The first surprise in hearing J. Robbins’ new mix of “The Draft” was how little football, etc. wanted it to feel like a rewrite. “Honestly, I thought it sounded less different than maybe I had expected,” Lindsay Minton says. “And I mean that in a good way — the intention here was to keep the essence of the recording and just bring a freshness to it.”
Mercy Harper heard the shift somewhere else. “What hit me most was hearing the vocals punched up in the mix. I knew the bass and drums would hit better, because J. was mixing it. The vocal wasn’t a drastic change, but punching it up just a bit made it sound so much more confident.”
That new version arrived March 18 through Rite Field Records and Count Your Lucky Stars Records, which are co-releasing a 15th anniversary edition of the Houston band’s 2011 debut LP.
The album was originally tracked with Trent Bell at Bell Labs in Norman, Oklahoma in October 2010, then first released in March 2011 by Count Your Lucky Stars and strictly no capital letters.
This edition was remixed by Robbins at Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore in September 2025 and remastered by Dan Coutant at Sunroom Audio in Cornwall, New York.
Fifteen years later, the record doesn’t sit neatly in the past. Some of it still feels lived in. Some of it comes back like something half-forgotten.
“In some ways it does feel foreign,” Harper says. “Of course ‘Safety’ is a well worn one. But there are a few tracks on this record, like ‘Hail Mary,’ that drummers after James never learned. Those feel like lost songs I’m rediscovering. And I don’t think we’d ever write a song quite like ‘Mouthguard’ again.”
Minton puts it a little differently: “I think the album, like anything else from when I was in my early twenties, feels both familiar and foreign. Like Mercy mentioned, songs like ‘Safety’ stayed in the repertoire over the years, but hearing them all in context together again was a trip.”
That push and pull between memory and distance runs all through this reissue. “The Draft” was the first full-length from football, etc., a band Minton and Harper started after meeting at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and relocating to Houston in 2008.
They formed the band in 2009, released a split 7” with Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) on Count Your Lucky Stars, then cut the ten songs that became “The Draft”.
They made the record the stripped-down way. Live takes, very few overdubs, three people locked into the same room and the same job.
“We drove to Norman from Houston in my Honda Civic,” Minton recalls. “Trent Bell had let us know that he let out-of-town bands stay at the studio, and we absolutely took him up on that. We bought a bunch of microwaveable food from a nearby Target and basically lived off that for the weekend. Sleeping in the studio sounds kind of romantic in hindsight, but at the time it was just what we had to do.”
She laughs at the idea that it was a one-off. “And frankly, we also later slept at the studios while recording the ‘Audible’ LP (Blacklodge in Eudora, Kansas) and the ‘Disappear’ EP (Magpie Cage in Baltimore, Maryland). There is something really focused about it, though — nothing else to distract us, just the record.”
If one song has followed the band further than the others, it’s “Safety.” Harper traces its afterlife back to a specific moment on tour with PS Eliot in 2010. “At one show a producer happened to be in the crowd, and he talked about how good that song was and invited us to come back to Athens, Georgia to record with him. But we couldn’t make it work to drive all the way back out there. The song ended up on a Count Your Lucky Stars/Topshelf compilation, and I think that’s how a lot of people heard it.”
“The Draft” also carries the stamp of James Vehslage in ways bigger than the drum parts. Vehslage, who played on the record and died on August 15, 2019, was there before the band had fully become itself.
“I think about how much he believed in this record,” Harper says. “He really pushed us to finish up the songs, get them tight, and record them professionally. He saw so much potential in the LP and in the band.”
Minton remembers how total that investment was. “James joined the band when we only had a handful of finished and unfinished songs, plus a summer tour that was already half-booked. And he was all in from the start. Not just in helping us get ten songs across the finish line, but in everything around it too — setting goals, coordinating photos, researching studios and booking us at Bell Labs, managing artwork, making CDRs to send out to college radio and press. He didn’t just want us to make a record — he wanted us to do it right.”
