Album review
Horse Jumper of Love‘s Dimitri Giannopoulos is equally drawn to heavy and gentle music: the two albums he’s cited as primary inspirations for the Boston band’s new album are Hum’s Downward Is Heavenward and Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room. But on Disaster Trick – which follows last year’s stripped-back mini-album Heartbreak Rules – this fascination hardly presents itself as a dichotomy. Slow-burning as ever, the songs’ graceful, down-to-earth melancholy gives itself over to towering melodies and disorienting guitar lines, amplifying but never quite overshadowing their startling intimacy. Against the dreamlike – or, as he puts it, “disassociative” – haze of Giannopolous’ lyrics, which range from cryptic to wittily poetic, the music can feel like a way to see through the distortion, drenched in it as it may be. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios with producer Alex Farrar and contributions from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman and Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams, Disaster Trick seems to roar back at the void. “I know it sounds dramatic,” Giannopolous sings on ‘Death Spiral’, “But I must describe the way that it felt.” And so the song rings out, wordlessly, for just a little longer.
We caught up with Horse Jumper of Love’s Dimitri Giannopoulos to talk about some of the inspirations behind Disaster Trick, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room, working for a guitar pedal company, and more.
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was reading The Idiot while we were there recording, and it’s not necessarily that the story inspired me as much as the ability to switch my brain from recording mode to getting lost in this very dramatic, long Russian novel. That was a really useful tool for me to escape into something that was so dense. We would finish the day recording at like 8pm or 9pm, and then we’d go up to the apartment we were staying at, and I would just start reading that book all night.
I did actually end up writing a song that was a B-side for that recording session called ‘The Idiot’, so it did slip into my subconscious. That song was about stumbling into a situation, which I think is what the main character in that book kind of does. It opens with him on his way home from a mental institution, going back to St. Petersburg in Russia, and he just stumbles upon his new life. He just gets dropped in. I really like that concept of being out of touch for a while, and then getting dropped into a situation where a lot of stuff is happening. But more so, I liked utilizing the book as a tool to switch modes in my brain.
Did you ever find it hard to switch back to recording mode after reading, like the dramatic weight of the book was still lingering in your mind?
Yeah, I think it must have. I’m definitely a person who’s really inspired by literature and other art that I consume beyond music, so as much as I was using it as an escape, it was definitely still there. I think a lot of my songs for this record did end up being a little dramatic, which I like. I feel like art and music, for me, are vessels through which I allow myself to be dramatic. A lot of people in our generation, in our daily lives, we’re pretty irony-poisoned, where everything is kind of a joke or whatever. I feel like music is this place where I allow myself to put it out there, whatever I’m feeling, even if it’s dramatic. This is my vehicle to do that.
Were the songs mostly done by the time you were in the studio, or were there lyrics that made it in at the last minute?
It was a little bit of both. A lot of them ended up being finished about two weeks before we got into the studio. At that point, I was still reading The Idiot. I feel like I’ve used this analogy before, but the songs definitely feel like a deck of cards spread out all over a table and you’re slowly trying to neatly stack them into a pile. Having the studio as a deadline to do that really helped speed up the process of organizing that chaotic deck of cards that are my songs.
A geode jigsaw puzzle
I’m curious if this is another metaphor for organizing that kind of chaos.
I think that’s exactly what it represented. The only reason I got into that, too, is because the studio we were at, Drop of Sun, had an apartment upstairs where we were staying, and they had one of those puzzles. That was my process of unwinding after the studio day – working on that puzzle a little bit and reading The Idiot. It was definitely another form of escapism. And it felt so symbolic. I finished the puzzle on the last day of recording the record. It took me the full 12 or 13 days we were there to finish that puzzle. But what was really funny was, at the end, there was one piece missing that was totally lost. I was like, “Oh, shit, there’s something symbolic here, and I don’t quite know what it is.” But I did end up finishing it, I finished the record. And I think maybe the missing piece was symbolic of something that has been said many times before: the concept of art not being finished, but abandoned. I can look back on this whole record and be like, “There are some missing pieces here, some missing pieces there.” There’s always more that I wish I could have done, and there’s always stuff I wish I could take out. But you just gotta give up at some point and be like, “This is it. This is the art. This is what I’m putting out.”
