Jordan Dreyer doesnt have a good name for what he does. Midway through a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, the affable, unassuming 31-year-old who fronts the beloved post-hardcore band La Dispute in a style that ranges from measured spoken word to an arresting half-scream, half-sob explained why he shies away from the most obvious designation.
I dont think Im a singer, he says, sitting in the lobby of his Brooklyn hotel on a January afternoon near the start of his first-ever real-deal press tour. I am certainly a vocalist, and Im recently comfortable saying that Im a musician. For a very long time, Id just be like, Yeah, I dont know what I do, but Im not making music. Because I dont play an instrument. I would have to have some understanding of music and theory to be in a band, even if its innate.
But I cant, like, sing, he continues with a sigh and a laugh. In that way, its kind of poetry, and its kind of hip-hop. Thats a longstanding joke of ours and all of our friends in bands: that were a rap-rock band.
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Dreyers struggle with labels makes sense, given the strange blend of elements at the heart of La Disputes sound. Often coming across like an obsessive novelist pacing his attic, trying to get the words right, Dreyer presents disarmingly intimate, frequently reality-based narratives of distress and domestic discord as his bandmates guitarists Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino, bassist Adam Vass, and drummer Brad Vander Lugt, Dreyers cousin churn through beautifully nuanced, masterfully dynamic compositions. Depending on the song, the results might manifest asseething near-metal or understated indie rock.
This isnt typical teenage-heartbreak stuff, though there was some of that in the early years. The bands output feels more akin toNew Yorker short stories John Cheever as filtered through an emo lens, orSlint with the urgency level cranked way up. (Fittingly, given the bands literary bent, their name comes from an 18th-century French play.)
La Dispute debuted in 2006 with Vancouver, an EP of harsh, chaotic hardcore. Their first full-length, 2008sSomewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, presented a more fully formed vision, with songs tackling weighty topics like divorce. It shocks me, listening back to it, how dramatic [it is], Dreyer says of the album today. Somewhere won the group anunusually devoted fan base that has grown steadily in the years since.
In concert, fans speak/scream every word back at Dreyer, whose slight frame flails and convulses in front of the mic. The fervent response only makes his already dead-serious tales, chronicling the aftermath of a drive-by shooting in the bands hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, or the 2007 I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse, feel all the more weighty.
If I pride myself on anything, Dreyer says, its performing and feeling that connection with people and getting to make eye contact and see people who are affected emotionally by, not even necessarily the specific thing that were doing, but just the general mood that punk and hardcore can create in the right atmosphere.
There are plenty of future shout-alongs on La Disputes upcoming fourth LP Panorama, out March 22nd a typically moving, at times harrowing set that finds Dreyer heading back in the direction of autobiography after 2014s excellent, more fiction-based Rooms of the House.
The albums sound and themes feel right in line with the bands prior work, as various songs address the aftermath of a highway accident, the toll of dementia and how people cope with loss day to day. But in a broader sense,Panorama represents a career milestone: After two albums for SoCal indie No Sleep and one issued on their own Better Living imprint, its the bands first full-length for new label Epitaph, a punk bastion for close to four decades.
I sort of didnt remember how much I loved that label until I was in the office and I was looking at all the gold records they had on the wall and I was like, Oh, fuck that record. Oh, fuck that record,' Dreyer says.
During a wide-ranging interview, the vocalist spoke about processing grief second-hand, seeing some of his darkest lyrics turned into Tumblr memes and whether there could ever be an upbeat La Dispute album. The following are excerpts from the conversation.
What led you back toward a more autobiographical writing style on this record?
When we did Wildlife in, I guess we put it out 2011, but we wrote in 2009, 2010 it was a product of my environment. It was just hearing peoples stories, some that grabbed onto me for whatever reason and stuck with me and felt worth telling. So, that dictated the structure of that record.
It was similar in this one, where it was just, like, a lot of repetition in my home life. I didnt have a whole lot going on, truthfully. We were in-between record cycles and sort of in flux. We all live in different places. We did Rooms and then we toured for that record and then we had all this downtime.
