Tim Kinsella and Coffin Prick Make It Entertaining

Ryan Weinstein is an LA-based multi-instrumentalist who performs as Coffin Prick; Tim Kinsella is a Chicago-based musician and author, who’s played in Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, and currently Kinsella & Pulse, LLC, with Jenny Pulse. Both have new records out — Coffin Prick’s Loose Enchantment and Kinsella & Pulse, LLC’s Open ing Night — so to celebrate, the two friends got on a Zoom call to catch up. You can catch Cap’n Jazz on tour with Coffin Prick this July. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Ryan Weinstein: Hi, Tim.

Tim Kinsella: Hi, Ryan.

Ryan: How’s it going?

Tim: Good. Nice to talk to you. This is a scary premise.

Ryan: How so?

Tim: Well, I mean, probably half of all the talking on the phone I do is to you. Then you do an interview and sometimes you forget that other people will read it.

Ryan: Yeah. I’m gonna try and keep myself in check here from my usual ranting. Or at least I’ll make it entertaining if I can.

Tim: Do you feel like you’ve been ranting a lot these days?

Ryan: I do.

Tim: Well, I noticed you’ve been wearing a new hat.

Ryan: Yeah, I got a new hat. You know, that’s a good story — or, it’s actually a terrible story. I used to have an older hat, and I stopped wearing one for years because I think it got ruined by the Jersey Shore. Anyhow, the other week I’d been thinking about getting this new hat for quite some time, and I was driving to a meeting. I was waiting to make a left hand turn onto the street, and I waited for this woman to pass who was in the crosswalk. As soon as she passed, I made my left, and just as I was making my left-hand turn, I heard the screeching of tires — a car had rear ended another car at such a speed that it pushed it through traffic and hit the woman who was crossing in the crosswalk.

Tim: Oh, no!

Ryan: She went flying about 15 feet in the air.

Tim: Oh, god! She’s OK? 

Ryan: It was horrifying. I immediately pulled over, called 911, and ran over. She’s face down in the street, and I’m thinking, Oh, my god, this person’s dead. I didn’t know what to do. As I was getting close to her, she rolled over and was moaning in agony, and I started talking to her, just making sure she knew that someone was there with her. Eventually, an ambulance showed up and they took her away. And in that moment, I realized I needed to buy my hat. So I went and bought my hat, because there seemed to be no time like the present.

 

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Tim: Because it made you realize that it was silly to live in fear of what other people think?

Ryan: No, just that I might die and not be able to get my hat, so I should probably go do that now.

Tim: Man, I thought you were going to say that she died and it’s her hat.

Ryan: No, she lived! But anyhow, I took a walk with our friend John Herndon today, and I don’t think he’d seen me since I got my my new hat, and he just kept calling me “Hat Man”… But how’s Italy? You’re in Italy right now.

Tim: Yeah, it’s the best. The last tour was really grueling, just in that every simple thing was complicated — you know, parking in another language and stuff. And as we were getting down to the last couple days, we were like, “Oh, my god, we might survive this.” And then we were in The Hague — Den Haag — and driving in the Netherlands, there’s so many bikes and cars and trams. I was driving and I was like, This is this is too much sensory stimulus. I ended up on the tram tracks, and Jenny’s yelling at me, “You’re on the tracks, you’re on the tracks!” It’s like, “Obviously, I know. I don’t want to be doing this.” We’re in this busy downtown area where everyone’s just on bikes and walking, and to get off the track, I had to pull the car into an angle between that track and an oncoming track. And then finally, this SUV with these warriors with rifles pulled up, and they were like, “You shouldn’t be here.” 

Ryan: You’re like, “Yeah. Thank you, local warriors.” 

Tim: [Laughs.] “This this was not intentional. I promise.”

Ryan: [Laughs.] “Well, last night’s show was pretty rough, so…”

Tim: I hope that woman’s OK, though. I mean, I’m glad you got your hat.

Ryan: Yeah, I am too. I wish it didn’t come on the back of such a traumatic event for somebody.

Tim: We sound like — and when I say “we,” I mean, you — sound like an absolute psycho. I know you to be a warm, generous, kind, loving person. But someone else getting so hurt… I understand that witnessing something like that has an impact. 

Ryan: Oh, yeah. 

Tim: Do you feel this hat is gonna have profound implications?

Ryan: It has, yes.

Tim: Just a little hop in your step.

Ryan: Well, I think it’s just allowed me to do something that I want to do that maybe is a little bit verboten these days. Nobody really wears a good hat anymore. There’s a lot of stigma against certain hats. And every man seems to wear a baseball hat these days. You wear a baseball hat on occasion.

Tim: You know, I’ve actually taken my hat off the last couple of days because we’re now in this small town and we’re in the same place. When you’re on tour, there’s this freedom of, you can you just show up to wherever and people are like, “I guess he’s the guy who wears that hat.” You don’t have to be accountable for it, you know? So I’ve been wearing this little train conductor’s hat. 

