On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from La Dispute’s new album No One Was Driving the Car, disaster flicks play on a muted TV while nobody’s watching – except, that is, Jordan Dreyer’s camera-wielding narrator. Disaster – whether exploited for entertainment, untangling through time, or lost to history – is a fact of life; earlier on the record, Dreyer goes as far as to sing, “Every moment we’re alive a disaster/ A tragedy to be and breathe.” It is also a miracle, he later exalts; the follow-up to 2019’s Panorama is revelatory and windingly rapturous in that way, knotting the vicious truths and transcendent joys its characters are driven towards around the veil of memory, progress, and Christian fundamentalism. That looming specter of religion is tied not just to the film that most heavily inspired the album, First Reformed, but the band members’ own upbringing – they are all from Grand Rapids, Michigan, though they now live in different places, and worked on the songs there as well as in the UK, Australia, and the Philippines. No matter where you grew up, or how acquainted you are with La Dispute’s catalog, Dreyer’s piercing, meandering, masterful language – illuminated by the crew that reliably and relentlessly brings it to life – hits close to home. Turn the sound up, and let the beam of light take you there.
We caught up with La Dispute’s Jordan Dreyer to talk about Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, Édouard Levé’s Suicide, isolation, and other inspirations behind No One Was Driving the Car, which is out in full this Friday.
The work of Paul Schrader
Let’s start with First Reformed. What weight did it take on for you over the years, from when you first watched it to it becoming a reference point for No One Was Driving the Car?
I saw the film when it was in theaters. I was familiar with Paul Schrader, but primarily as a screenwriter and not as a film director. I love Ethan Hawke, so I felt pushed to go experience it in a cinema. More than any film I’d watched in quite a few years, I found myself thinking of it repeatedly in everyday life – maybe less even about its specifics than the sense of unease I felt throughout the film. Not only through Ethan Hawke’s character, but also the climate activist at the beginning of the film. I think that, in general – and this is probably true of the majority of people who pay attention to the world around them – I had been feeling a tension, an underlying unease about the state of the world. Not just on a micro level, with the stress of conflict in relationships and existing in the world, experiencing trauma first-hand or second-hand, but just the specter of climate catastrophe, political turmoil, and the way the pandemic altered our lives in ways I’m still processing. I felt like First Reformed captured something profound about the contemporary world.
I also felt a connection to it on a personal history level. There’s a Reformed church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where we were born and raised, most of us anyway. I think the more I interacted with Paul Schrader’s films and writing, the closer I got to understanding its origin points, given a shared history. He’s from the same city we’re from originally and grew up in an earlier, what I’d call a more fundamental version of the church I grew up in, one that still holds a lot of sway in West Michigan historically and to this day. That connection helped me understand myself a bit better, and some of the themes I’ve returned to over the years. I found similarities and overlap between what Schrader discusses in most of his films – in a much better way than I do, I think. The underlying subtext of growing up in a Calvinist church, in Reformed ideology, established a personal connection I don’t have with every artist I love.
I have a lot of respect for people in my life who remain religious and practice in a principled, loving way. My parents are like that. I saw a lot of that urgency in First Reformed – in how desperate and affected Ernst Toller is after his experience with the young climate activist. I think I had the “Will God forgive us?” sign in the church burned itself into my brain as I interacted with a world that seems increasingly volatile. Purely as storytelling, the way you’re introduced to Ernst Toller’s traumas is pretty astonishing. It’s not so directly discussed – you don’t see his marriage ending, his son dying. Instead, it’s introduced in bits of overlaid narration, in the way he self-medicates, the sparseness of his apartment. I find his character so compelling because he’s managed his trauma through a deeply held fundamental belief, a faith. And the doubt he experiences – the contemplation when confronted with misrepresentations of how he aligns with the Bible, with the teachings of Christ. Having grown up around a lot of people who are rooted in their faith, as a person who is not, but holds pretty close to these fundamental principles of equality and compassion and the power of are – all these different things that I utilize in my life to make sense of what doesn’t – that really spoke to me.
Beyond just the fact that I initially pitched First Reformed as a kind of structural map, I was thinking of some of the themes explored, but I didn’t want to write a climate change record. I didn’t want to write something that direct, but I wanted to capture how we find a way to establish control, or to believe that somebody has it, in order to lessen the violence of existing and to find joy. I love that transcendent moment where you escape reality through Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried’s characters floating through outer space, witnessing the effects, or the possible future outcomes, of climate change and our unwillingness to approach it productively when the balance of the world feels at stake.
