La Dispute on Tearing up the Rulebook, Abandoning Plan B's, and Engaging with the Real World

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Post-hardcore legends La Dispute caught my ear with their last record Panorama from 2019; it took me a minute to get on their wavelength but only because what they are doing in the current landscape is fairly singular. Few sound like them, and those that do aren't really able to scrape the heights they've reached—and that certainly includes their great new record No One Was Driving the Car, which is out tomorrow on Epitaph. I hopped on a call with frontman Jordan Dreyer earlier this summer to talk all things their return and the state of the world, and I found the resulting convo to be extremely engrossing and nourishing. Check it out:

Your band is so fascinating to me, and I say that as somebody who came to you guys a few albums in. This is the first record for you guys in six years—the longest period of time in between records La Dispute have had. Walk me through what went into that.
Not all of that idle time was intentional. We were gearing up for an anniversary tour on the nostalgia circuit right when things shut down for COVID. During the three or so years that we weren't able to tour, we had another anniversary pass. So when we finally were able to be together again and make music, we jumped right into rehashing the past—which was good, in a way, to reground and feel a little bit more excitement about having the opportunity to play music again after years of kind of touring quite often.

The prior LP we wrote was a bit of a task for us, in an uncommon way. We really had to work at getting through it, and generally speaking, things have come together pretty easily, so I think we were all feeling a degree of burnt out. Coming back to play a bunch of old songs really reminded all of us, in a particularly powerful way, how much this is not just something we love, but a part of us after so many years doing it together—the most consistent part of any of us, after so many years doing it.

I was 16 when we started making music, so having that forced break meant that we found ways to adapt—and generally speaking, my manner of adaptation is to avoid actually considering what's going on in my life, to push it down the road. I didn't understand—and I imagine my bandmates would say the same thing—how much of a part of our lives this is. We felt really reinvigorated in an unexpected way, and when we first started to bounce ideas around, I pitched the idea that had been in my head for a while. It felt like we were 21 and ready to get in the van and spend eight months on the road. We felt excited about the prospect of creating again.

We all live in different places about the globe. I'm out west, we have one in Rhode Island, two in Michigan, one in our hometown, one in Detroit, and Brad, our drummer, lives in Australia with his wife and daughter. So we have logistical hurdles to clear when it finally does come time to write, because as much as we have more tools at our disposal in the 21st century, it's a poor substitute for capturing the creative energy of a room, being able to feed off each other in real time, and actually sitting, talking, and working things out.

We had to figure out how to be in the same place to make that happen, so we wrote this record in multiple countries and continents—which was a really good way for us to have a new environment each time to breathe new life into the process. There were different restrictions, and not just creatively. Just being in Manila for 10 days—writing music and having to figure out how to get from point a to point b in a stranger place than normal, interacting with a different environment and culture—it was a process to get there, but everything that contributed to how we had to accomplish it ended up being a boon, creatively, for all of us. It was really challenging, but ultimately it was the most rewarding thing we've done in a long time in the sense that it came fairly easily and there was excitement around it.

How was your pandemic?
I don't think I realized the effect that it had on me. My pandemic felt more or less fine, other than the bottom falling out on my professional career for a period of time and having to figure out how to manage my life financially and occupy my time. I don't know that I did a particularly good job of either thing, but I have the tendency—in a classic "socialized straight male" way—to not really think about how I'm affected by something as traumatic as a global pandemic that locked us all indoors for a lengthy period of time.

I'm only just now able to think back on it critically and self-examine a little bit better, and I think it really kind of fucked me up. I mean, again, the band is the thing that we've done for the majority of our lives. It's what we've put ourselves into. It's the reason I didn't more strongly consider going to college after graduating high school. I was pretty committed to making punk rock—making art—my life, and this was the avenue in which I did it. To have the rug pulled out from under you, and to not have really considered in urgency in a plan B, or another way to satisfy an urge that is either part of your innate makeup or has become one because of the way you've approached your life and the way you've spent your time—it was difficult to pivot to something else.

