John Krasinski: A Conversation With Summer 2000

A CONVERSATION WITH SUMMER 2000: JOHN KRASINSKI ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

A true Midwest-Emo, Jacob Robert West has certainly made his mark on the scene. Raised in Illinois before making the move to Utah, Jacob began creating music under his meta-project C.H. Point: a self-described emo video game nostalgia fever dream. Releasing work under C.H. Point and other alias’, Jacob is constantly creating and exploring music. 

I first came across Jacob’s work after seeing a flyer for a show at Kilby Court. The comments were full of people sharing their excitement for Summer 2000 to perform- immediately intriguing me. Without intervention, I began looking him up to see what people were so hyped about. I was met with John Krasinski’s face and name, causing even more curiosity. Upon listening, I found myself obsessed with the genre-bending album. “10 songs from a bedroom on a mountain in the wilderness”, the project explores Midwest emo, shoegaze, math rock, punk, and more to create a fantastic record. Eager to learn more, I sat down with the man himself to discuss all things John Krasinski in honor of its 3-year anniversary.

In the Summer of 2000, a young John Krasinski was an intern for Conan O’Brien. A staff polaroid was taken, and later uploaded to a Midwest Emo Posting Facebook group with the caption “This should be an album cover” 

Jackie- First things first, I wanted to talk about the album cover and name. I saw that you had talked previously about how you didn't want to take the album cover art super seriously and got the photo on a Midwest-Emo Facebook group. 

Summer 2000- I was on Facebook a lot during 2019, 2020, and there was a Facebook group that I was part of- Midwest-Emo posting. At the time I was recording, you know, my own music, and at that point I didn't really have an idea of what the album cover would be or what the album would even be called. And I saw that post and I thought it was funny- my vibe is a little satirical and tongue and cheek. I actually really liked the name Summer 2000 as a band name because it kind of sounds like a video game console, but it also has that nostalgia vibe that I feel like a lot of Midwest-Emo bands kind of go for. I grew up in Illinois, so it kind of struck a chord with me. Then I just decided to slap that album cover as the face of the collection of songs that I had written at that point.  

Kind of like, not taking the art too seriously in a sense. And also, you know, of course, some people might call it engagement bait nowadays. But that definitely wasn't the intention, so to speak. I almost see it now as kind of like a, a gate for, you know, people who sort of understand my vibe. I feel like if you're willing to click on something that's called John Krasinski. Not to say that that has anything to do with him as a person, but just the idea that an album is called John Krasinski.  I feel like that sort of helps gate people who might not like it from even checking it out. 

J-:That's exactly what happened to me. When I first saw it I was like- John Krasinski? What is this? I gotta click on this... I’m curious if that was it- like one and done you had found your album cover. Or if there were any other ideas that you toyed with? Were you thinking “oh yeah, something like this” or did you just see it and you’re like: oh that's it. 

S2K: I think, yeah. I honestly think I saw the post, like before I had even started writing some of the music because I mean,  I was making music at that point,  but don't get me wrong,  it wasn't necessarily what became John Krasinski. I was making a lot of video game covers, a lot of the stuff for what I called my meta project, C.H. Point. There's a lot of video game crossovers with like emo and math rock, a lot of stuff that I listen to. I saw the post before and it wasn’t necessarily the inspiration behind starting the music, so to speak, but it was like, oh, got to keep that in mind as like: oh, I’ll use that if I ever make my own music, you know? I saw and I was thinking: probably no one else would use it because it is kind of ridiculous, and so I kept it in the bank. 

J: I truly love it as a cover, it was also the perfect setup for Ellie Kemper [The second LP by Summer 2000, released in May of 2023]. I wanted to get into the actual song making process. You talked a bit before about how you would write songs slowly in one off sessions then repeat and go on, and I just wanted to know more about that whole process and how the album was actually made. 

S2K: This is something I could talk about for a long time. I think it might make more sense if I start with a little bit of context of how I used to approach music growing up and how my paradigm shifted, and how that created the way that I now write music.  