That is what I was inundated with, the routines that I had and the same streets that Id drive and the same places that Id go. So, feeling connections again to stories from my neighborhood and from the places that I lived and from the places that my partner lived and where she grew up, that made me want to talk more about my own life, or speak directly from experience rather than extrapolate from others or fabricate entirely.
This neighborhood youre describing, how close is it to where you actually grew up?
The neighborhood [in Grand Rapids] that I lived in was a five-, 10-minute drive from the neighborhood that I grew up in. From the time I was 13, 14 and riding my bike or taking the bus to go to the record stores and the book stores and the coffee shops where my friends and I hung out, wed all go to this neighborhood called Eastown or East Hills, and Ive referenced it on records years back. Thats the neighborhood that my partner and I lived in when the idea for the record came up and when we started writing.
She grew up outside of Grand Rapids in a city called Lowell, which is a city of 6,000 people. Its an old mill town, half an hour out of where we lived. So we did a lot of commuting back and forth between Grand Rapids and going on this highway that runs all the way to Flint, M-21, which is Fulton Street. So from Eastown where we lived, the route wed take to drive out to Ada, Michigan, where she worked and Lowell, Michigan, where she grew up, I would just hear the same stories from her about people who passed or different events. And it felt impactful because so many of the stories were about death and about people passing at a young age, and I didnt experience a whole lot of that where I grew up.
She and her friends, everyone has a story of somebody who passed away car accident or whatever it might have been. So, yeah, it felt like you could trace the history of a city through the stories that you hear from the people who live near them. But then, like, how much dont you know? If you can drive down the road with one person and hear about this body that a maintenance worker found, and then a half mile down the road you see a roadside memorial for somebody who passed in a car crash, you go a little further down, and then what about all the things youd hear from other people who are 20 years older, 30 years older? Thats where the earliest incarnation of the record came from.
Theres that line in Fulton Street I: Will I ever put flowers by the street? It seems like youre zeroing in on the perspective of someone who hasnt been through that kind of tragedy but is wondering how they would react in that situation.
Hundred percent. And thats something that, honestly, I didnt consciously think about it until well into the process. Its not the first time that Ive talked about that. It goes back to Wildlife.
Right. I was going to bring up the second-to-last track on that album
Yeah, exactly: Everyone in the world comes at some point to suffering
It was like, all the things this person, who Ive spent a considerable portion of my life with now, how much shes endured and the people in her close social circles and her family and her sisters, and how little I have in my 31 years of life. Theres an anxiety, I guess, for having so far been relatively unscathed from a tragic standpoint.
It seems like Rhodonite and Grief is touching on some of that too, this idea of someone close to you going through something and trying to figure out how to be there or
How to help.
Right, exactly. What can you say about that song?
Yeah, I mean, thats a lot of the record, because its talking about people close to me and their interactions with loss and the accompanying grief. That song is about being an effective companion in the context of someone elses loss and grief. Or observing it as a third party. Theres a few different things on the record that I was trying to articulate: how it feels to experience another persons grief when it isnt directly yours. And how difficult it can be to find a way to help a person going through something, because its super fucking hard to do that, too.
I mean, obviously I dont think its as hard as experiencing your own grief, but trying to figure out how to be helpful without being overbearing Its a very difficult balance to strike. So, I very deliberately talked about, in that song, trying to remove myself from the situation. In the first paragraph, I talk about watching somebody through a car window. I talk about watching somebody through the window coming back the back from the store, so its very deliberately meant to be a secondary characters perspective of someone elses grief. And then the very end, just finding these kinds of trivial, menial ways to help somebody deal with what theyre dealing with, buying little gifts and sort of an expression of guilt that there isnt a better way to help. But also, I think thats sometimes probably what you need to do? I dont know.
What is rhodonite?
Its a stone, a crystal.
Different kinds of stones or gems come up a few times in the record. Whats the significance of those images?
Yeah, I wanted a recurring symbol or motif for the external sources people seek out as an effect of their grief, or preemptively. I feel like everybody has their thing, whether its their religion, or music they listen to. I feel like everybody has this cloud of despair hanging over [them], like the inevitability of our death. People seek external ways to feel comfortable with their eventual fate and the fates of the people around them.