I don't think I really understood how difficult it all was until the first time I flew to Grand Rapids to rehearse before a tour. I was in a room playing old songs with my four bandmates, and I said to my partner, "This felt so good. I didn't realize how much I'd missed this, and how important it is to how I define my existence on Earth." And she was like, "Yeah, of course, are you fucking stupid?" But it wasn't until I was in that room that I was like, "Oh, fuck, this is the thing that feels perfectly natural to me." I don't think that I felt perfectly natural since the last time I was able to do it. You pour so much of your formative years into something and lose it...it's pretty damaging, and I think I'm still trying to figure out how to get my life in order, to a degree.

Did you have any moments during lockdown where you were worried that you wouldn't be able to have music be your career in the future? Yeah, for sure. It took me a while to get there, and it was out of a degree of hubris, maybe, to believe that I was capable of weathering the storm—especially without actual active effort towards something towards making it happen again. I started working at a small venue in Seattle that one of my best friends runs, and that felt like a concession to what is effectively one of three occupations available to people who tour regularly. I'd never done that, which was also probably unwise from a financial standpoint.

But I thought about the post office. I had a couple other friends consider that as a way to get out of bar life. There was a period of time where I was like, "Maybe I'll be a fucking postal worker. I can do my civic duty in a way that doesn't feel morally bankrupt and participate in a means of communication." I theorized how I could make my moral structure fit into an occupation. "You got to cut your teeth a little bit working in the mail room doing third shift." I ultimately wilted under the imagined pressure of having to go through that process, and I didn't pursue a plan B, which is fine now.

But it does make you think a little bit more about the volatility of the creative industry writ large—to have it upended in a way that was, in some ways, worse than in a lot of other industries. Obviously, other industries were worse than that. But I also thought, "What is the landscape of touring going to be like post-COVID, and how many venues will we lose?" How much harder will it become to navigate touring life in an ethical way if Live Nation buys every venue in the country and everything becomes increasingly monopolized? Taking stock of the general landscape of music listening, streaming, and financial compensation—there's a lot of ticks in the "con" column when you're taking stock of your life and wondering about your future. As you hurdle towards 40, you're like, "Fuck—even if I'm able to do this again, what's it going to look like?"

One thing that caught my eye in the bio materials for this record is that you managed to fund a decent amount of the recording by doing short tours, which is an approach I haven't heard too many other people talk about. Tell me about how that part of things came together.
Generally speaking, we've been very careful about how we give away individual control over what we do. That has combined with the fact that we have a pretty consistent and loyal fan base. We've been okay, I think, over the years about managing our financial health with help from people we trust and love.

Having said that, it was difficult to manage this record financially, given the loss of touring income over the COVID period. Sometimes, making decisions to retain control over what we do results in leaving money on the table—which is not something any of us have any reservations about, but it certainly makes navigating today as a band a little bit more difficult. So we had to be very deliberate about how we traveled to be together.

We had money from Epitaph that we were cautious about utilizing, because we try to bankroll stuff ourselves with what we've squirreled away—even if it maybe means paying out band members a little bit less when times are lean. But we managed to cover travel costs and renting a rehearsal space and studio. A lot of those trips were for the Rooms of the House anniversary, which we knew would cover costs because nostalgia, in our universe, seems to be the most effective selling point—especially when you're becoming more of a legacy band or whatever.

We scaled back the the length of that tour to leave ourselves maybe in a worse off financial situation long-term, but to remain focused on what we were doing and to um break even so that we were just capable enough of working towards this one thing as a long-term investment—but, ultimately, we were not really thinking about it in that way, either. I don't know, it was tricky. I'm the worst person to talk to about money, because my brain just doesn't understand it. But we did a really good job of managing that, and in general as we get older, it's always been a consideration of trying tomove more things into our court.

We bought Wildlife back from the record label, so we have ownership over the majority of our catalog—not Rooms of the House, because that was on a subsidiary of Vagrant that got bought by BMG or whatever, and they won't sell it back to us in case one day we hit it big, I guess. It's a lot of moving parts, but we're here, and we're still able to pay for it and make a little money ourselves. Ultimately, the goal is just to keep doing it and to see a project realized, and we did that pretty well this time.

