Honesty is the best policy

"I don't do well with big groups of people," admits Make Believe's Tim Kinsella.

Meeting the countless legions of fans he has inspired would be incredibly overwhelming for anyone, let alone someone with social anxiety.

Kinsella is soft-spoken and laid-back. He says what is on his mind but takes his time getting there.

"It's not hard for me to not think about [those large groups]," he says.

Kinsella has turned his home into a studio and prefers to spend his time there writing music. Many of his bandmates also call the place home. For them, creating is not just a passion, it is a necessity.

"People call me and ask me to come to parties and if I turn down the invitation so that I can record, they get mad at me," he said. "After a decade, they still have trouble accepting that this is who I am and what I do."

He does not go to parties often and keeps socializing to a minimum. If he has to socialize, he does it under his own terms. He works as a bartender and his friends come by to drink and hang out.

He makes enough to cover his expenses, which allows him the freedom to create music. Rather than falling in the modern trap of living to work, he works to live. To him, making music is living.

While he may seem a bit reclusive from the outside, he has not isolated himself. He is either unaware of the impact he has made, or he choses to ignore it. However, Kinsella's reach us undeniable.

It all began in 1989 when he, his brother Mike, and friends formed Cap'n Jazz. The short-lived group had a profound influence on the indie rock scene, forever altering its landscape.

"I'm just like everyone else in indie rock," Denver Dalley of Desaparecidos said in a previous interview. "I grew up on and was inspired to write music by that Cap'n Jazz album, Analphabetapolothology."

This is not an uncommon sentiment.

The band fused the subjects of math and art into something people actually wanted to study. His screeching wail was second only to Victor Villarreal’s virtuosic guitar work in shaping the band’s legacy.

Over the course of a couple years, Cap'n Jazz released a few EPs and a full-length album nicknamed Shmap'n Shmazz due to the length of its actual name. The records were impossible to find and the band broke up before the LP came out.

It was not until 1998 when Jade Tree Records released the double LP, Analphabetapolothology that the world outside of Illinois was introduced to this groundbreaking act.

After Cap'n Jazz broke up, the original band's lineup reshuffled into various combinations to create Joan of Arc, Owls, and American Football. Make Believe is the most recent iteration. Each band has a distinct sounds and draws from different influences.

Make Believe gives fans a chance to get in on the ground floor. The avant-garde band picks up where Cap'n Jazz left off, but with a more nuanced and mature sound.

To say the Kinsella brothers of Tim, Mike, and Nate produced a lot of music is an understatement.

"What else am I going to do?" Kinsella asked.

Hopefully, he continues to create more music.

"In the band we always ask each other, 'What if we had real lives?' but none of us want to do that. With the amount of work that we do, it'd be impossible."

Whew. That's a relief.

This article was originally published in the Colorado Daily in 2003.