Do you remember any of the missing pieces that you figured out before abandoning it?
Vocal delivery is really hard for me in the studio. I get really nervous and uncomfortable. But as we progressed with the album, I figured out a way that worked for me to do it in the studio. I wish I could go back and re-record the first songs we did during the first two days, because when I listen to those songs, I sound way less comfortable, and I sound way more comfortable with the songs we recorded later on. But there just wasn’t time for it, so that kind of feels like something missing. There are always little guitar parts and things like that where I listen back after we’ve left the studio, and I’m like, “I hear this guitar part in my head, I wish I’d given it a shot when I was there. But it’s too late.:
Maybe there are also these parts early on where you’re less comfortable singing, but the discomfort suits the song.
Totally. And there’s always a little discomfort listening back to lyrics. There’s a Jeff Tweedy lyric that I really like off Yankee Hotel Foxtrot where he says, “I shake like a toothache when I hear myself sing.” Every time I listen back to my own albums, I always think about that lyric, because listening to myself sing just makes me cringe, and I’ve been doing this for like eight years now. There’s definitely people who don’t like my voice, but I know that people who like the band probably don’t cringe when they hear my vocals. [laughs]
Downward Is Heavenward by Hum
This is one of the records you said you listened to the most in the studio. What kept it in rotation?
Honestly, it was the geode puzzle. I was listening to that album while doing the geode puzzle, and it was a perfect fit for some reason. always been a huge fan of Hum, but in July or August 2022, we played in a small town in Illinois where the lead singer of Hum owned a bar. We played at his bar, and I met him, he was a really nice dude. He was just a normal guy – he had this bar and got bands to come play, paid them well, and treated them right. I’d always listened to their big album, the one with the zebra on the front [You’d Prefer an Astronaut], but then I listened to that one, and I was just amazed. I couldn’t believe I never gave it a chance when I was younger. I just became obsessed with it and listened to it over and over again.
After we got home from that tour, that’s when I started writing all the songs. That album was deeply in my subconscious at that time, and it continued to be as I worked on the songs. I don’t feel like sonically it’s particularly inspired by that album – it’s not like I wrote a crazy space rock album. But there are some guitar elements that I think came from that album, just trying to get a little heavier at some points.
What struck me is that there’s a kind of tenderness amidst the noise, and I’m curious if that’s a quality you strive for in those heavier moments.
Yeah. There’s definitely a way to achieve beauty with a fuzz pedal, you know? Actually, the first and second Red House Painters albums were pretty influential for me in that sense. The louder, heavier parts can make the softer, tender parts feel even more soft and tender. But also, if you just make pretty chords really loud, it still sounds pretty, I think. For example, the first song, ‘Snow Angel’ – I’m a huge fan of the chords I used. I don’t know what they are, but if you play the song on acoustic guitar slowly, they’re really pretty chords. So I was like, “Let me put some distortion on them and see what happens.” And I feel like it did maintain the tenderness, as you said. It’s definitely something I strive for because I don’t want to just be a loud, straightforward shoegaze or metal band.
My theory behind what I try to do with Horse Jumper is I don’t want there to be any veil over it – I just want it to be very direct and honest, exactly what I’m feeling. I think that should be the goal with a lot of songwriting. I want it to feel like I’m emotionally naked all the time and not distract with a lot of reverb or crazy shit. And I think that’s why it ends up coming out kind of tender, because I am a really emotional, sensitive person. If I wasn’t writing songs, I would just be crying all the time or something. [laughs]
Songs From a Room by Leonard Cohen
I feel like this album is a blueprint for that kind of naked, honest songwriting. Was it a similar thing to the Hum record?
