If you know about Nate Kinsella, it’s probably because of his astounding contributions to local post-posthardcore band Make Believe, which started in 2003 as a touring version of Joan of Arc (led by his cousin Tim Kinsella) and went on hiatus in 2008. Not only did he drive the music with his complex, propulsive drumming, he also added electric piano, using his right hand on a keyboard set up across his kick drum while he played his kit.
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Birthmark arose in 2006, after Kinsella and his girlfriend Jamie Burns (now his wife) moved to Champaign-Urbana so she could attend the graduate program for comparative literature at the University of Illinois. “We rented this house because rent is so cheap down there,” he says. “It has a basement area and a kitchen and a big living-room area, so I’m able to do a bunch of recording in the house, which is totally awesome. I started just compiling tracks.” Kinsella has a fair amount of experience as a journeyman sound engineer, most visibly at the Empty Bottle. He recorded himself playing a heap of different instruments—guitar, bass, keyboards, cello, clarinet, mandolin—as well as drums, percussion, and vocals.
For a while Kinsella continued to work sound at the Bottle, but traveling between the two cities wore him out. He started looking for a way to make a living closer to home. “I got a steady job at a bakery, where I worked from midnight to seven in the morning pretty much full-time,” he says. “I did that for almost a year, which kind of burned me out also. I don’t really know many people down there and I’d only be awake in the middle of the night and I was working alone, so I had like zero social life for months on end. It was kind of crazy.”
It’s hard to tell from how assured Shaking Hands sounds, but the solo approach is still difficult for Kinsella. “I guess as fun as working alone can be, I definitely am more insecure about it,” he says. “In Make Believe we used to write each tune together. Just having four dedicated individuals working towards something, I felt like we were all backing each other up. Working on a solo recording project, I’m the only person holding the whole thing together. There are all of these battles of self-doubt and whether it sounds good at all, and not really bouncing it off of anyone else.”