Ryan: Oh, I love that. 

Tim: I was afraid maybe it looked like a band called Cold War Kids or something. I was afraid I looked like a mixologist. Then when I said that to Jen, she was like, “Are you kidding me? You look like a fucking psycho. You’re like a 50 year old man dressed like a toddler.” And I was like, “Oh, OK, cool.” [Laughs.] But the thing about this hat — I think there’s a psychological feng shui with personal style, where I have all kinds of clothes that I need to live with for years before I wear it out of the house. You just need to become familiar with it enough, and then you take a couple steps to get a coffee or whatever, and next thing you know, you’re the guy with that hat.

Ryan: Then you’re just naked without it.

Tim: Yeah, or naked, except for it.

Ryan: Well, it’s a real trial by fire, personal style. People get accustomed — like, the rare occasion I don’t have my eyeglasses on or my sunglasses, people don’t recognize me. There’s a lot of freedom in that, in those few moments until they catch on. But when you introduce something new to your aesthetic presence in the world, people get a little shocked by it. It’s like they’ve eaten peanut butter and jelly their whole lives, and you’ve just given them popcorn shrimp.

Tim: There’s a subtlety of getting new clothes that look like not clothes you already have, but clothes you already would have.

Ryan: It’s true.

Tim: Although, I do think — and your hat coming from this woman’s incredible, life changing misfortune is a similar scale to what I’m going to say — I’m not going to leave you dangling as the only psycho in this conversation — my upside of the fascism is I have a wild personal style now. I feel like it’s important to be on the street as a white man and, from afar, people can be like, “Well, not him. He’s not one of those white men.”

Ryan: Yes, I agree. I think part of the fascism is embodied in the homogeny of the world. Corporate fascism. And I think that introducing yourself as someone who has thoughtfully injected a personal style into their lives is a sort of rejection of that.

Tim: I mean, I understand the QAnon Shaman is a thing. And Johnny Lydon, he’s a conservative.

Ryan: Yeah. I was just reading about him and this group Kneecap, who I’ve yet to hear, but he seemed to have some choice words for them. He seems to have some sort of idea of himself as the arbiter of everyone’s ideas, as though everyone listened and Never Mind the Bollocks and mapped their lives out from it. Pretty disappointing considering I love a lot of his records. But what do you do? A lot of people get older, they become conservative. It just seems to be one of those bizarre things people do. They want to hold on to what little money they have left.

Tim: Yeah. See, now we’re at a crossroads, if we’re having a personal conversation. I’ll just say, I know some totally shocking people who are… I wouldn’t say they’ve turned MAGA but, yeah, they’re Trump supporters. What’s the difference? It’s fucking insane.

Ryan: People that we know?

Tim: Yeah.

Ryan: Well, we’ll save that for our personal conversations. Unless we want to have a MAGA exposé, which I don’t think anybody really needs.

Tim: There’s a part of me that feels like we should be outing these people. But then another thing — I don’t think there’s any danger of them having an influence on anyone else. Like, let them just go live their sad, stupid lives. But… it’s disgusting.

Ryan: It is disgusting. And for people that we would know, I would find it fairly unforgivable. 

Tim: Yeah. 

Ryan: There’s a lot of people in the world who I give some grace to, because I feel like they’ve lived in towns that they’ve never left in their entire lives. I try to understand this stuff and try to have a more nuanced picture of America. I’ve been through, as you have, many, many towns in this country, and there are people who are just mesmerized by the idea of getting on a plane.

Tim: I mean, I never went anywhere in my life before playing in bands. I don’t think I’d ever even met anyone who’d been to Europe before punk bands.

Ryan: I traveled with my family. We’d gone to New York a few times because we had family there, and we’d gone to San Francisco because we had some family there. And actually, we went Ireland when I was a kid because we had family there too. But, yeah, travel seemed to be a thing you did with your family at most. 

Tim: There’s been this thing, being in Italy — we’re only on maybe our fourth or fifth day here since tour, and it is really just because we were coming back in three weeks for Cap’n Jazz shows and my cousin has this house, so it was cheaper to stay than to go home and back. Which is fucking great. 

Ryan: What town are you in?

Tim: We’re in this town called Galatina. Puglia is the southernmost region of Italy, and Lecce is the southernmost city in Puglia, and we’re south of that a little bit. We’re, like, 15 minutes from three different coasts, we’re so deep in the heel of the boot. But I’ve had this really intense realization in the last couple days that all the international touring I’ve done for so long and all the traveling, there was still always this feeling of estrangement. You know, I’m a Chicago person. Chicago is normal, everything else is how it compares to Chicago. But now this whole tour, everywhere else feels normal, and I feel estranged from America. It feels like there’s just some giant violent performance happening, and it feels amazing to be away from it, to be able to see clearly for a little bit.