I didn’t listen to that one as much in the studio. I have it on CD, and I just had it in my car for months, that was the only album I was listening to. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Leonard Cohen. I must have been like 11 years old, and my dad put it on in his car. He played ‘Suzanne’, and I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was like, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” Ever since then, I’ve been obsessed with Leonard Cohen. When I was in Greece on a trip a couple of years ago, we went to Hydra, and I went to his house. There’s a bench with a little memorial to him. I chatted with different people who also went there to see the lore of Hydra because Leonard Cohen lived there, and I’m pretty sure he wrote ‘Suzanne’ there.
Spiritually, Leonard Cohen was very much a guide to a lot of these songs. I was also listening to Death of a Ladies’ Man a lot, too, but that one, production-wise, is definitely very different – it’s got the Phil Spector shit going on. ‘Death Spiral’ was especially inspired by Leonard Cohen. My partner, when I was on tour, was on a hike and saw two eagles literally in a death spiral, which is such a crazy image. I couldn’t believe they saw that. There’s a Leonard Cohen lyric on Songs From a Room where he sees an eagle but isn’t sure if it’s an eagle or a vulture. I basically ripped that lyric off because it was just in my subconscious.
You also reference ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ in ‘Lip Reader’, with the line, “What do you see when you look at the sky? Do you see who has done it before?”
Yeah, that’s another one. I was just trying to reword that feeling because it’s such a powerful feeling. At some point in your adulthood, you realize that you’re not as unique as you think you are. That was a really powerful lyric I heard in my mid-to-late 20s, where I was like, “I’m just doing what’s been done a million times before. I’m not breaking any boundaries with my music; I’m just trying to be true to myself and do exactly what I’m feeling.” And that’s fine. That’s okay. At some point, you have to accept that. I think that lyric helped me realize that, and I guess I was trying to express the same thing in ‘Lip Reader’. He’s like, “Many loved before us, in cities and in forests…” We’re all doing the same thing.
Electronic voice phenomena
That’s something I was thinking about because I was trying to write a song about – someone in my family died, and my cousin, also named Dimitri, said that he heard this person talk to him through the stereo. And I was like, “What’s that called again?” I looked it up and found it was called Electronic Voice Phenomena. They say that if you scroll through radio stations really fast, whatever words you pick up is what a spirit is trying to say to you. To me, that’s just random and chaotic; there’s no real meaning to it. People will attach meaning to anything they want. I tried to relate that feeling to songwriting by being like, the inspiration that comes to you is also really random. EVP felt like a great metaphor for the spirit of the song speaking to you, as if your soul is a little radio picking up signals, and you filter out what you want to hear and create a song from it. It’s the same with EVP: it’s not actually ghosts talking to you; it’s just random meaning you’re attaching to stuff you hear in white noise. And creativity feels a little bit like white noise sometimes. There’s all this shit that can inspire you, it’s happening all the time, it’s really loud. You just have to hyper-focus on something and create something out of that.
And then I was trying to write a song about that phenomenon, but I realized it wasn’t working. It was just a random idea I pulled out of the white noise that I had to throw away because it’s no good. So, you’re filtering stuff all the time, and you have to know what to absorb and what to throw out when it’s not good.
Are there times when inspiration feels more than random, or a little bit otherworldly to you?
It definitely starts out random, and then it’s just whatever meaning I end up attaching to it. But I do think it is, in a way, otherworldly. After writing a song, I look at it and it doesn’t feel like me. It’s disassociative, and I’m like, “If it’s not me, then what is it?” It must be something spiritual or whatever you want to call it. But for me, it’s like randomness and some form of spiritualism. I grew up religious, Greek Orthodox, and when I stopped being religious around 12 or 13, something had to take the place, because there was like a spiritual void. And I think music and songwriting, not to sound corny, but it really took the place that more traditional spiritualism had before.
