The Bad Penny (beta)

When The Bad Penny caught up with Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse earlier this year, they were living the high life. Fresh off the release of their third collaborative album, the deliberately misspelled Open ing Night, the musicians previously of Joan of Arc and Spa Moans, respectively, were taking a break between tours with Karate by staying at Kinsella’s cousin’s 400-year-old apartment in Italy. The indie-rockers, whose new project is called Kinsella and Pulse, LLC, had just eaten a five-course lunch by the ocean and seemed to be wanting for nothing.

Well, except one thing – of the furry variety.

“Devastatingly, we do not have our cat with us,” Pulse lamented.

Kinsella agreed: “We can never emphasize how much the cat is the central thing in our life. I’m worried she’s going to be so depressed for a couple of days after this conversation. This is the longest we’ve been away from her, because we do our business from home. She’s used to being around us 24-7. When we drive somewhere not for touring, she comes with us. So I think she’s probably pissed off, resentful, confused.”

“It’ll be fine,” Pulse reassured his partner. “She has great caretakers. We have one cat sitter for a month and then a second one for the second month. And she’s friends with other people. We’re friends with all our neighbors, and they’re all couples and have two cats each. So we all cat-sit for each other as well. It’s nice there’s like this built-in, cat-loving building. So hopefully she’s having a good time.”

When asked if the neighbors stage cat socials, Kinsella thoughtfully replied: “We haven’t tried. Maybe, because we all know each other’s cats, and out of respect to them … that’s the thing about having a cat: When you know one intimately, you see other cats and how different they are from each other.”

Here’s how the rest of The Bad Penny‘s conversation with Kinsella and Pulse went in regards to their cat:

What’s the name of your cat, its age and breed?

Pulse: Our cat’s name is Bomba, which is inspired by being in Italy. It means “bomb” in Italian or, like, the expression “the bomb.” (“Bomba” is also the name of a small village in the central Italy region of Abruzzo.) She’s 6 and a calico long-hair. She might have a little Maine Coon in her, ’cause she’s pretty social. She’s more into people than anything else.

Kinsella: When we got her, we were actually in this very building. COVID had just hit; it was the first place to get it after China. All our upcoming plans got cancelled, and it took about 90 seconds before Jen was, like, “We’re getting a cat.”

Pulse: When we got her, what was so weird is that she was completely silent. Like, we just put her in the crate, and she just stared at us. She still does it: She’ll just sit there and find a lot of contentment staring at people and blinking. She’s just a really silent, chill cat. Kind of always has been. I mean, she has two sides to her, but the main one is more like a guru than a total spaz, which is her other side.

So is she studying or judging when she behaves like that?

Pulse: Studying, I think.

Kinsella: If we’re at home – I don’t mean just in our house, but if we’re in Chicago in general, Jen and Bomba are attached every moment. Bomba sleeps on Jen’s face and is constantly touching her. It’s only like these short periods where Bumba will sit a couple feet away and stare at her. It’s usually she’s touching her at every moment.

Does she sleep like one of those face-huggers in Alien?

Kinsella: Nah, they use each other as pillows.

Did get her in Italy or in the States?

Pulse: Back home. I think she was born in Indiana, which makes her a Hoosier.

And how did you cross paths with her? Did you rescue her?

Pulse: I just found her on an adoption website and then picked her up at a PetSmart in Indiana. It was very unglamorous. She has a street-cat energy, but I don’t know where she came from, where she was before. But she did live a bit of a life, I think, before being rescued by whoever and then coming to us.

Which is extra-cool that she’s still so attentive or comfortable with people. Probably doesn’t have too much abuse in her past.

Pulse: Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. She’s always been very sweet.

What struck you about her when you saw her in the listings?

Pulse: Her gaze. She was posted up on this little fuzzy flower blanket, and she was just like, “What?” I feel like we had some sort of celestial, astral-plane connection. It does feel like a weird cosmic thing that we got her. She’s so much part of our life.

