Horse Jumper Of Love’s New Record, ‘Disaster Trick’, is Music To Feel Big Feelings To
Photography by Elena Saviano.
When Dimitri Giannopoulos was ten, he picked up his first guitar and learned a Chuck Berry riff in his childhood bedroom.
Several formative years later, he developed Horse Jumper of Love with drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bassist John Margaris, making rock music to be remembered and replayed. Their newest composition “Disaster Trick” is out now, brimming with wit and wisdom.
A pensive slow burn with a sly and tempered heaviness, this record digests a reality that is itchy and grimy and erratic: not exactly comfortable but deliciously hypnotic nonetheless. While fuzzy guitars buzz around textured vocals, the record remains magnificently intimate: like a conversation by fridge light, the scrawl of a staggering musing on the back of a menu, a severed moment of solitude. The band’s previous few albums hardly pale in excellence, but “Disaster Trick” packs a stronger punch. It is heroically dynamic, steadfast in its sincerity, and more realized than ever before. Horse Jumper of Love is disassembling and reassembling ideas of heartbreak, destruction, and nostalgia, and they make it sound really damn good.
I caught up with Dimitri somewhere near Atlanta to chat about literary inspirations, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the rawness fueling an absolutely slamming record.
What’s up! How are you?
DIMITRI: I’m doing well! We’re two weeks into this tour supporting DIIV, and it’s been great. The rooms are really big, the crowds have been great, and the people in DIIV are really nice. We don’t have a show tonight, but we have a 12.5 hour drive to Miluakee so we’re getting kind of a late start, but we’re going to try to hit it.
Oh shit. How do you plan to make it through that?
DIMITRI: You know those memes of people saying, “I’m going to raw-dog this flight.” Sometimes, honestly, it’s a lot of that – sitting there, trying to become totally blank – but I’ve been getting really into audiobooks too, so I’m listening to some stuff and that definitely helps pass the time.
I love audiobooks. What are you listening to?
DIMITRI: Right now I’m actually listening to Jeff Tweedy from Wilco’s memoir. It’s so good!
Oh no way! I haven’t read that yet, but I’ve been meaning to.
DIMITRI: It’s really, really good. As you’d expect from someone like Jeff Tweedy, it’s an honest portrayal of the band and how he started up. It’s really cool.
I love Wilco so much!
DIMITRI: Me too! I definitely recommend reading it.
It’s absolutely on my list. Right now, I’m reading this book about Bruce Springsteen’s record “Born to Run.” It’s basically a deep dive into American social culture and history at the time of its release. It’s so good.
DIMITRI: Oh shit. That’s so cool. I would definitely be interested in reading that, I love Bruce Springsteen.
Oh, of course I love Bruce Springsteen. So besides the long drives, how's the tour? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen since you left?
DIMITRI: Well, we were just in Florida for about a week.
Yeah, enough said.
DIMITRI: I don’t know how familiar you are with Florida, but it’s a fucking weird place. We played a show in Tampa that was an outdoor show, but there was a hurricane during our soundcheck. I don’t know if it was actually a hurricane, but the rain was going sideways. It was windy and raining and the whole stage was soaked. We thought the show was going to get rained out, but they went through with it anyway, and I have never been so scared for my life before a set. I was like, I’m going to plug this amp in, the stage is covered in water, I hope I don’t die.
Yeah, like, godspeed. We went to a festival last summer and right in the middle of the Pixies’ set, it started completely storming. They cut them off in the middle of their song – I think it was Vamos – and I was like, this is sacrilegious. Let them finish.
DIMITRI: Oh totally. Damn!
Well, let’s talk about the record. You’re releasing it on my birthday, so thank you for that.
DIMITRI: Oh no way! August 16th? That’s so awesome, happy almost birthday!
Thank you so much! How are you feeling about it entering the world?
