Scholar finds rhythm in rock and rhetoric
Top image: Steve Lamos (left), Mike Kinsella, Nate Kinsella and Steve Holmes of American Football (Photo: Alexa Viscius)
As a founding member of influential band American Football, currently on tour, ĢӰ Boulder Professor Steve Lamos blends music and writing in ‘resonant literacy’
Steve Lamos is relaxing at home during a brief pit stop after touring with his band for two weeks. By Friday, he’ll be on a plane to Japan. Somewhere in between, he finds time to lesson plan and grade papers.
This is normal life for Lamos, an associate professor in the University of ĢӰ Boulder Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.
Every so often, he trades the world of academia for a tour bus as the drummer and trumpet player for , the influential Midwest emo and math-rock band he co-founded in 1997.
Steve Lamos is an associate professor in the ĢӰ Boulder Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.
This spring, the band released its fourth studio album, “LP4,” its first in nearly seven years.
Now juggling his teaching career with his band’s busiest touring schedule yet, Lamos calls this summer “both a blessing and a little bit of a, wow, you know, be careful what you wish for.”
Hiatus to homecoming
American Football’s new record almost didn’t happen.
Between 2020 and 2023, Lamos stepped away from the band while serving as interim director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, a role he describes as a “24/7 type of job.”
Around the same time, unresolved tension within the band came to a head and Lamos was focused on managing more responsibilities at home after a family member fell ill.
“Stepping away was inevitable,” he says.
But as any musician knows, putting down your instrument often comes with a sense of nostalgia for what once was. So, it was absence that brought Lamos back to American Football—realizing that the weight of missing it was greater than "whatever things were demanding that I step away or more than I was aggravated by those things, that’s when I knew,” he says.
The circumstances surrounding his return are why this album means more to him than the three that came before it, including a genre-defining first record.
American Football will perform tour dates through summer and fall 2026, including Sept. 22 at Boulder Theater and Sept. 23 at Red Rocks Amphitheater.
“It represents our ability to get back together and do new things. I’m probably the proudest of it of anything I’ve ever done,” he says.
The rhythm of resonant literacy
Lamos kept his two lives strictly separated for many years, but today he’s quite willing to bring them together.
While teaching an upper-division course called Writing with Music, he’s developed a concept he calls “resonant literacy.”
As Lamos explains, it all starts with rhythm.
“A rhythm is predictable, but what makes rhythms exciting sometimes is the fact that they do change… it’s the balance between the predictability and the spontaneity. That’s what makes life worth living,” he says.
Within his framework, resonance is what follows.
“Resonance is when rhythm in one body generates rhythms in one or more other bodies,” Lamos says.
Over time, he’s learned to apply the concept as readily to a drum set as to a well-written sentence or the back-and-forth of a good conversation.
Resonant literacy often manifests in Lamos’ classroom. In Writing with Music, students spend a semester narrating the feel of a favorite song, then write a research paper arguing why that feeling should matter to a specific audience.
“Like, what a useless thing,” Lamos says, only half-joking. “Except, if students are doing it right, I routinely get the best work I’ve ever gotten.”
But really, Lamos says the idea is less about music or writing than about how to live. Understanding the rhythms we both create and are subjected to offers us a richer viewpoint as we navigate life’s ups and downs.
“There are ways in which you can influence those rhythms, or even make yourself better at generating them, and then leaving yourself more and more open to the possibility that they resonate, ideally in some sort of transformational way that makes life more vibrant and exciting,” he explains.
Where two worlds meet
When looking for it, Lamos finds that resonance often shows up in unexpected places, too. That includes relationships formed in the classroom that have blossomed into new creative ventures.
“A rhythm is predictable, but what makes rhythms exciting sometimes is the fact that they do change… it’s the balance between the predictability and the spontaneity. That’s what makes life worth living,” says Steve Lamos. (Photo: Jesus Ortiz/@optimisticphoto)
was a science-writing student in Lamos’ class about a decade ago. Years after graduating, and coincidentally at the same time as his hiatus from American Football, Goyal shared some of her music.
“Every piece she sent me, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is good. This is even better than the last one.’ So, I asked if she wanted to play with some live drums, and she was in. We did some stuff together and I still get to play with her as a two-piece now and then,” Lamos says.
More recently, ĢӰ music student with Lamos this spring, arranging several American Football songs for a live ensemble.
Asked to describe it, Lamos’ face lit up.
“One of the cooler experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.
‘AپԲ’
For Lamos, making the most of a life defined by two wholly different paths comes down to a word the College of Arts and Sciences has embraced: “ANDing.”
“It’s this idea that part of what arts and sciences is about is this additive thing… taking two things that might seem disparate or even running at cross-purposes, and seeing what happens when you bring them together,” he says.
The label is fitting for a career built on the instincts of rhythm.
Resonance and “ANDing” are, in a sense, two names for the same idea that has carried Lamos from a grad school garage band to a tenured professorship and an international concert venues.
Whether you call it resonant literacy or borrow ĢӰ’s branding, the lesson is the same one Lamos wants to pass on to his own teenagers and to any student wondering whether a writing seminar and a rock band can not just coexist but become more than the sum of their parts.
“Do something practical, do something wholly impractical, and figure it out,” he says. “Figure out a way to bring them together, because you're only going to be happy in your life in the long term if you do.”
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