I was born and raised, as I said, in Illinois. I grew up there until I was 18. Music was always sort of a really important thing to me- I played cello in the orchestra, I played upright bass in the jazz band. I sang in choir, I played in the pit bands of musicals, I had a bunch of bands of my own- pop rock, I had a ska band, so yeah. I did a lot of music stuff and by mid high school I was fronting a lot of these projects. And so I was starting to write my own music and the way that I used to write, if I could sum it up, was  Googling cool chord progressions. It was a very constructive approach to building music- where it was like, oh, you know, I'm going to use other people's ideas as far as like Googling that kind of stuff, I would always be looking up like lyric ideas. At the end of the day, you know, if that works for some artists, that's totally valid, but in a lot of ways, it's a very inauthentic way of writing music because you're just taking pieces from other people or your ideas of other people, rather than just like trusting your own intuition. 

And I think a lot of that ties very close, very deeply into the identity of John Krasinski. I was raised LDS, and in Illinois, which is kind of weird, you know. My wife is from Utah and was also raised LDS and we were just talking about this last night- we always talk about the differences in our experiences of being LDS in Utah versus Illinois. Like in Illinois, I was one of the only Mormons in my whole school, so I was one of four Mormons and, you know, versus my wife- she always talks about how everyone is Mormon. But anyhow, by the end of teenage years, right at the end of high school, I was starting to question my faith a little bit. And in a lot of ways, I was sort of living inauthentically and not coming to terms with my own beliefs and kind of caving into the pressures of being, you know, the oldest child in the family who was supposed to go on a mission and supposed to go to BYU. And I think that ties a lot into the way that I approached songwriting. Because I was not being authentic and not trusting who I am and my beliefs and my talents and capabilities and kind of outsourcing it to like, oh, I'm going to Google search this and, you know, kind of build something that's really good. 

And I had one of my friends in high school named Kellen, who we played in a bunch of jazz bands together. The last band that I sort of had in high school was this band Poolhouse. We never played any shows or anything, but I thought I wanted to do music production as a career and so I was like trying to build my portfolio before graduating high school. So we were trying to record a bunch of music down in my basement, you know, me and a bunch of friends who were really into Midwest-Emo stuff at the time. We just decided to make a band Poolhouse and we would record a bunch of music in my basement like all throughout senior year of high school. Kellen was really impactful on me because he was a drummer by nature. He didn't play guitar at all, he's amazing at the drums, but once we started playing these Poolhouse sessions, he was really interested in just learning guitar and playing guitar. But he didn't want to like take lessons or anything because at that point like he sort of had an understanding of music as a percussionist. There was a common joke that he would just sit on the guitar for hours in my basement studio and do what he called finding the emo chord, which the best way that I could describe that is he literally just tuned the guitar to an open tuning, which, you know, of course, an open tuning makes the strings sound naturally like a chord when you don't put your fingers down on anything. And he just started putting his fingers down randomly on the frets, not really knowing what he was doing until he found a position of his fingers that made a good chord. The way that I describe it now, it's kind of like exploratory creativity where he's coming in with a completely open mind and not really knowing how to play his instrument- just trying to find and discover what sounds good, rather than building what sounds good. That was a huge influence on me, several years later, four or five years later after I graduated BYU- 

J: OH! 

S2k: Oh yeah, I guess I didn't preface that.  

J: I know. I was like- Oh my gosh! 

S2K: I did end up, after a lot of back and forth- I was actually going to go to University of Wisconsin Madison originally. And my parents basically came to me and they were like, Hey, you know, like the only, the only affordable option for you to go to school is BYU or community college. And at that point,  I was hiding my authenticity and definitely not wanting to live at home and stay in the Midwest. I was like, fuck it. Utah. Let's do it. I had grown up coming to Utah, my grandma lives in Ogden. I was just like, all right, let's do BYU- which was another three years of inauthenticity and not writing music., I was a very, very busy student trying to get out as quickly as possible. 