DIMITRI: I’m feeling pretty good. Releasing an album is weird. You work on something for so long and then you just kind of have to let it go. I’m not a parent, but I feel like it’s like seeing your kid off to college or something. You’re just like, okay go ahead, you’re without me now. You spend a lot of time on it and really care about it, and I don’t even really think about it that much anymore. It’s just like, it’s coming out on this date, we have to tour on it, but whatever, the songs are what they are. We can’t change anything. I try not to get too emotional about things I could’ve changed or things I could’ve done. But I do feel so good about the record. I think it’s my favorite one we’ve done so far. The process of making it was excellent. We worked with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun who is a great producer to work with. I’m stoked for it!
Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
I don’t know if I’m as much a perfectionist as I am a control freak. Maybe those are kind of the same. I just want to make sure everything went the way I wanted it to go. And that’s so far, because it’s not always the case, but I find myself adjusting to being okay with the things that didn’t necessarily go the way I wanted them to. And maybe even convincing myself that that was the plan all along.
And what was the process of making this record? What was great about it?
DIMITRI: The recording process was great. It was the first time we had ever fully immersed ourselves into the studio. We were staying there for about two weeks with no days off, and we’d start at 10am and go until 8 or 9pm for two straight weeks. Our whole lives for those weeks were just the album. I had never done anything like that. Before, it used to be like, we book a day at a studio and three months later, we book another two days and finish it, and then we go on tour for six weeks and come back to the studio. I think after doing it this way, I feel like I don’t ever want to go back to the process being spread out like that. This is the way I want it to be: full immersion.
Where were you staying?
DIMITRI: It was in Asheville, North Carolina. Drop of Sun has an apartment upstairs above the studio. We barely left the building. There was a basketball hoop in the back, so we’d play basketball, but that was pretty much it. I think by the end of it, the three of us were feeling a little crazy, but in such a good way.
That’s an awesome amount of intensity. Totally locked in. And does this record feel like a divergence from your last few because of this new approach to songwriting? Or does it feel like a continuation?
DIMITRI: It feels different for me. I don’t know if it’ll feel different for other people. I definitely tried to call back on some of the stuff I did on the first record. For the last couple albums, all my songs were really soft and acoustic and this time, I wanted to play loud rock music again. Sonically, it’s definitely like our first record than the two that came after that. I also tried to be a little more direct lyrically. I wanted to lift the veil of songwriting or something and be like, these are the emotions and this is what it is. I don’t know if I necessarily achieved that, but I definitely had that in mind when I was writing.
Why did it feel important for you to approach writing like that?
DIMITRI: I think it had a lot to do with straight-up self confidence. I feel like in the past, I would write songs and feel really embarrassed about the way I felt and about whatever was going on in my life. I tried to obscure things a lot. But for this record, we went into recording and I was like, okay I’ve been writing songs for the last 10 or 12 years, and I’m at a point where I can just be confident that it’s at least good enough that some people will want to listen to it. So I should try to be more direct and more confident in what I’m feeling and trust that what I’m trying to convey will speak to some people.
That’s a pretty impressive place to land. I feel like a lot of artists across the board never really reach a point of feeling like people should enjoy what they made.
DIMITRI: I still don’t necessarily feel like people have to listen to it, but I’ve been doing it long enough where I owe it to the people who have been listening to my band for this long to be confident in my songwriting and try to make something that’s good. And make myself believe that it’s good too.
How has your writing evolved thematically as you’ve come into these realizations? Do you notice any recurring throughlines?
DIMITRI: There are definitely some similarities, but this album came after a chaotic period of my life where I went through this phase of weird self-destruction and felt like I came out of it like a cocoon and felt a lot better. I changed some habits in my life, so in that sense, it’s different from what I’ve been doing before. The main themes are definitely always there: heartbreak and family and nostalgia. That’s the shit I like to write about.
You can hear that. I get that. Not to be dramatic, but it literally feels like you’re being born into the world again. Things literally look different and sound different and smell different and you’re kind of like, shit, I have to do something with this.