Ryan: I haven’t traveled overseas in about seven years now, which is wild to me. Do you think it’s the prevalence of American media? Do you think it’s that kind of blitzkrieg that we’re sort of hit with every day that allows us never to really catch that breath that we need?

Tim: I guess so, right? Everything happens so fast. And I think it’s that it’s all obviously such bullshit. It’s just the firehose of shit that they announced they’re going to do. And it’s all obviously so false that it’s destroyed just being in the world. I mean, that’s their goal.

Ryan: It’s destroyed the concept of being in the world, but it hasn’t destroyed being in the world. I think there’s an impotence to what they’re doing as well. 

Tim: How so?

Ryan: Well, I think a lot of it is just meant to make you feel that way, to enable the action. So it’s not necessarily so much that the world is this way, it’s just that this is one facet of the world that you’re forced to contend with. But it’s not it’s not the defining feature of the world.

Tim: Right, but that’s what I’m saying. That’s why it feels like there’s this insane, giant violent performance happening, because everyone knows it isn’t real. But it’s this postmodern tyranny of, if you pretend this is how things are and this is the truth, people are just going to eventually submit to it. 

Ryan: Yeah, if we really look at the world — if we’re looking at what’s happening in Gaza, there’s no way you can say, “OK, this isn’t what you think it is.” There’s no two ways. But there’s also just this geographic abyss between you and this thing that allows you to say, “Well, hey, they said they’re going to defund NPR.” You’re just inundated with this shit, and the shit is just such mind poison. And it loans this kind of lethargy that makes you feel that somehow there’s not really a reason to get involved in anything. And I feel like that’s the major problem. I was talking with someone about this last night — they said, “It feels like there’s nothing you can do.” And the truth is, there’s likely nothing we can do here to stop Israel from dropping bombs on Gaza. You can keep trying to put pressure on the government, but it’s pretty obvious neither party gives a shit. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something you can do in your community, and get involved with something locally. If everyone gave a food bank an hour of their time a week, do you understand what a massive impact that would have?

Tim: Right, yeah.

Ryan: It’s just one example, but people have been led to believe that they don’t have any power, because they look at these massive Godzilla-like announcements that are just meant to crush all the cars and buildings in the city, and you’re just out of hope, you know? But being outside of America — I mean, I haven’t been traveling really at all since this has happened, and you and I will be going on tour soon, and we’re going to all these major cities. But just the same, I had this reluctance to travel.

Tim: Oh, yeah. I mean, I do have a little support group of friends on tour over the last few months that, we’re talking pretty regularly about how weird it feels to be traveling now in a way that it never did.

Ryan: On a couple of different fronts. The people on the ground, the trouble with transportation…

Tim: You know how we’re getting around on this tour with you? Did I tell you this?

Ryan: You did, you said Amtrak. 

Tim: The tour manager is driving the gear, and we all just get on the train every day.

Ryan: I’m jealous. That’s something in Europe I’ve done, I’ve traveled pretty extensively by train. But I’ve never done that in the United States. Ever since I was young, I’ve always wanted to take a train across the country in America.

Tim: I took it to New Orleans and back a few times in the ‘90s. There was a 24 hour train from Chicago to New Orleans, and there was a smoking car that would just get so thick [with smoke].

Ryan: Do you remember flying before when you could smoke on planes?

Tim: You know, only one time. First time I came to Europe.

Ryan: I remember it myself. I remember it with my father.

Tim: Wait, how old are you now? 46.

Ryan: 47. I remember people smoking on the plane, there being a smoking section. I quit smoking about three years ago, and it’s been unbelievably brutal. Every day, I think of smoking once an hour, every hour.

Tim: I’ve quit smoking for ten months, three times. Not worth it. [Laughs.]

Ryan: [Laughs.] I describe it as the one true love of my life that just seems to always be out of reach.

Tim: It’s just so simple to have a chemical dependency that you can be like, “I need to satiate this thing.” And then you can satiate the urge. 

Ryan: There’s that brilliant Sun City Girls 45 called “You’re Never Alone With A Cigarette.” I always think about that. Are you smoking? It sounds like you’re smoking right now.

Tim: I just put one out. It’s always hard after finishing a record, but do you find it hard to motivate yourself to play and to get these shows together with the all encompassing dread of being a sentient being in the world now?

Ryan: I find everything difficult. I have for some time now. But actually, I have to say, there’s been a string of events that have been pretty traumatic in recent times. A friend of — maybe someone you’d met at some point — passed away recently. There was a scheduled post with the next day with the label, and I thought, How can I do this with all of my friends,seeing it, thinking about our friend, and so on. And then I thought, You know what? I am alive, I am here now, I don’t necessarily want to sell things to anybody, but also, I’m going to take that as a lesson in my life that I need to do the things I can now. And I never had these thoughts of mortality until I got to be the age that I am, until there’s been a number of deaths in recent times. And I thought, You know, I actually do want to make something of the time I have here.