After graduating BYU, I was already making music in some way with the video game transcriptions I was making, but I kind of was thrown back to those days in my studio. We were actually in the process of trying to finish a lot of unfinished Poolhouse stuff that we'd had from five years previous at that point. Everyone else in the band probably weren't as into it as I was, but I was just thrown back to the finding the Emo chord days of just kind of acknowledging that I don't necessarily need to be good at my instrument in whatever way that others might say is good. A lot of times people say open tunings are kind of a cheating way of playing guitar in the sense that it's a very easy way to make good sounding music, so to speak. But that was a huge inspiration in my songwriting process for John Krasinski. 

Another thing that Kellen- it's actually crazy that Kellen has so much influence on this album... But he was telling me that he was getting into this way of writing lyrics where he would write one page of just stream of consciousness journal every morning right when he woke up as a way of just dumping everything that is in his brain, not in a cohesive or coherent way, but just extracting it all and putting it onto paper and then using that as a starting point for lyrics. That was really inspirational to me as well. That effectively lead me to the method that you were describing where I would kind of just sit at my computer and put some type of drum beat on... And tune my guitar to some random open tuning... And then just put my fingers down and find the emo chords. This turned into pretty much every one of those songs. Besides maybe Unearth, the ninth track on John Krasinski.That was a programmed piece kind of in a similar way that I did some of my video game music transcriptions, That’s kind of the method of songwriting that I used for John Krasinski that ended up turning into what it is now. 

J: I was wondering about Unearth... Because I know you do a lot of  video game related things at CH point- you're kind of like HQ, your headquarters. 

S2K: Yeah, its like the project of all projects. 

J: Yeah, I was wondering about that song because its very different from the rest of the tracks, but it makes perfect sense with what you do normally 

S2K; That was definitely the intention. I wanted to create a thread in between C.H. point and Summer 2000, so to speak. All of the instruments used in Unearth are just from a bunch of old video games that I just combined together into like a hodgepodge of just that two minutes song.  

Oh! Actually! There was one other thing that I forgot to talk about in the songwriting process that I wanted to go over. So I already talked about like this idea between like exploratory creativity versus constructive creativity. There's another aspect that I think I talked about a in a tweet long ago that I talked about a little bit in a previous podcast that I did with Twinkle Dads that was this idea of horizontal versus vertical construction of a song and the fundamental idea behind methodology and songwriting of trying to capture a moment in a bottle and put it into the form of sound. 

When I was making music when I was younger, I would spend a long time thinking about a piece of music and kind of building it. And I feel like one thing that you lose from that is that the vision of the song sort of changes over time as you spend a long time working on a song. You change as a person over time and I feel like doesn't authentically capture what you were genuinely imagining right when you started the song. Not to say that’s a bad thing, I feel like for some people that really works. But it ends up resulting in a much greater piece of work than it could have been at the beginning. I guess my mentality is with it being more emotional music, I would rather capture the emotions of that moment versus like the emotions over a long period of time. 

And so the idea is I would write the song as quickly as the horizontal aspect of the song, which I guess I would describe as the progression of the song. And then the journey that the song takes you on- writing that as quickly as possible... Spending more time on the vertical elements of the song- which would be like instrumentation, adding other layers into the song, but not fundamentally changing the journey that the song takes you on, so to speak. Then I could spend a little bit more time doing the impact, capturing that emotion of the moment. That was another element of the songwriting process that I sort of have retroactively uncovered.  

J: Yeah! One of the things I'm most like curious about too is when you start adding the instruments and other layers, how much of it do you pre-hear in your head? You have the basics already started, and then as you continue adding more stuff and you’re like: oh, what if I do this now... and now this...- how much do you already know, how much is trial and error, and how do you know when to stop? 