DIMITRI: No, absolutely. And that’s exactly how I felt too. I went through one of the darker periods of my life so far, and I came out of it with the ability to write an album, which I feel privileged that I was able to do. Because I know it’s hard dealing with any form of mental health, and you don’t always want to do stuff, but I had the energy to do it so I felt like I had to. And now I feel a lot better.
That’s one of the most beautiful things about making art. If you can get yourself to produce literally anything, there’s usually light at the end.
DIMITRI: Yeah, totally. And actually, the Jeff Tweedy book talks about that a little bit. He talks about how he was in rehab and couldn’t even imagine writing songs or anything at all. His main goal was to try to get better. He wasn’t focused on music or anything. I was definitely feeling like that for a while. My main goal was just to feel better. But luckily enough, I still had some creativity, which isn’t always the case. I know people who get depressed and can’t do anything at all.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to set everything aside and just push forward.
DIMITRI: Absolutely.
How did you find yourself getting into music? How did this become the right space for you to be creative in?
DIMITRI: It’s all thanks to my mom. She had a guitar from when she was a kid. She doesn’t play guitar and didn’t when I was growing up, but she always had the guitar. It was at my grandparents’ house in Massachusetts. I was always drawn to it and played with it. When I was nine, my mom got me into guitar lessons, and I did a few lessons with this lady. There was a specific moment when I was nine or 10 where she taught me how to play oddly enough a Chuck Berry solo or something. It was, to a young kid, a very classic, electric-guitar-sounding riff. I remember practicing it for weeks and finally getting it and feeling like a total rockstar. Ever since then, it has been more or less chasing that feeling of achieving a riff and feeling really good about it. But now it’s also about songwriting. And then I took more guitar lessons when I was younger but I wasn’t super interested in it, so the guitar teacher quit on me. And then I started writing songs myself, because I got into Elliot Smith.
Oh, one of my absolute favorites. Hands down.
DIMITRI: I got into Elliot Smith when I was 13 and my mom, another reason why she has helped my music life, would take me to the CD store and I somehow came across Either/Or.
My favorite one!
DIMITRI: Yeah, so good! I was 13 or 14 when I picked it up, and it completely changed my life.
He’ll do that to you. And you also covered Luna by the Smashing Pumpkins on your last record. That’s one of my favorite songs of all time, and I loved your version of it. It sounded like Luna was dropped off in space and was floating around in zero gravity or something. Why make that choice?
DIMITRI: It’s also probably one of my top five favorite songs of all time. Siamese Dream was another album I picked up around the same time, when I was 14, and I found myself drawn to the softer songs on that album like Luna or one of my other favorite songs of all time, Mayonnaise. It’s so soft and pretty and then it gets so heavy. I feel like that’s how I became so obsessed with dynamic shifts like that: beautiful, guitar stuff and then fuzzed out, heavy shit.
It’s whiplash in the best way.
DIMITRI: Oh, totally! And that cover of Luna I think I made when I was 19. I was looking through a lot of old cassettes, because I demo on cassette, and I found that song. The tape was all out of phase which is why it sounds so spaced out. I mean, I have reverb on it. But the four tracks on the tape machine I recorded on were all out of phase, so it gave it this warbly effect that I really liked. I found it and was like, this is so cool, I might as well throw it on the end of the album.
I love that album so much. You can’t not, but I really do. You know?
DIMITRI: Yeah, no, it’s amazing. And I do think Billy Corgan is kind of a genius, even though he’s a fucking weirdo now.
Agree and agree. And what else besides other music inspires you to be creative?
DIMITRI: I like to read and watch movies. I think reading is definitely the most influential thing beyond music. I read whatever. I like non-fiction, but I also like fiction and poetry. I think whatever I’m reading at the time of writing something is usually an influence on it.
Well, I’m going to read the Jeff Tweedy book.
DIMITRI: Oh yeah, let me know if you like it!