American Boyfriends may have recorded their first album in 2002, but the band had been floating around in some form for almost ten years before their debut. Matt Johnson and Eric Harmon had started the band with Matt Good and Richard York in the early '90s, but their dual involvement with the Chainsaw Kittens put the band on hiatus for a good part of the decade. Good joined the Starlight Mints and also worked away from the band, but the breakup of the Kittens would inspire the band to reunite and begin working on new songs. Gaining their footing by playing live shows around the Oklahoma City area, they shaped up their material and stepped into the studio to record and release What Love Can Be in 2002.