You guys are two albums in on Epitaph now after being on a few different indies over the course of your career. Epitaph is kind of one of those independent labels that honestly almost feels like a major now, only because they put out so much. Talk to me about what being on Epitaph has meant as far as the business side of things.
They've been very good to us, and I think that they trust us. The reason they were initially interested was because they value what we do as a band, and for a label of Epitaph's size, you probably have to have multiple considerations to maintain financial success and keep going with the music landscape being what it is. There's probably a combination of considerations when they put records out, and some of it is bands they know will sell or satisfy a trend and keep the lights on, and then there are other bands who have been around and represent some sort of benchmark for the industry.

I've always felt, since we first met with Epitaph, that they understand us and respect our desire to operate the way that we do. I don't think that all labels will do that. They allowed us to use our own press team when we wanted to. Brett's guiding light, ultimately, is still punk rock—and it's pretty remarkable that they are as big a label as they are for being an independent and existing for so long, and how ultimately niche some of what they do is.

I'm not sure what the future holds. This is, I think, our last full-length release—we're obligated for maybe one more thing, and maybe we keep taking more ownership of what we're doing going forward, just because it feels right to do. But it wouldn't be a slight on what Epitaph has put into helping us be where we are and see projects to the end.

On the topic of autonomy, this is the first record you guys self-produced. Talk to me about that experience.
We've always had a production credit on everything we've done, because we're pretty particular about individual ideas, and every record starts with a concept, themes, and a structure. We have a pretty specific end goal in mind. With every record that we've done, I'd say that the people who have recorded or co-produced the record with us have really functioned as helpful facilitators. I think [Will Yip] is extremely good at that. He has a very intentional approach and a great idea of what he feels should happen at a given moment, and he's very good at articulating that influence and guiding people in the direction of something better than maybe they knew it could be. But he's also very good about being cognizant of the people he's working with and how they operate.

Everything we've done with Will has been extremely rewarding and fun, and we're profoundly happy with how he helped bring the records to life, and that era in our band's history is super meaningful for us. But we knew what we wanted with Rooms of the House and Panorama, and we approached it pretty specifically, so I didn't expect this to be very different—but it was quite different. There's something about having total control where, even if you had it in the majority of ways before, it unlocks a part of your creative brain in a different way. It feels like you can go in any direction. because the only other people who are there to voice their opinion are the people that you know the best and have worked with you for so fucking long that there's another level of lack of inhibition.

In the past, we've put restrictions on what we're doing with an end goal in mind, or with the idea that doing so will push us in an unexpected direction relative to what we've done in the past. When we started writing this record in earnest, we were like, "Let's not take anything off the table or shy away from something we've done before," which has always been a big thing for us—moving in a new direction and seeing what happens when we try it differently. This time around, playing two
anniversary tours immediately preceding the process made us be like, "Let's do anything new we want to do, but if we've done something before, let's just pursue what feels right in that moment." That came from keeping the process entirely self-enclosed.

In the studio, sometimes I was tracking a vocal part that I wasn't 100% confident with what I heard a certain way in my head while writing. I, at times, have a tendency to lose confidence at the moment of tracking, and if it doesn't come out the way i hear it in my head, my immediate default is that i'm not capable of accomplishing what I've heard in my head. But having just my fucking bandmates on the other side in the control room—whether it was all of them or one of them—really helped me break through that vocally to understand that there's no lack of concern for failure. From failure, you pivot when working with people that you have unquestioned trust in, and we all felt that way—"I got this fucking stupid idea," and then you try it once, and you're like, "That feels weird," and then everybody's like, "No, I think I see where you're going, fucking do it again." There were a lot breakthrough moments like that for me that I haven't felt in a really long time, so it was really rewarding in that respect.