Kinsella: The first conversation me and Jenny ever actually had was about how I would never get another cat, because watching my [previous] cat slowly die nine years earlier was so gruesome. So it is ironic that the very first conversation we had, we were standing outside a bar, both smoking, and had a lot of friends in common, and somehow we started talking about how neither of us would get another cat. And she was just like, “Quit being a pussy. You’ll get a cat.”

No pun intended, right?

Kinsella: Yeah.

So did that conversation actually help move the ball forward with your relationship in the first place?

Kinsella: No, it was just a ironic serendipity that that was our first conversation. We were together for maybe a year before we started playing music together. And then we started recording and touring all the time. I was really struck when the moment we realized that we weren’t going to be touring [due to COVID], Jen was like, “We’re getting a cat. Like, as if she’d been waiting.”

Pulse: When I first moved to Chicago, I had this little black and white cat named Finnegan. He farted all the time, and my roommates hated him. It was such a problem that they would take him and toss him into my room. And I was like, “OK, I need to give this cat away.” And it worked out, because the downstairs neighbors had an older cat. And so they were looking for a companion. He might not be around anymore, but hopefully he’s alive and well and living a good life.

Did you ever have any other pets?

Pulse: My family was very anti-animals, so they would only let me have fish that would die very quickly. Although I did have, like, maybe three hamsters. When I first moved to Chicago, I was a dog walker for a couple years. So I was like constantly around dogs and dog-sat for a while.

You said Bomba’s the best cat. What else makes her the best?

Kinsella: The one thing that makes her the fucking worst and is so annoying is … I don’t know what kind of energy I emit when I am concentrating on music, but as soon as I start working on it, she starts jumping all over the computer and rolling around on it and messing up files. I’ll be recording something, and she’ll fall from the ceiling to roll across the keyboard.

Yikes. Has she deleted any material?

Kinsella: She screws up sessions for sure, but it’s more just breaking a workflow. I can recover stuff after she’s just hit all the keys randomly. She also gets spooked very easily, which is charming.

Pulse: But when new people come over, she really hams it up. But she does have some dog energy. I feel like, if we had a dog, she would be more into that than another cat.

Kinsella: She also does a weird thing with Jenny’s parents’ refrigerator, where she sits in a specific spot and runs to it and stares. We can’t tell if she’s looking at her reflection. She also does a funny thing when we wake up. She runs to the same position every morning and stares at the same branch. It always cracks me up, because it feels like a salaryman clocking in. One of us gets up and opens the bedroom door, and she runs straight there.

Have you written any songs about Bomba or are you planning to?

Kinsella: She’s sampled on a few things. We do a lot of little field recordings just buried in our songs.

What’s the most amusing thing that she’s ever done?

Kinsella: I know the fucking worst thing she’s ever done. [We all laugh.] Jenny’s parents rent this timeshare in this little vacation town. [One time,] they weren’t able to go, so they were like, “Do you want to?” And I’m like, “OK,” even though it was kinda boring – just a condo on a golf course. And I go through phases of pretty bad insomnia. One night at 4 in the morning, we’re staying at this place, and I opened the screen door porch and stepped outside, and Bomba slipped out right.

There were, I don’t know, hundreds of acres of golf courses. And it was pitch black. I thought she was just gone. I was sobbing and I had to wake Jenny up and be like, “Oh my God, this is insane.” And then, after a half-hour or something, she just popped back in. That was bad. There were two times that we thought we lost her, but [that was the worst]. We live on the third floor of an apartment building, so it’s pretty hard to flee from.

As far as delighting us the most, she’s just so present all the time. What Jenny doesn’t know that I do is that, if Jenny leaves the apartment and I’m still in there, Bomba follows her to the door and just goes, “Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.” Like a car alarm, for like 10 or 15 minutes. every time after she leaves.

Every time we come home and open our front door, she runs right to it and rolls over and spins around on the ground for us to welcome us. Six years in, she’s still doing it.

Get your copy of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC’s Open ing Night here.

Go here for The Bad Penny’s Pet Sounds index.

This entry was posted on 09/21/2025 at 6:25 am and is filed under Features, Interviews, Pet Sounds with tags Cap', Cap'n Jazz, Jenny Pulse, Joan of Arc, Kinsella and Pulse LLC, Tim Kinsella. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.