One can imagine the overwrought anecdotes that pepper its tracks taking place in childhood bedrooms, in tear-soaked conversations sitting in cars, or over underaged drinking sessions in shady backyards. No doubt this fuelled stories told on couches before house shows, in a 50-strong crowd while waiting for the next song to start, or at the end of long nights into ringing ears.

Listen to Patrick McKenzie’s playlist: Emo Albums with Houses on the Cover