Jordan Dreyer had the concept for No One Was Driving the Car figured out pretty early: a winding, intricate network of characters trying not to buckle under the strain of environmental disaster, religious dogma, generational trauma and multi-level marketing schemes. From that point forward, he tried to consume art that matched the mood he imagined for La Dispute’s fifth album, and so breaks in recording were filled with the films of Lars Von Trier, David Cronenberg, and Ari Aster, and most importantly, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. The final product spanned five acts and 65 minutes, with the longest lyrics sheet I’ve ever received in an album promo — a 47-page Google doc, bursting at the margins. A work of such magnitude was bound to leave Dreyer wishing he could change a word or two, or maybe add another verse. But his main regret about No One Was Driving the Car is more global. If he was locked into spending the past six years trying to capture the tragedy and comedy of blue-collar Joes and Janes barely surviving in the Rust Belt, he could’ve spared himself some misery by watching more Detroiters.
“Detroiters is deeply right in my wheelhouse because it’s full of obscure Michigan references,” Dreyer admits during our Zoom conversation. It’s unsurprising he’s a fan of the Tim Robinson Extended Universe. Still, you can’t argue with results: La Dispute albums typically arrive after five or so years, and so every one will be received like a highly anticipated novel rather than a mere album, something that demands undivided attention and academic dissection from their hardcore fanbase. But even more so than their prior, narrative-based concept albums, No One Was Driving the Car feels like an entire universe unto itself, so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.
The searing opener “I Shaved My Head” introduces a series of narrators who try to will profound change into their lives to no avail; witness the doomed addiction of “Steve,” the hopeless nostalgia of “Self-Portrait Backwards,” the ensuing cast of squabbling, drunken siblings and hopeless bricks in a pyramid scheme. It all peaks at “Top-Sellers Banquet,” where First Reformed’s indelible “floating scene” is transposed onto the deeply unmagical tableau of a corporate holiday party. I’d argue that it’s La Dispute’s most immersive yet; I kinda wish it could actually be expanded into a novel… or, at least, a limited series on Netflix.
Dreyer’s language is so rich and gripping that it almost invariably leads to La Dispute, the band, being given short shrift. But having set aside the more overt genre experiment of their early work and the frothy production of 2019’s Panorama, No One Was Driving the Car is a refinement of everything they’ve done well over the past 20 years – fusing vice-tight, vein-popping post-hardcore with jazzy flourishes, veering out into mesmerizing, In Rainbows-style art-rock and downcast acoustic ballads. After the grueling experience of Panorama, La Dispute vowed to take the entire recording process into their own hands with their next album. “I think we knew pretty early on that we were capable of being entirely responsible from beginning to end, that we had the tools in our toolbox,” Dreyer says. “It was a nerve wracking experience, but we’re very profoundly happy that we did because knowing you’re going to be responsible for that aspect of the process allows you to fully buy in.”
The recording of No One Was Driving the Car spanned four continents, though Dreyer remains fixated on his former home of Grand Rapids throughout; only one member of the quintet still resides in the city, while Dreyer himself has resided in Seattle for the past decade. That doesn’t mean he’s fully settled down. “Even approaching 40, I haven’t transitioned particularly well to the between time from anything La Dispute-related,” he admits. “I’ve lived a strange lifestyle for a very long time, and only in the last few years have I been actively trying to figure out a level of discipline that allows me to remain productive on a fulfilling level, you know, not just like doing the f*cking dishes and laundry.” He’s spent most of his free time working at a small venue in Seattle and taking up the Dreyer family tradition of woodworking. Dreyer’s parents own a hardware store, he has two brothers who work as carpenters and another who went to luthier school. “The inevitable arc of my life was working with power tools,” he jokes.
There’s probably a metaphor there for how the patience and concentration of building furniture is a perfect outlet for someone who spends upwards of five years creating dizzyingly literate post-hardcore. Maybe it’ll come across in the next La Dispute album. As for No One Was Driving the Car, Dreyer took the title from a police report of a fatal, self-driving Tesla accident; there’s definitely a metaphor there, the core of an album where Dreyer repeatedly asks how much agency we have in our own lives, and how much is subject to the whims of billionaires and technology. And yet, the tragedy of the inspiring incident doesn’t quite obscure for Dreyer how “self-driving Tesla accident” could’ve been the premise of a Tim Robinson sketch. “I Think You Should Leave is fascinating because at first glance, I think it can seem so grounded in absurdity,” he offers. “But I think the absurdity in which it finds itself is representative of the absurdity of contemporary living and office culture and these bizarre micro-interactions we have. I should probably watch more comedy, maybe to balance out the part of me that feels so fascinated with the morose and the Paul Schraders of the world.”
Though I’ve seen many books and documentaries and podcasts about multi-level marketing, I’m not sure that it’s been explored on any album as deeply as this one. It’s a world that’s definitely tied up in the church and the Midwest in general, were MLMs a focus from the beginning, or a way to tie together the themes of the record?
