Patrick MacCready was a music-curious kid, but he didn’t take well to traditional music education.
“I grew up in Pella and got guitar lessons from a local shop. I found it too scary, and I actually had a falling out with an instructor in the school band because the instruction part was too scary for me,” said the lead singer of Jinnouchi Power. “Sitting with a guy and going through chords and stuff was too much. So, I put the guitar in the corner of my room when I was 8.”
“When I was 16, I met a friend who had the same interests as I did. We taught each other how to play stuff. Then I figured out how to record on my own.”
MacCready took these new skills and ran to Des Moines. “It was the nearest big city, and I wanted to meet some people and form a band.” He found a bandmate and friend in Forest Cochran. The two moved into a house together and formed Jinnouchi Power.
“He’s the bass player. He grew up here, so he knew a bunch of people and said, ‘Hey, everybody, I am really into this music and I really support this.’ That was really cool,” MacCready explained. “Although we have had a couple of different drummers and guitar players, Forest and I have stayed the same.”
The anime Summer Wars provided the band’s name. The sci-fi family drama revolves around a family with the surname Jinnouchi, which roughly translates to “power from home” or “power from inside.” MacCready was inspired. He dreamed up a fictitious power company, Jinnouchi Power, designing specialty jumpsuits, name tags and a slogan: “America’s Favorite Electric Company.”
Seven years of conceptual work went into their 2022 debut album Kaleidokoi. It was a great experience, MacCready said, but by the time it was done, he couldn’t help but feel the band had already evolved beyond it.
“I wish I had a mentor in the earlier days to let me know that what I was doing was good,” he said. “It seemed like the first five or six years, we were only opening for touring bands and not getting people to [our] shows. But … I realized that by making music and playing shows here, I became part of this community in a way that I didn’t think was going to happen. I had an idea of ‘oh, you make songs, you put a record out, people hear it, they start liking you, and then you get more successful.’ Now, it’s turned into this dialogue I get to have with my whole community, and we get to build something, and it’s really cool.”
While the band struggles to categorize their sound, they understand who’s listening. “The people who do like rock and roll and still want a wholesome time have become that core of our audience,” according to MacCready.
Jinnouchi Power’s new album, Home, released in February, was created with that community in mind. It’s more personal and less conceptual, stripping back the jumpsuits to explore aspects of MacCready’s life as a husband, father and uncle.
“Home didn’t have the pressure that the first album had,” he said. For one, it was self-produced in their own abode rather than through a formal sound studio, as Kaleidokoi had been. The visuals on the album were inspired by the first house MacCready and Cochran lived in, based on a series of photographs taken of the house before they moved out.
Home meditates on family, both blood and chosen, close and extended. The current iteration of the quartet includes MacCready, Cochran, Kale Hawks (keyboard, vocals, trumpet), and Alex Pargulski (drums). But the constant with Jinnouchi Power is how MacCready, the songwriter, and Cochran, the album producer, work together. MacCready brings a near-complete song to Cochran, who pushes it over the edge with an added chord change or other enhancement.
“Everything is easy now, because there’s no expectation of what the album will be when it’s done,” said MacCready. “In the last couple of years, it’s been the process that’s important to me. That’s when I learn new skills, make discoveries.”
Jinnouchi Power has two albums’ worth of music developed. One of the albums will include both new songs and retooled old ones, including some that are continually requested by fans. The band hopes to infuse new energy and perspective into their early catalogue. “The other [album] will be pretty challenging for the listener with weird stuff for our fan base. If we give them something challenging, they will accept the challenge and explore the lyrics, the music and the expanded approach.”
MacCready refers to his thought process as a memory palace. If you’re meeting Jinnouchi Power for the first time, consider this an invitation to step inside the front door and tour its well-lit, ever-expanding corridors.
“Once you enter, as you go deeper, it’s going to be rewarding to see where all the little tangents go,” MacCready said. “I imagine it’s like someone following the musical rabbit holes. The silliness and the absurdity are all part of our adventures.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2026 issue.