The album title references a pretty grim story about a self-driving Tesla. For people our age, you've had more than a moment or two in the last decade or so where you've been like, "Oh man, things are getting really bad. This isn't the future that we were promised." I'm curious if there's a specific instance of a moment that you personally started to feel that way. Sometimes, I can't ever remember not feeling this way.
I was talking to Danielle Chelosky, who wrote the bio for the record, and it was the first time I talked about the record. I said something about getting close to 40 and feeling for the first time like I'm in the midst of some sort of midlife crisis, looking around at the world and taking stock of my own existence—and she was very blankly like, "You seem like somebody who's always been going through a midlife crisis." Which is very funny, and very true—but it's different now. I've always been interested in observation and trying to learn more about the human condition and my own station in life through what I witness around me, and that's informed a lot of my writing for the band. It's also informed how I approach my life.

There's a degree to which I've always internalized the tragedies and disappointments of getting older within the context of how you perceive adulthood and youth—what you're conditioned to expect, by the sheer naïveté of youth, to occur. But I struggle, at times, to understand exactly why—because I feel this internal conflict between a younger me that looked at every older generation in full panic about the changing state of their universe and thought it was pretty fucking silly, because when has the world ever stopped changing? So I'm über-cautious about not becoming a curmudgeonly old man.

On the other hand, it's hard not to feel like everything's accelerated in a measurable way—in a way that's immediately visible enough to understand exactly, but that feels hard to disregard. The means of communication and social media, and what unbridled and constant internet access has done to our brains and our attention spans—with international conflicts, and Palestine—it's just so much fucking shit, and it's hard not to feel that this time is different. That's a lot of what bore out in the record: the sudden volatility of everything, the veil coming down and us seeing it all urgently for the first time in our lifetime. There's so much we don't have control over that affects our lives in the environment, and we're living under the specter of a looming climate catastrophe—and it seems impossible to hit the brakes at this point. That's fucking terrifying, when you think about it.

There's also something to feeling like we're not smart enough to comprehend all the ways in which things are changing. Post-COVID, the sensation exists for me where, the people who are like, "I get what's going on and I'm gonna tell you what's happening," I'm almost like, "You must be an idiot, I'm not trusting you at all. You're scamming me, or lying to make money off of this current moment."
Yeah, I know. I'm poisoned against optimism at this point.

Well, optimism is a tricky thing. I definitely experienced extreme pessimism during COVID—"it's all crashing, everything I feared is finally happening"—but you have to find a way to balance the sadness of watching what's happening in the world with being like, "Well, I'll do my best to be a good person while I'm still here."
100%. That's exactly where I am, honestly. Optimism is complicated, and I think that we conflate being hopeful with being overly idealistic. I find myself increasingly resigned to a position that, when, expressed outwardly to another person, feels like nihilism. Honestly—and I have trouble when I speak about stuff like this, or when I've listened to the record with people in my life who hear what I'm saying and feel concerned that my worldview has degraded irreparably—but I think that there's truth to that, and that life is more violent in the everyday than the majority of us really interact with or understand.

My partner works at a trauma hospital in acute care, and I spent a lot of time myself, against hopelessness during the pandemic, with mutual aid and serving meals and running supply drives for some of the areas affected most by the housing crisis in Seattle. You become aware in those ways. I've always written about violence and heavy topics—I've always found myself to learn the most from examining them—but I've achieved a new level of focusing on the bleak through interacting more directly with the violence of life, and the awful things that happen—not just in news stories, but outside of them.

But, in some ways, I think it's made me a more compassionate person and refocused my attention on the value of having a community and being compassionate, of utilizing art to tell those stories and maybe affect some positive change from doing something that you love and feel good at. I don't think that I feel pessimistic, necessarily—I mean, I do think everything's fucked. But it's also made me realize how many things aren't, and how many good people there are.
The only real way to push against falling into complete isolation or indifference is to go out the front door and talk to your neighbors a little bit more.

Amen.
Like, that's fucking how you do it, and that's how the world gets better. Maybe we lost a lot of that, and maybe that's part of how we arrived where we have. We stopped looking around us, especially in our country. Hopefully, it's not just you and I having this conversation. I think it's pretty obvious that there are a lot of people who feel that way, and that's a hopeful thing.