Jordan Our hometown of Grand Rapids is pretty present in our entire catalog, it’s the most consistently appearing character in our storytelling. This record is not an exception. We’re thinking about systems of control and what forces enact their influences on people, and what level of agency we have over our own lives. I thought a lot about my environment growing up in Grand Rapids, the history of the city is pretty difficult to tell without talking about Amway, which was founded and is still headquartered in Western Michigan.
It’s impossible to avoid, even if you’re not directly affected by it. Everyone’s gotten the pitch. Everyone knows people who live that lifestyle. And it’s suspiciously woven together with Christianity to the point where it reflects an air of a cult. It’s not sold to you just as a means of financial success. It’s sold to you as a religious endeavor and prosperity gospel and that’s something that I’ve always seen growing up in a very specific branch of the church, in a very specific area that is touched in many ways by Amway — the wealth that it creates and, relatedly, the lack of wealth it creates for a lot of people and the negative situations it puts people in. It’s also a way to represent the church itself, at least the parts of the church that I find particularly objectionable as somebody who was raised immersed in it.
It’s interesting how a lot of punk and emo that emerges from the Midwest exists in opposition to the church, while still operating within those physical spaces.
Even when I was 13 and getting into punk rock and moving pretty urgently away from the religious aspects of my life and my upbringing, a lot of the Midwest scene was Tooth and Nail, Solid State, that weird era of metalcore that I’m assuming still exists somewhere out of my purview…thankfully, for the most part.
I often see Grand Rapids portrayed as a quintessential, mid-sized Midwestern city “making a comeback” with art spaces and microbreweries and such, how have you seen it evolve in the past decade, especially now having Seattle as a comparison?
I think that Grand Rapids is certainly convincing itself of something. Growing up in Grand Rapids, the second most populous city in the state of Michigan, you inevitably suffer a bit from little brother syndrome relative to Detroit. It’s the automotive capital of the world. It has in so many ways defined the state of Michigan at large. Grand Rapids is very different from Detroit in its demographic makeup and in the industries that have defined it, and it weathered the recession remarkably well for a Rust Belt town. It’s reinvented itself as a destination place and has really embraced hospitality and arts and culture, but in a way that feels a bit superficial, a little like an aspiration more than something it’s been able to fully adopt. But I feel like I’m talking a lot of shit and there are a lot of things that I love about my hometown and I still consider myself somebody from Grand Rapids and somebody from Michigan and very much a Midwestern person even almost 10 years on in Seattle. But the identity has changed a lot.
I’m struck every visit by how much has shifted, particularly the neighborhoods that I frequented as a young person. The neighborhoods where people go to eat and drink and shop now are the ones that were home to all the quirky old hippies and old punks and college kids because the rent was affordable and that’s where the left-leaning people in the city populated. The neighborhoods where early furniture barons lived used to be eminently affordable, like 12 college kids living in a house because you could afford to pay for the whole house for $600. But everyone started moving back from the suburbs into the city and buying and renovating these incredible historic homes for $500,000 or whatever. People have really invested into making Grand Rapids a place where art and music and forward-thinking people thrive, but it’s constantly under the umbrella of its history and the influence of the church. It’s still forming its identity.
By the time this piece publishes, I think 75% of No One Was Driving the Car will already be available on streaming. What’s been your experience with this unorthodox rollout of releasing the album in “acts,” several songs at a time?
It’s been really rewarding in ways I didn’t necessarily anticipate. Our manager, who has been our friend for longer than he’s been our manager, and is in many ways the “other member” of our band, suggested to us that we approach things a bit unconventionally and invite people in a slightly more interesting way, given that we consume music in such a formulaic pattern. It was initially met with reticence, you think you don’t want to give away the whole game off the bat. But we’d also written the record pretty deliberately via that sort of five-act structure. On previous records, we have relied on some structural element to demarcate the changes in intention or in mood. We’ve had actual signifiers of those changes, like typographic and grammatical differences when you look at the actual track listing. Specifically on Wildlife and on Rooms of the House, we broke the record up that way and signaled that we had done so. And that wasn’t the case with this record. Everything more or less flows from one part to the next without any intercalary transition. Releasing it act by act allows you to understand it a bit better, because those changes don’t happen as obviously as they did on previous releases.
Were you concerned that La Dispute fans might misinterpret the whole of the project based on one song or one act, especially something like “Environmental Catastrophe Film,” which itself was a one-song “act”?
This is maybe where the initial hesitation came from, there are a lot of parts that I feel are considerably different from others. The first three tracks off the bat, that all have this post-punk-y, gritty feel to them. And my concern was that people would expect [the album] to continue in that direction, like the way that film trailers set expectations by how carefully curated and intentional they are to evoke a particular feeling of excitement, which belies the actual subject matter when you go to see the film itself. I think that can have an interesting effect psychologically on how much you enjoy or do not enjoy a movie. But I think if people have engaged with our catalog, [they know] our records always contain a dynamic spectrum. So I’ve mostly seen people excited and open-minded, especially after we released the single eight-and-a-half minute song.