I had no concrete memory of the levitation scene until listening to the album and hearing those lines about the camera rising through the ceiling – that image crept back immediately. I’m curious how challenging it was to write through that filmic lens.
We’ve always used an outside medium as a structural guide for our big projects, and I wanted to use film for this record. It proved considerably more difficult than I’d imagined to write something cinematic without a visual accompaniment. But I did want to cue into that in a literal way at points on the record – hence including camera directions in some songs. It also harkens back to something we did early in our history, specifically on ‘King Park’, where you’re experiencing events from an impossible place. You see it through a lens you’re incapable of seeing it through replaying it in your head. Writing about something that happened in proximity but not directly to you comes with a concern for how you treat another person’s experience. I’ve always operated at a remove, intentionally, to treat the subject matter with a degree of respect, and to not put my thumb on the scale for whoever’s interacting with it after the fact. Because I find it difficult to take a stance on the stories that interest me and that I enjoy telling.
So I transcended time and space in that song, as the narrator does. Using that as a storytelling device I think worked well. I ended up assimilating that approach into how I used cinematic language in constructing songs across the record. There’s a level of voyeurism you’re able to accomplish when you frame a story through a camera, as opposed to being on the ground as a character in the events. It also teased out another thought that has carried with me at least since the beginning of the pandemic: the way we live under constant surveillance. It was a way to cue into our marriage to technology, our belief in its benevolence. That became another motivating factor – introducing an additional character, that character being how we collectively engage with each other in the 21st century.
Conversations with his partner at night
The song that instantly comes to mind is ‘Self-Portrait Backwards.’
Yeah. I think there are two levels in which conversations with my partner really impacted this record. One of them is the subject matter in ‘Self-Portrait Backwards’ – the resetting at night, shutting your brain off, blending into the scenery of contemporary life, and the conflict I feel about that process at times. On one hand, it feels pretty essential, and the best part of my day. On the other, it can feel escapist or under-stimulating on an intellectual level. Which might sound derogatory, but it is a time I cherish and a space I require to feel healthy and to lessen the sting of every day.
But also, my partner works at a trauma hospital in acute care. She’s witness to life’s mundane violence every day. Having the opportunity to hear about her experiences daily on drives back home or at night when she feels compelled to talk about it – I’m struck by how little most of us, myself included, actually see of the tragedies that befall people everywhere, all the time. Even though we consume so much more through the news and social media, we’re insulated from how regular violence really is – those of us, anyway, with a degree of privilege. I think that there are ways that that veil has fallen because of the way that information is communicated in the 21st century; I also think that there’s still so much that we don’t see. To spend every day of my life, at least that I’m not traveling on tour or recording, with a person who every day sees people who have fallen through the cracks and are living at the mercy of the streets – her hospital takes all patients, all the low-income and unhoused patients – I’m having a hard time narrowing on one thought I have, because there’s so much.
I’ve always been fascinated with trauma – what we learn from people’s tragedies, our own tragedies, the beauty and truth we find, the pain we work through. I can’t speak in extremely knowledgeable terms about what that means philosophically, how life has changed in the internet age, but I do think there’s a degree to which we separate ourselves from the fact of our lives because we’re not forced to confront the bad – if we’re lucky. And I think we lose something when we refuse to acknowledge the fact that there are people suffering, not just on the other side of the world through our phones, but in our own neighborhoods. Seeing how she processes and manages that information opens me up to understanding, again, the fact of our lives: they are fraught with tension and volatile, and they could end now, tomorrow. Everything could change in an instant because I walk out on my front door, slip on ice on my concrete steps, and lose my ability to speak or communicate.
History and memory
These are broad concepts, but to me, they’re entangled in a tangible way throughout the album, where personal narratives trigger threads of history, and history widens our view of the characters.
Yeah, definitely. I think I’ve spent a lot more time in the past few years really thinking about how I arrived at this point – my station in life. Part of the impetus was COVID, quarantine, and things changing and I don’t think returning. It compelled me to consider how my environment has affected who I am, and how my previous environments affected who I became. Pretty early on, I knew I wanted to talk about history – how we’re either shaped by the events of our lives or adopt an idea of who we are based on what’s happened to us. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve thought back to my personal history, where I come from, how I was raised, what my family means to me. I considered it in earnest considerably more than I have at any previous era in my life. It was important to me from the outset to speak on the city of Grand Rapids, where we’re from, as, in some ways, a love letter, but also a way to process, and a storytelling device to narrows the record’s scope to focus on a handful of ways in which people cope with life’s volatility and uncertainty.