So that was just meant to be a symbol. I dont know the exact moment that gave me the idea, but throughout the record there are all these different stones that all have supposed healing properties and they all coincide with some manner of grief, or that kind of thing. I cant remember which exactly rhodonite was, but theres rose quartz at the beginning, then rhodonite, and I took specific listed properties from crystal-healing books about calming your senses in the face of loss or being able to articulate like opening up the throat chakra.
And its nothing thats ever spoken to me or that I take much stock in, but I thought it was a cool symbol.
There are lines in the song about a convalescent home and aphasic patients. Are those references to a sick relative?
Yeah, I mean, the whole song is really [about], like, losing a family member. And in particular to dementia. My partner is in grad school for speech-language pathology. So, aphasic patients/apraxia of speech is kind of juxtaposing the loss of a relative to dementia with her career.
Judging by your lyrics over the years, these kinds of tragic or wrenching stories have been a real obsession for you. On the last track on Panorama, You Ascendant, theres even sort of a catalog of possible ways to die. Have you been preoccupied with morbid thoughts all your life?
Its hard for me to think beyond the 10 or 11 or 12 years now weve spent making music. And its kind of something I think about now and again, having spent so much time talking about other peoples tragedies. I dont know if I was, as a young person, particularly interested in the morose or anything.
I think we started making music at a very young age, a tumultuous time.So you start making music when youre that age, and the music that youve gravitated toward to that point the stuff that like really connects with you emotionally, that speaks viscerally to you whether it was Hot Water Music and hearing these triumphant songs about belonging and about community and about finding your own way, or it was listening to Planes Mistaken for Stars songs about being drunk, or whatever, everything is, like,turned up to you when youre that age.
So, you take a snapshot of a period of time in your life, but you also inadvertently set your creative course for the next decade in a weird way because you get comfortable doing one thing, you get good at doing one thing; that becomes your wheelhouse. So theres the three songs on [Somewhere] that are not my stories, that are about peoples divorces, and those were the songs that I connected with the most making that record, and then in the years after releasing it.
So, when we did Wildlife, I leaned really hard into telling peoples stories, and I talked about things that happened in my neighborhood. And in a manner that I tried as best [as I could] to make respectful, and just more or less, to dictate these stories. But yeah, theres that block of songs on that record: King Park, [about] the drive-by shooting; Edward Benz, 27 Times, about a guy I met whose son had stabbed him; and I See Everything about one of my teachers from high school who lost a child to cancer.
I think that there are times when I feel guilty having taken that course where you never really consider, and I dont think you should necessarily, the responsibility that you have to the people that will digest what you create. But there are times that I have felt like maybe me writing a song like King Park that relies so heavily on this big dramatic climax is maybe prone to misreading. And especially now that everythings so reducible. We live in a culture that digests and compresses things into memes on Tumblr. I think we got a lot of that, which is fine. Thats a whole nother conversation. But I think you worry that these big events that by nature arent reducible, that are complex and nuanced, become Can I still get into heaven if I kill myself? memes.
Wow, is that actually a thing?
Yeah. Like I said before about being 17 and listening to these bands theres nothing inherently wrong about that, I dont think. But I think you worry as the person who presented it into the public forum that maybe you ought not have? Especially considering its never been your story beyond it being something that happened in the neighborhood that I lived in and where my parents own a business. So theres a degree of guilt sometimes, or at least concern going forward, and when we wrote [Panorama] I felt immediately drawn to those really big, complex, nuanced stories of tragedy and I think you sort of black out when you get so into making something. Its not until the very end of it that you look back and you go, Man, really, should I have done that?
Also, too, being in a band where fans sing along to every single word at shows do you ever think about that when youre writing?
I dont think so. It used to be when wed write songs that you wanted the sing-along parts, so from a logistical or songwriting standpoint, you maybe embed them in the music in places. I dont really ever think about how things are gonna connect. I already have a difficult enough time to committing to the order of the words that I write. And maybe thats why I black out and dont think about the sort of emotional implications of having written about something so intensely difficult to hear about, until down the line. Because if I thought about it while I was doing it then I think I would beat myself up about it.
When you were younger and going to shows, were you that kid ?
