Photo by Caitlin McCann
“I had a phase when I was sixteen or seventeen where I thought nothing was real,” Dimitri Giannopoulos concludes after some silence. “Like, I thought I was living in a constant dream. I refused to believe anything I was seeing was happening to me or even happening at all. I was just freaked out by everything.”
He’s quick to mention that it was just teenage thinking, that the feeling doesn’t stress him out much anymore, but it’s still the kind of abstract honesty that defines a person like Giannopoulos and a band like Horse Jumper of Love.
As we’re talking, his roommate’s dog Merlin alternates between teething on his boots and trying to eat loose change around the apartment. John Margaris, the bassist for Horse Jumper and one of Dimitri’s best friends, sits on the couch opposite Merlin, adding relatively minimal statements to the conversation, but remaining cheerfully affixed to whatever Dimitri has to say. Their drummer, Jamie Vadala-Doran, is en route from virtually endless undergrad study sessions, texting in periodically to ask if they can sneak him into a friend’s 21+ show later that night. And, within their small circle of known reality, their debut album as Horse Jumper of Love lies finished on a small handful of laptops and cassettes.
For all intents and purposes, Horse Jumper of Love have earned a prominent place on the city’s “bands to watch” list in the last year, even if the trio themselves are still reckoning with the fact that they’re being mentioned at all.
If we’re looking at local culture more clinically, their ascent is obvious: the concept of three guys playing unorthodox guitar parts rooted in ‘90s college rock bands has been championed in the Allston scene over the last five years, but to box Horse Jumper into that would ring sour to anyone that’s seen them live. Where records like Wowee Zowee and Doolittle get thrown out relentlessly as scene-wide influencers, Horse Jumper skew closer to Silver Jews’ American Water as a touchstone for their slowed down aesthetics.
Beyond influences though, the album put forth by Dimitri, John, and Jamie is the wholehearted effort of three friends with years of musical discovery, friendship, and love for one another established before a song was even recorded.
Growing up between Jamaica Plain and Dorchester, the trio officially met, rather ironically, as each other’s competition. “Dimitri and I basically formed a new band for my school’s Battle of the Bands and we were going against John,” Doran explained. They were playing as the Late Greats, a self-proclaimed “light indie rock” band that took its breezy cues from Local Natives, against John’s slightly more seasoned band Bridge to The Moon.
“I knew who John was,” Dimitri recalled. “He was, like, this big shot. His band sounded like Coldplay. They were good though!”
“I grew up very religiously and almost exclusively listened to Christian rock music for a long time,” John added. “We basically sounded like Coldplay because we were a Christian rock band.”
Unbeknownst to either of them, Jamie had already had a mythic encounter with John. “I remember I was at junior jazz band practice and John walks in wearing the same faded Old Navy v-neck shirt I was wearing with black jeans. I was like, ‘oh my god, this cool, older male is dressed similarly to me and that makes what I’m doing okay.’” Despite the hero worship, the Late Greats won the Battle, resulting in the three future bandmates keeping tabs on one another over the years.
“[John] found me on Facebook two years later and was like, ‘hey, you should come over and watch Lord of the Rings with me and my girlfriend,” Dimitri added with a laugh. “We went to a party first and I watched him throw up in a sink. That was my first impression of John since high school and I was like, ‘this is my guy.’”
The partnership between Giannopoulis and Margaris seemed defined from that first party by relishing life’s uncomfortableness and the ways people cope. “We sat outside on the stoop of that Berklee bro apartment [after the party] smoking cigarettes. John was like, “yeah, sometimes I get anxious,” and I was like, “hey, sometimes I get anxious too.”
“I was, at that point, flunking out of Berklee,” John added. “I had a very bizarre experience, growing up in this evangelical, ‘sons of God’, Pentecostal church. I was very on board with it all, but I decided to go to Berklee instead of bible college. [Dimitri] kinda rescued me from hating everything.”