I thought a lot about the church I was raised in – something I hadn’t done in a long time, outside of conversations with my bandmates Brad and Chad, who shared the same experience. I started to see how much of an impact that’s had on my worldview and how I interact with people. I wanted to explore that. It’s not a new idea, even in our catalog – it shares some DNA with Rooms of the House, where I used highways to symbolize the paths we take and where they diverge, what going down one instead of the other might have done to change the outcome of your life. On this record, it was creeks and rivers, and that was pretty intentional to signify the city we come from, which is built on a river. That became a way to set up the conversation about control – what we have or don’t – and how outside factors influence how we move through the world.
I had to think back to earlier times in my life, people and moments that really did, if not pushed me in one direction or another, taught me some essential truth about what it means to be alive. We even went through the archives at the main library branch in our hometown. It was pretty interesting. And Paul Schrader – looking at his oeuvre, and seeing how many repeated conversations there are about the same topics that, to my mind, arrive in his world via his upbringing and the city of Grand Rapids. That process was one of the most satisfying parts of making this record – fixing my eyes intently on parts of my life that, since moving away, I’d put in the back of the closet, so to speak.
Vortex by Gaspar Noé
This one’s trickier to articulate. I went to see Vortex at a small cinema in Seattle with my partner. It was shot during COVID and takes place in a small apartment in France. It’s about a married couple: the wife is suffering from dementia, and the husband is attempting to finish a book of art criticism, if I remember correctly. The entire film is told in split screen – except for the first and last shot – so you see each character’s perspective as they navigate the end of life in this lovely space filled with books and art collected over the years. You really feel like you’re experiencing something deeply intimate and deeply tragic, but also beautiful.
At the end of the movie, you see their apartment emptied put in frames. You’re in this space with these two people who clearly loved each other for a very long time and are drifting away – they’re forced to drift away by the circumstances of life and aging. She’s disappearing from the world, and it feels so vivid, intimate, and relatable. When you share a space with someone, or even just have your own space, you accumulate things, you build this life with objects. They represent the years of you doing so and the memories attached to everything within four walls. When that ends, when you die, those things return to the world sort of unceremoniously. They’re given to family members, donated, or thrown in a landfill, and someone else moves into the space where you once lived. And the process begins again. It’s just a profound meditation on impermanence.
There’s a Carl Sagan quote talking about the satellite that drifted into space and the last image that it captured is the pale blue dot, and that’s all there is of Earth. You understand, on one hand, how brief and inconsequential our existences end up being in the course of human history, which is also a blip. But how beautiful the time we have is. I felt floored with sadness after watching Vortex, and my partner even more so – it was a hard film for her to watch. I walked away feeling that as well, but also feeling a strange beauty in seeing these lives so intimately, how much they meant to each other and to the people in their sphere. More than anything, it had an effect on articulating my worldview and the end of the record. After the rapture moment, you fast-forward to a place in time in the future unknown, and the note of resignation, if there is one, is the feeling of comfort in partnership. Having somebody asleep on your shoulder makes the uncertainty of what lies ahead less terrifying. That’s the way Vortex left a fingerprint on the record.
László Krasznahorkai’s long sentences
In a lot of ways, this was a practical one when we were writing the record. I generally go in with a complete idea of what I want to accomplish thematically, and a dynamic map to accompany the stories that I’ve attached myself to over the years where I’m thinking about what the next record might be. In the past, I’ve pitched those ideas to my bandmates by an explanation of whatever narrative arc and sonic direction it might require. I would take one of the ideas that I had, and I would just sort of free-write. Rather than saying, “Here’s point A, here’s point B, and here’s point C, I need space to articulate all three of those parts to present a structure,” I just wrote to see where it would take me, and then I would read what I’d written. Before we started rehearsal, before we started to write the actual song, I would open my notebook and read a thing that I’d written.
I was reading Krasznahorkai pretty heavily during the process of writing the record. I need an angle for any writing that I do, generally speaking. I don’t tend to accomplish a whole lot if I just start. So rather than plotting the writing out, I cribbed his long sentences, and I just tried to write each idea, each story, out without periods, without punctuating, for the most part, beyond commas and colons and em dashes. And it was a really fruitful angle for me. I think there’s a rhythm to writing in that capacity that helps encourage little revelations, when you’re just trying to figure out how to carry on a thought in a non-static way — to incorporate character growth, and scene changes, and build a sort of narrative structure without, “Here’s a sentence, here’s the next sentence, here’s how we accelerate, here’s how we get from here to there.”