Singing along? Yeah, sure. Definitely. The big one for me when I was younger was Hot Water Music. When I was like 13 or 14, in middle school still, I had a friend with a CD burner, like the one friend who had the technology. He would burn his older brothers CDs and he was the cool friend that we had. And he burned me a Hot Water Music record, Forever and Counting, when I was 13 or 14. And hearing them was just kind of transformative because it was all about community and belonging and about finding your own path. Growing up in a very religious area, it was revelatory for me, having recently abandoned my adolescent faith to find a new text, I guess. And it was going to the record store and [finding] Hot Water Music and Small Brown Bike and, like, BoySetsFire.
Thats probably why when we started making music, I wanted to write about super emotional things because the bands that I loved and connected to were more or less the church for me. It was its super corny to say, but, like, youre not alone shit.
So how did you come to combine all that with the more literary aspect of the band? Hardcore and poetry arent necessarily united in every teenagers mind.
The two things that Ive always loved since I was little were music and reading. Like, those were always the two things that I wanted to do, when I was kid, going through my dads Neil Young records and then getting older and getting into Kurt Vonnegut when I was that age. So these two things kind of happened in tandem; they were always what I loved and then a lot of the musicians that I idolized, too, when we first started making music, were of that literary bent.
So it was a synthesis of my two passions. I think more or less, when we first started making music, I had a specific tool set from which to pull, and I couldnt sing, so it was like, Im gonna speak these parts, but Im gonna try to make the writing compelling on its own. And then, yeah, listening to Joanna Newsom when I was that age, and the Hold Steady and the Mountain Goats, MewithoutYou, bands [whose lyrics are] compelling enough to stand on the page.
To this day, Im even more reluctant to say that Im a writer than to say I am a musician. But if I think back on that crossroads of my life, I couldve graduated high school and gone to school and I wouldve probably gone for English. And instead I make punk music. And its going great and I love it. And the thing that I love the most about it is I get to maybe not the most about it, but another thing that I love about it, is I get to do those two things that Ive always loved. I get to write, and I get to spend hours on end editing and re-editing, and I get to do it while making music and performing for people. And thats awesome.
I couldve graduated high school and gone to school and I wouldve probably gone for English. And instead I make punk music.
I wanted to get back to something we were talking about earlier, how you set your creative course with the bands first, very intense album. It makes me wonder: Could there ever be a happy La Dispute record?
I dont know. I genuinely dont know. I feel like there are happy songs. Theyre not uncomplicated. I dont know that we could ever make a La Dispute record that was just, like, exclusively euphoric. Thats never been my experience in life, in general. Life has always been good, but never exclusively so. How many people experience sheer, unbridled bliss 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? If they exist, I dont know them. They probably do, I dont know.
But there are songs of ours that are happy in that they present a conclusion that involves some sort of realization or reconciliation. But I dont ever know that we could write a record that didnt have happy without sad. At least not a La Dispute record. I dont discount the possibility, but I think that La Dispute is just kind of inherently that.
That makes sense, because some of this album seems like a love story set against the backdrop of tragedy. Theres one song about driving through a rainstorm, and theres a line about being dumbstruck with love and terror
Yeah, love and terror both. So, this is the happiest Ive ever been. But like we were talking about before, nothing is ever uncomplicated. Nothing is ever exclusively good. Or exclusively bad, or at least the majority of the time its not. So, given a frame of time, youre gonna experience ebbs and flows no matter where you are in your life, no matter how comfortable you are, no matter whats going right, whats going wrong. Like, there are gonna be rainstorms you drive through, the clouds open up, and you are truly dumbstruck by how Theres a Joanna Newsom [lyric], still one of my favorite lines on the record she did Ys, what did she say?
We could stand for a century, staring, with our heads cocked, in the broad daylight, at this thing dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
That line, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, is such a remarkably beautiful and concise way to capture an emotion like that: when youre driving and you see a sunset or you come upon a landscape youve never seen. You share a particular connection with a person and thats super powerful. So I think thats a good image for the record as a whole. Theres tumult, certainly; theres shit going on that is difficult to deal with, but love isnt uncomplicated, and relationships arent.
And I think truly coming to a place of peace is coming to understand that duality and being able to cope or compensate. Or to have somebody to help you do it. So thats a lot of the record talking about all the facets of love.