Between the release strategy and the decision to self-produce, I had wondered whether La Dispute had any sort of existential debates about whether the band could continue to exist post-COVID, let alone continue doing the typical “make an album, tour for three years” cycle.
There was a degree of anxiety about the industry as a whole, and there have been periods of time in our band’s history where I think we felt pretty fatigued. Panorama was maybe the best example, and it was a difficult record to make for a lot of reasons, and reasons that I think ultimately made it fulfilling for us. But I also think coupling the difficulty of that record with the way years of touring wear on you and trying to balance lives at home with the realities of the financial landscape of the industry you’ve committed all of your time and resources to with the consideration for your future well-being. And then…COVID.
Looking at the landscape of not only the world, but narrowing focus on the world that you know most acutely and feeling pretty fucking dire about its ability to recover considering how many changes have already put bands of our size at a disadvantage, and venues of a certain size at a disadvantage, there’s this existential dread for the industry at large. Having the opportunity to come out of COVID playing an anniversary tour and then another one right after that, we came back not just to playing music, but records that had meant a lot to us individually and also had meant a lot to the people who came out to see those shows.
I think it was a great, forced recalibration for us to consider the place it has in our lives and to understand that a lot of the feelings expressed on the new record came from the bottom falling out and not being able to do the thing that is like essential to your character and to the way you define yourself. I think a lot of how this record turns out comes from us rediscovering what works for us and being able to contextualize that in a healthy way. We feel a degree of urgency we haven’t since we were 23 and writing records and feeling reckless and focused wholly on only one thing.
With the long gaps that happen between La Dispute albums, have you considered using your writing in other ways, whether it’s a novel or screenplay or just poetry?
The band is the perfect synthesis of my lifelong passions and has given me the opportunity to write and to be a musician and to be in the world of punk rock. I’ve always not perceived myself as a writer, but as somebody who might eventually be one, were I able to learn and practice that discipline. But I’ve always talked myself out of it. I understand that, as I get older, that the only real obstacle towards pursuit of something you love and feel capable of doing are internal.
The unexpected consequence of this recording process and the pride I feel at the work that I did is a newfound sense of confidence that I’m capable of also doing something on my own. And my status as a writer is still pending, but I think I feel capable of taking that step for the first time and ignoring the voices in my head screaming imposter syndrome or limiting myself otherwise by thinking about all the benchmarks I’d have to reach in a different universe to get to where I want to be. I think I would like to write a novel at some point.
Since so much writing goes into each La Dispute record, how do you keep things on track and not give into the temptation to endless tweak one sentence?
If I were not given the deadline of a record, I fear I might never fully commit to anything that I’ve written. Although I felt this time around it was considerably easier than it has been in the past to commit to something, this project was fleshed out from the beginning and I think I knew a bit more about what I wanted to say and how to say it. But there’s always second guessing, how do you know when something’s done?
I think ultimately you don’t, you find ways to look back at something you’ve done 15 years ago and think, hmm. But you have to really commit to what it is, which is a snapshot of a particular time and a particular set of experiences and a feeling that wants to be expressed for one reason or another.
Especially for something as lengthy as “Environmental Catastrophe Film,” I can’t imagine how much work goes into memorizing the lyrics for the live performance. What’s your process like?
The beauty of how particular I am about my writing, about making every word perfect and constantly editing and re-editing, is that I go over it eight million fucking times in my head. So I’ve more or less committed lyrics to memory through writing and repeatedly tracking them. But some songs require more effort than others, to not get in the habit of misremembering what I’m saying and reciting it incorrectly live. The spoken stuff that has less structure and relies less on what is happening in the music, that’s hardest to commit to memory. Those are the ones where I sometimes have taped lyrics to my monitor on stage.
We played these new songs while we were in Europe for the last two weeks, and the first three days of tour, were anxious in a way that they haven’t been for a very long time, because I was worried about fucking up words. So there’s a lot of sitting in the green room with my headphones on while everyone was like hanging out and talking and getting ready to play and just listening to our own band over and over again, which is pretty fucking embarrassing. But the beauty of playing new songs and fucking it up is that no one else knows the words. As long as I don’t fully draw blank on stage, I’m fine. But I do get teased by our front of house engineer, because if I do go blank, my response is to act like the microphone’s not working. Then our tour manager is on stage looking at the backup mic to go see if he has to go. But ultimately, I’m just buying time until the next part comes in so I can remember what the fuck I am doing.
In the process of fleshing out your characters, are there ever ones that develop in ways that make you think, “damn, I’d like to meet this person in real life”?
I have a pretty specific idea about what I want to accomplish story-wise, character-wise in each song. But there’s always a period of evolution that is instructed by how my bandmates translate the story itself. Ultimately, I don’t want to put my finger on the scale and lead the audience in the direction of some point, but to observe and to capture the complexity and nuance of what it is to exist as a human being in the world. I think you become more empathetic when you approach things from that standpoint. You see how even the people you fabricate contain multitudes.
No One Was Driving the Car is set for release on 9/5 via Epitaph Records. You can find more info here.