S2K: Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, it's funny because one of my favorite bands growing up was Smashing Pumpkins, and Billy Corgan is, like, notorious for laying like, 200 tracks of guitar or instruments into his songs. And I always thought that was really silly because at some point, you can't hear the difference between the 200 tracks of guitar. There's only so much sonic space, so to speak, that you could fill before it just becomes noise.  

I think as far as like how the vision progresses, I'll usually start out with a very simple idea. Like, for example, the song Cereal Eater Status on John Krasinski- I was really into this band Old Grey, which is a Midwest-Emo band. There's a song they do called Vulcan Death Grip. And I just like really liked that song at the time and I was like imagining doing a similar song, because that was actually one of the last songs that I created for John Krasinski. It’s one of the most screamy ones. And at that point in the progression of creating John Krasinski, I was like, you know what, let me try screaming. I'd never tried, like, screaming before- and so Vulcan Death Group song is kind of Midwest-Emo screamo kind of vibes. The only vision that I sort of had in my head at that point was just: oh, I kind of want to write a song like this, but not necessarily exactly like it. Once the actual Instruments and tracks start to lay down, the vision rapidly changes t because then I'm like: okay now I know what I'm working with. I think overall, the vision sort of adjusts as I'm building it and just hearing things. I'm like, oh yeah, this would be cool to add a different section after this part. 

That was actually one thing I was gonna say as well, is that a lot of the structure of the songs is just like an ABA structure. Which is just the way that I write. You know, or the way that the sort of vision changes is- I'll write one section of the first section, the A part of the song and then  I'll usually come back to it the next day and add a B section. And then I'll usually just repeat the A section afterwards. So, you know, I would say that the vision starts out as  mostly just a figment of my imagination and just kind of like a vibe or an idea, but then as soon as the instrumentals start coming in it changes pretty rapidly. As far as knowing when to stop, usually I'll just get bored of a song and just be like, yeah, it's done. Bored of working on it at least- sometimes I'll come back later and if I do, you know maybe a couple weeks later, something like that, and see if there's anything else that I would want to add in hindsight. But, I feel like most of the time it usually is not, because I'm usually interested in other ideas at that point anyways. 

J: Speaking of Cereal Eater Status... I want to know about the Bart Simpson sample. I love the Simpsons, so I just need to know how you landed on that, how you're like: this is the one- or just the story behind that. 

S2K:  I'm also a huge Simpsons head. My parents did not allow me to watch The Simpsons growing up. It was kind of crude in their mind. I would secretly check out the season DVDs from the library and watch them late at night on this mini DVD player that we had in my house. Of course, it became my favorite TV show of all time. I mean, it's, it's a classic., I don't watch much else besides The Simpsons and Nathan Fielder. Using samples is definitely kind of a Midwest-Emo thing to do, and I just wanted to use a Simpson’s sample because I'd never heard a Simpson’s sample be used in a song before. Especially as the album of John Krasinski is kind of about coming to terms with being authentic, I really just looked up saddest Simpson’s quotes and saw that one and it fortunately fit really well into the lyrics already and so it kind of just worked. Of course I knew that episode, but I didn't remember that quote exactly.  But when I looked up the video I was like: this is perfect. This is exactly the final touch that the song needs. 

J: Oh its so perfect on the song. Takes sad Bart Simpson edit to a whole new level. How did you decide the ordering of the songs? You said you didn't write the songs in orders- so how did you decide what went where? 

S2K: As you listen to albums, I feel there is sort of a flow that kind of works sometimes. I hate saying that there are rules to doing music at all, but you know, usually you want a catchy song at the beginning. You want something at the beginning to have the hook. I think Lucifer Loves Me very quickly became the first song. I think the only songs that I really knew were the first and the last song just because the last song is sort of, I'm not to say that there is any coherent story to John Krasinski, but if there, if there was, you know, The Curious Case of Finding Someone Who Understands kind of is the resolution and the end. And so, I knew that, you know, that, uh, like, Lucifer Loves me was gonna be first, and then Curious Case was gonna be last. I think I just divided it into sections of: I'm gonna do like the softer stuff first, without the screaming, and then l as soon as like the interlude, Two Hundred 70, then do the screamy songs and then we'll throw some weird shit in there with  Trevor Wong Guitar E School Graduation Party and Unearth and maybe in a Cereal Eater Status and then end the end the album, so it was like let's just divide the album with the start and end, and that's kind of how the order came to be.  