Tim: Get that hat, man. Don’t deny yourself that hat!

Ryan: That’s what I’m talking about. So, yeah, I find it hard just in general to stay engaged. But I also make a concerted effort to stay engaged. Do you have trouble? Because it feels like you’re constantly making things.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, I have trouble because I’m constantly making things. Dude, we recorded the caPn j’OWLS record — it’s insane. It sounds so crazy. It’s not mixed yet, but Cooper [Crain]’s mixing it next week. 

Ryan: I don’t have the actual physical copy of your new album — did Cooper mix that record? I’m assuming.

Tim: Yeah, yeah.

Ryan: I really love this record, Open ing Night.

Tim: Thanks!

Ryan: I have to say that, to me, this is my favorite thing I’ve ever heard from you. This record is really excellent, and I think it’s a really weird, interesting distillation of everything I’ve known you to do. And knowing that you did it seemingly just as a duo—

Tim: Well, Theo [Katsaounis] plays on some stuff.

Ryan: I know there’s some live drumming, I can tell. But this record really is fascinating to me, because it feels like these diverging things all somehow coming together in this… I don’t want to say “inappropriate” way, but it almost doesn’t make sense at first. It feels like a collage of some kind.

Tim: Well, first of all, thank you. Secondly, I’ve always trusted your listening more than most people I know by a long shot. When we signed to Kill Rock Stars, on this first Zoom meeting, Slim, the owner was like, “Man, what kind of music is this?” And we were like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “What do you guys call your genre?” And I just I said, “Collage rock” — like as a joke about college rock. And then after it popped out of my mouth, I was like, Hey, yeah, actually we do! So thank you for getting it. 

I had an interesting thought listening to your new record. It’s so weird to get older as a musician, right? You actually get better at expressing yourself with more subtlety, more expansiveness, and depth. But at the same time, you see the futility of so much of what seemed to motivate people when you were younger, when you were 25 and everyone you know has a band. But it’s interesting, too, in terms of your friend’s music, because when you’re a kid and you listen to your friend’s band, you could be like, Ah, my friend has started this style band. A surf band, a hardcore band, whatever. And then as your friends get better at playing, you’re like, Oh, this is my friend’s take on a surf band, or, This is my friend’s take on a hardcore band. But listening to your record, I was like, Oh, this is Ryan. It sounds so much like you. I mean that as the highest compliment. Like, that’s a form of mastery.

Ryan: I take that as a compliment. I’m curious what you mean though. Because the thing that I listen to most and look for or just am trying to experience in the things that people I know make is, I want to hear something that I know of their personality to be true. Of course, there’s lots of things you don’t know about the people you care for, and they come out in unexpected ways in the work they make. But I think that generally speaking, what I’m really attracted to is things that sort of confound me and things that seem familiar in a way that is personal. So if I were to listen to your record, I would listen to your sort of sense of [humor] — there’s some kind of gallows humor, there’s a little absurdity, there’s a little surrealness. There’s a little of all these things that are sort of conversational that only someone who would know you would be able to impress upon it, rather than, I wonder what Tim was thinking when he [made this]…

Tim: That’s so true. But then at the same time, sometimes I’ll meet someone at one of our shows and they’ll talk to me like they know me, and I get a little defensive. Like, you don’t really know me, you know the songs. And the songs, those are like personas. Those are crafted. But they do betray a sensibility. And you’re talking about sensibilities, and there’s also a pretty big data set at this point of us to judge it by. 

Ryan: I mean, those are sensibilities, but they’re no more or less a part of you than anything else. They’re just the things that you don’t keep for a close conversation.

Tim: Right. My stink.

Ryan: Yeah. People can get to know you through these things, it’s just not the picture that you want to share with the people that know you well enough to know. You know, you saw me eat my first banana.

Tim: [Laughs.] I told someone that story recently and they didn’t believe me. I’m so happy to have you confirm that. Who did I just tell about that?… I think someone was being funny, opening it upside down, and I was like, “You know, it’s not only instinctive to monkeys.”

Ryan: [Laughs.] 

Tim: “I once knew a 35 year old man who had never had a banana.” What I remember about it is — confirm or deny this — we were standing in my kitchen and I said, “Do you want a banana?” And you said, “I don’t know. Is it good?” And I was like, “I think it’s an OK banana.” And you were like, “No, are bananas good?” [Laughs.]

Ryan: They were! I ate two this morning. Thanks, Tim.

(Photo Credit: left, Charles Bouril; right, Kate O’Neill)