After football, etc., Vehslage founded The Summit, the all-ages DIY space in Houston that would host touring bands including Japanese Breakfast, Jeff Rosenstock, and Alex G. Harper says none of that felt out of character. “James creating the Summit was no surprise at all, honestly. When he was in the band with us, we would all complain about shows in Houston, which didn’t measure up to the great DIY and basement shows we’d play on tour. So of course, once he wasn’t in the band anymore, he went out to fix that problem. If James thought something could be bigger and better, he’d try his best to make it so. That’s what hoped to do with football and the Houston music scene.”
There was also one detail about him nobody would get from the records alone. “Something that people who only know us from the records wouldn’t know, but that everyone who knew James in real life knew, was that he was an absolute fanatic about the Houston Rockets,” Harper says. “That’s why he named his DIY space The Summit, which was the name of the old Houston Rockets stadium.”
That history is built directly into the new pressing. Once the reissue started taking shape, Minton says it felt impossible to revisit “The Draft” without marking how much Vehslage meant to the band and to the record itself. Joseph and Parker at Rite Field, both based in Houston and both people who knew James, helped push that side of the project forward.
“The idea of doing something intentional to honor James came pretty naturally once the reissue started taking shape,” Minton says. “I think everyone involved felt that it wouldn’t be right to revisit the record without acknowledging how much he meant to it and to us.”
The original pressings had two different versions of the artwork because of file mishaps, so the band used the anniversary edition to rethink it. Izzie Mack, who saw football, etc. play in Scotland with James in 2011, redrew the art. Eric Castorena handled the layout. The new version also adds band photos to the insert, pulling in more of the record’s history instead of presenting it like a sealed artifact. Photography comes from Mark Marshall and Justin.
The color choices carry that same intent. There are 500 copies total: 200 blue through Rite Field, 200 gray through Count Your Lucky Stars, and 100 black through the band. The blue variant is “James blue,” matched to the shirt Vehslage wears in one of the photos. “It just felt like a nice, simple way to reference him,” Minton says.
Physical copies of the 2026 remaster are available through Rite Field Records and Count Your Lucky Stars, with the black vinyl edition limited to 100 hand-numbered copies. EU orders go through Gizz Moix, and Japan orders through Waterslide Records and Disk Union. The black version is listed at $25, with shipping expected in late April and a ship date on or around May 1.
Hearing “The Draft” again also made both Minton and Harper look back at what the band meant when it first arrived and what it means now. Harper went back through old emails while thinking about that question and found herself staring at the amount of life football, etc. once consumed.
“I was blown away by how much time I spent setting up shows and trying to get people to hear the record back then,” she says. “The band took up a lot of space in my life, for better and worse. There were many times back then when I was jealous of other bands, especially when people jumped around and crowdsurfed during their sets but just quietly clapped for ours. I wish I hadn’t been jealous like that, because it prevented me from seeing how special we were to some of those people who were quietly clapping.”
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Minton remembers the pressure of firsts. “We were learning so much at the time — so many firsts, so much newness — and it all felt really high stakes. Now I see it more as one phase of our lives, but also something that shaped everything that came after. I feel a lot of gratitude for it — for what we made and for what it taught us. A lot of that has carried into later versions of the band and into everything else we’ve done. I feel really lucky that we still get to come back to it now.”
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That later history is part of the story too. Since “The Draft,” football, etc. have released “Audible” in 2013 and “Corner” in 2017, along with EPs and splits including “Disappear” in 2015 and “Vision” in 2022. Their third LP and both of those EPs were also recorded with Robbins.
Across that run, Minton and Harper have kept a sound built around melodic, angled guitar interplay that has drawn comparisons to Rainer Maria, Mineral, and The Appleseed Cast without ever sounding borrowed.
Outside the band, they also played together in Overo and currently play in Hew. Football, etc. now features drummer Daniel Hawkins.
The 15th anniversary edition of “The Draft” is out March 18 via Rite Field Records and Count Your Lucky Stars Records.
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