It really inspired a lot of little moments of illumination about the subject matter. I think you get a real sense of that reading his writing too, where a paragraph begins in one place, and the next paragraph begins in another place – often, but with Krasznahorkai, you’re moved through so much in the course of a half-page sentence, and sometimes the place where you begin is dramatically different than the place where you end. And seeing that happen not in the course of a chapter or a handful of paragraphs, but in one bizarre, meandering sentence is pretty fascinating. I tried, at least in one place on the record, to keep that feeling. The whole first section of the song ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’, which was first written as what we were calling prompts during the writing process — I really tried to capture that meandering feeling.
I think it works well in song, too, maybe even more so with my bandmates accompanying my voice. You begin with a boy catching turtles next to a creek, and you end up in the 1840s, with people settling an area. I think it was a great way to accomplish the abbreviated history of the record, to try to keep them as – not stream of consciousness so much, but one running thought.
Suicide by Édouard Levé
This is another one that I had forgotten that I’d read during this process. I was trying to find a book in my apartment that would fit in my jacket pocket before I went to work a door shift at a friend’s venue, and that was the only book I could find that would fit in my pocket. I started reading it again and was pretty struck by it. It’s the writer processing the suicide of an old friend, or a fictional old friend, and it was the last book I think he published before he himself committed suicide, which gives it another level of heaviness.
I had, a couple years ago, lost a friend to suicide, a friend that I had lost touch with quite a few years ago. And I think I spent a lot of time trying to learn something about myself in the way that I had reacted to the news of somebody who had played a pretty important part of my life at an earlier age, but had since moved elsewhere. We had drifted apart over years, and there’s the immediate reaction where you wonder what might have been different had that friendship not dissolved, how could I have been a positive influence in this person’s life, etc. – which is all stupid and unproductive. But you move past that feeling to just a resignation about the reality of what had happened, and what had led to it, and the fact that it happens to people relatively often. It’s not a unique experience, and I think it forced me to really contemplate the decision that he made in a way that maybe at an earlier age I wouldn’t have been capable of.
The older I get, the more I understand the inevitability of violence writ large, the easier it is to accept and incorporate moments of tragedy into being. When I read Levé’s Suicide, I think that it was a meditation on suicide that I had not considered, and it comes from a place of remove as well. It’s very powerful and beautifully written, but it also challenges your perception of suicide in a way. Not the decision itself, but the way you process it as somebody who feels its reverberations. It really helped me, because I had some reservations about writing about somebody’s suicide in song, partly for reasons I listed earlier – you want to treat it with a certain level of sanctity and respect, and you certainly don’t want to mine trauma for art in a voyeuristic, exploitative way. But I had a hard time keeping it out of my head, and the more certain I felt it was worth discussing, the more deliberate I had to be about the manner in which I would. I think reading Suicide really helped me understand a way to do so.
I’m really proud of the song on the record, ‘Steve’. I do think that it was very helpful that I came across that book at the time I did – not just for finding something that showed me there was a way to do it, but also because it helped me understand my reaction and what to do with – not a void left in my immediate life, but a void left in memory. For a person to disappear from Earth who has already disappeared in any meaningful way from my life in adulthood leaves you in an interesting position for grieving, because you’re not really feeling the immediate sadness you expect from something so tragic occurring to somebody that you know or once knew. But it makes you think back to the life you shared, to color interactions you had and experiences you had together, in a new way. It changes the saturation of how you visualize your experience. I think the book Suicide does that in a really powerful way.
You mentioned ‘King Park’, and listening to ‘Steve’ kind of coloured my own perception of that song, one I first heard over a decade ago. When you write a song you’re really proud of, that maybe captures a recurring subject in a different light, does it affect your view of older songs?
Yeah, definitely. Sorry to keep harkening back to this, and I think I’m maybe overplaying one specific influence, but that’s another thing I learned from Paul Schrader. We as a band have always felt like our principal motivating factor was to move in a new direction, to find a new idea, and really try to capture that specific new idea in any way possible. Going back and watching all of Schrader’s movies, seeing how often he approaches the same subject in a similar way – even down to structure – but from different perspectives, with a different set of experiences. I think you learn new things when you approach something you’ve already explored, from a different era and a new headspace.
I do think that this record, in a lot of ways, was part Wildlife, part Rooms of the House, part Panorama. It’s interesting to compare and contrast now, to look at the through lines between all four of our most recent records, and see the change in thought, the maturation of approach. There’s a noticeable contrast between how ‘Steve’ is told lyrically and how earlier songs in our catalog dealt with similar subjects. There’s an urgency and immediacy – and drama, especially – in songs we wrote in our early or mid-20s, but now there’s a perspective shift. It’s been fun to go back to some of the same things and see how I feel about them now.