Seeing Codeine live
I saw them in Boston, they played a show in March 2023, I think. I’ve grown up going to shows, and I’ve had plenty of shows that were life-changing for me when I was 17 or 16. But that was the first show I saw as a full-grown adult where I felt that same feeling again. I was like, “Wow, this is extremely powerful and extremely moving to me.” You know when you see a live band, read something great, or watch a great movie, for me it makes me want to go home and play guitar and try to make something. I think that’s what great art is – something that inspires others to make stuff. That’s definitely how I felt after seeing Codeine. I wanted to go home and write more songs like them. It’s just three guys on stage, barely any guitar pedals – just a loud Fender amp and maybe one overdrive pedal. I was like, this sound is so simple, with nothing to disguise or obscure the bare emotions in the songs, and that was extremely moving to me. I actually took four guitar pedals off my pedalboard after that show. The guitar sound was particularly inspiring to me. After seeing them and going into the studio, I definitely wanted to take that concept of less is more: fewer effects, more dryness, more directness.
Working for a guitar pedal company
The job I had was working for this guitar pedal company called Klon that’s based out of Boston. I worked for them for three years. His pedals very sought after, and the owner is a really smart dude. The best part of that job was that he loved that I was a touring musician. Anytime I had a tour, I was like, “Hey, I’m going to be gone for six weeks. If you need to find someone else, I understand, but if not, I’m still willing to work for you when I’m back.” He was always cool with it because he liked my band, and he liked that I was a younger musician. He definitely helped provide a lot of stability in my life by giving me a solid job when I was home. That’s so important, and I don’t think I would have been able to continue touring and writing that album if I didn’t have a way to make money when I was home. It really helped make the album and the tour happen. Even at this point, I’m not quite a full-time musician. If I go on tour all year, I can make rent, but you can’t tour all year, so you’ve got to find other things to do in between. And I live in New York now, which is really expensive.
Was being around all that gear something that also fed into the band?
It was definitely inspiring. The guy I worked for had a lot of really cool gear because he’s a collector, too, and had been collecting stuff since the ’80s when you could get really cool things for really cheap. He would let me borrow vintage Fenders, Marshall amps, stuff like that. He helped me pick out the amp I use now, which is an older Fender Twin. He gave me the pedal he builds, it’s called KTR, it’s a transparent overdrive pedal. He gave me one, let me get one for my other guitar player, and gave me a special bass mod one for our bass player, and we use those pedals all the time. The dynamics of having an overdrive pedal in our band are really important, so it was cool to work for a company that built overdrive pedals, and we could get really nice ones for free, basically. He let me borrow an amp that we ended up using a lot on the record, and he also let me borrow a guitar that we used on the record. So I also went into the studio with a bunch of his gear.
How quickly do you think about your gear when you’re constructing a song?
I write all the songs on a really simple acoustic guitar, very vanilla-sounding. And then afterward, I think about, not really the gear itself, but just what I can do with it, how I can use it as a tool. It can be anything; you can use a shitty $20 overdrive pedal and get something cool if you know your composition well enough or what you’re trying to. I think the gear doesn’t really matter. After we play shows, a bunch of younger kids often come up to me and ask, “What’s on your pedalboard?” Of course I’ll show everyone, but I always say that the pedals are not going to help if you don’t know what you’re trying to say or do. You’ve got to figure that out first, and then the gear can come after.
There was definitely a point where I was buying too many guitars, chasing some kind of sound before I started recording. But honestly, after seeing Codeine and how simple their setup was, I got rid of a lot of gear. I just sold a bunch of shit because I realized I didn’t need it. I could say what I wanted to say without having 50 guitar pedals or six different amps. All that shit – it’s just capitalism, it’s just stuff weighing you down. That’s not why I started playing music. It wasn’t to collect cool old guitars. I really want to get to the point where I just have one electric guitar that I really understand, one acoustic guitar that I really understand, one amp, and a few pedals – that’s it. Owning a bunch of amps just weighs you down, literally.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Horse Jumper of Love’s Disaster Trick is out August 16 via Run for Cover.