J: That makes perfect sense. With the Trevor Wong Guitar E School Graduation Party, the process is just so interesting to me, how did you land on repeating those lyrics across the entire song? Was it always simply that, or did you come across that in the process? 

S2K:  For some reason, my brain just doesn't really care about lyrics as much as music. I have a lot of appreciation for like the depth of the music itself and the harmony and the melody. My brain doesn't even like process what the lyrics are even saying. One of my favorite artists is Alex G and like I I know a ton of the lyrics, but if you ask me to explain what they mean I would have to think about it- it's all just sounds in my mind. I didn't really want it to be an instrumental song because I already had Unearth as an instrumental song, and the song felt like it needed something.  

J: Oh I am totally the same way, a lot of my friends are like “I have to dissect every single one of these lyrics” and just focused on how it sounds.  

S2K: Sometimes it’s a treat when I go back and read lyrics of things because I’ll be like: oh damn, really good lyrics. It’s like an active process for me where I have to like sit down and read the lyrics while I’m listening to it. 

J: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of the music I like anyways, and probably the same for you, the lyrics really do not mean anything. They’re just words. 

S2K: Exactly. Or hard to hear anyways, you do have to read the lyrics to even know what they're saying, My Bloody Valentine type of vibe. 

J: Precisely that. I wanted to know if there was anything on the record that you’re most pleased with or proud of, that really ties it all in together. 

S2K: All the things that we've talked about is this idea that I'm really passionate about that you do not need good equipment to make music. To be fair, I don't think that's necessarily a new idea and I'm not the champion of that idea by any means- but like I do think that one realization changed my paradigm prior to writing John Krasinski. That definitely influenced the genesis of Summer 2000. Just realizing that like the microphone on your fucking cell phone is better than what was used to record The Beatles, and people listen to the Beatles all the time. Most people don't give a shit, especially when they're listening to the speakers of their phone, it really doesn't matter. John Krasinski was recorded on a single $50 microphone with my old bass guitar that I'd had for 10 years. Shitty orange $99 amp, not even mic'd up. It was just DI’d from the headphone jack into the interface, I used a Scarlet solo with one mic preamp.  Overall, all that equipment probably costs less than 500 and people really like John Krasinski, you know. You don't need  a good piece of equipment to make a good piece of music and anyone that would tell you otherwise is lying and trying to get you to buy things. 

I released it to a following of like a hundred people when it first came out, it was really really for myself or anyone who was down to listen. Now its like spread across the world with thousands of pieces of physical media that people own and and that people cherish it and find meaning from it, I definitely feel proud of that. 

I'm most happy that it's finally sort of found a place in here in Utah. I do feel like the themes that I talk about are particularly relevant to people here in Utah.  People's religious or spiritual paradigms are shifting and changing, a lot of young people here in Utah especially, and a lot of people are learning to be authentic. To me, it took quite a while because John Krasinski’s now been out for three years and I feel like within the past year, I feel like John Krasinski has found a footing here in Utah, which, I think that, that makes me really, really happy and- just happy to see that people with similar experiences to me have found meaning with that.  

An album certainly worth a listen, Summer 2000’s John Krasinski is one you don't want to miss out on. Join the anniverary listening party on On January 29th, 2024 at 8 P.M. MST, head to the C.H. Point Bandcamp for a live listening party.  They’ll be a live chat, the opportunity to ask questions, and a group listening of the album from start to finish, At 8 p. m. Mountain Standard Time.  

Check out all of Jacob’s work under C.H. Point, and stream the album below!