Bandmates
The fact that you self-produced the record must have allowed you to focus on the ways you inspire each other in a new, more focused way.
Yeah, that’s spot on. Every recording experience we’ve had has been immensely rewarding, and everything we’ve done with help from someone else needed help from someone else. Those people were extremely important in realizing a project from start to finish. I’m proud of every record we’ve done. But for this record, we were committed to keeping everything in-house. Part of that was coming back from not being able to play music for a long time, or even being in the same place for a long time. When we could rehearse, tour, and write again, we had grown individually and collectively quite a lot, and were reinvigorated by each other’s presence. It felt new and recentered on the joy and fulfillment we get from playing together, and the ways we know each other after almost 20 years, almost, of making music together. It felt right to maintain that dynamic in the studio, to trust our instincts and each other’s instincts. From the writing process to recording, this is the most we’ve allowed ourselves to accept that we are good at doing this together. We know each other extraordinarily well, our tendencies and talents, and I think that’s what made the record what it is. It was just the five of us from beginning to end, really, working excitedly toward realizing an idea after some uncertainty – whether we’d be able to, how the world would change, what touring would be like, if we’d want to do it anymore.
It’s the only creative relationship any of us have that approaches it, and I don’t imagine we could replicate it in any other way if we decided to work with other people or whatever. I just think that we are family. There were so many moments in the studio where I’d be recording a part and feel unable to commit to how I had heard it in my head, because it was different from something I’d done in the past. And I think in other instances, I might have moved into a more familiar place if something didn’t work at the beginning, when I first went to the control room to record. But it’s the faith that your bandmates have in you that allows you to have it in yourself, and I felt that a lot throughout the process. From introducing a story to my bandmates – thinking I had an idea of where it would go and how it would transpire – to hearing how they interpreted something I’d read, changes your perspective on what you’re going to write, how you think of the story. It’s just this back-and-forth collaboration, where things end up in the right place.
Isolation
It’s almost antithetical to this next inspiration, which makes sense from both a creative and thematic standpoint. A lot of the characters find themselves alone at pivotal moments of the story. But you also mentioned the pandemic.
Yeah, I think it’s both. When I included that, I was trying to cover multiple things. The record has a lot of conversation about dissociation, especially at the beginning, and in many ways the subject matter is a product of personal, emotional withdrawal. I think in the course of making this record, I sort of understood better how much I had withdrawn from people in my life and from the world in general, and how much I was using that as a coping mechanism for depression I felt, or even just how uncomfortable it felt to feel without control. So I think there’s a threat of personal, self-imposed isolation that set the ball rolling for the record, and you see it through various moments on the record – even outside of the first three songs, where someone experiences a night in crisis alone, but elsewhere, in the stories told, people find themselves without support. That was a big influence thematically.
But I also think there’s a practical level to it. The writing and recording process was very collaborative, and the five of us lived in a studio for a month – there’s really no isolation in that respect, at least not physically. But I really benefited from where we recorded and how we wrote, too. We were all scattered about, so we wrote the record around playing shows for Wildlife and Rooms of the House, tacking on extra time wherever we were so that we could be together for a period of time to work on writing. Every one of those instances isolated us from everyday comforts and the normalcy of home.
When we recorded, we were in a studio out in the fucking jungle in Australia, and there was nothing else – you’re just in the studio, constantly surrounded by people doing creative work. I struggle with self-discipline at home, consistently trying to balance creative work – what I would love to be focusing my efforts on – and everyday considerations – the bills you need to pay, the relationships you need to maintain, domestic responsibilities. I’ve never been very good at carving out time to work… until I have to. [laughs] Being in the studio, writing the record the way we did in different places, and then being in the studio in Australia – actual physical isolation from the world outside – was really beneficial to me. It helped me fixate how I needed to and obsess over writing in a way that was harder on Panorama, because we wrote that in our hometown.
It’s a weird thing – everything that happened during the course of a record, in hindsight, was essential because it made the record what the record was. I don’t lament the struggles we had writing Panorama, because I think it really informed the way the record is and feels, and we’re very proud of it. But this one, I think I needed that separation. Being forced to be away, it was really all I could think about. I needed to be picked up and dropped somewhere for me to be able to commit that time without thinking about everything else.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
La Dispute’s No One Was Driving the Car is out September 5 via Epitaph.
