Photo by Jon Stars

Rooms Of The House, the third full-length from Grand Rapids, Mich. post-hardcore outfit La Dispute, is a story album told through a series of small mundane moments — a commute to work, reading on a Tuesday afternoon or prepping for a dinner party. Some moments are inspired by personal experiences while others are fictional, set around local historical events.

It’s a lofty concept, for sure, but the band is no stranger to intersecting musical ideas with other mediums. La Dispute’s first album, Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, is loosely inspired by the Asian folktale of the same name. And Wildlife, the group’s breakthrough release from 2011, is a collection of short-stories set to song that include notes from the fictional author in four monologues.

DCist spoke with La Dispute’s lead singer Jordan Dreyer about his narrative-heavy songwriting, the band’s creative process and its grandiose plans on how to properly accommodate all of their ideas.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DCist: Your songwriting, particularly on Rooms Of The House, feels more directly influenced by fiction. Has that type of writing always appealed to you? What attracted you to it?

Jordan Dreyer: I somewhat fell into it accidentally. My passion has always been reading and literature. All my heroes have always been writers who are more talented than me. It’s always been something that I’ve felt an incline towards. It wasn’t until our first proper LP, the one with the long title, Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair that I started telling other people’s stories.

A lot of that record too is pulled from personal experience, but there’s two songs on that record that I chose for the first time to write about other people, and try to talk from another person’s perspective, and tell a fully fleshed-out story. I guess that was the first time that I really dove into that realm in trying to translate fiction to music. Then there’s a lot more of that on Wildlife, and then this last record, Rooms Of The House, is from beginning to end a story. I think because I’ve always been interested in literature, it’s been fun for me to try to translate that type of narrative storytelling into a different medium, and the same goes for the musicians that I revere and lyricists that I focused on for most of my adult life. A lot of the artists that make the music that I’ve loved for a long time focus more on telling a story.

DCist: You’ve mentioned in past interviews about not wanting to be pigeonholed as far as genre is concerned and trying to approach each project differently. Do you see La Dispute moving toward more experimental concepts of approaching music and how it’s released?

JD: Yeah. Definitely. We’ve always from day one I think, it’s always been important to us to challenge ourselves creatively, and try to make the experience all-inclusive and engaging from the artwork through the music. We’re always considering that when we write, trying to change the process up.

I guess for us it’s always been like we’re trying to simultaneously do two things. We want the songs to be standalone songs, we want people to be able to enjoy the music and not have to dive into this whole product.

I think it’s hard to say where we go next after this last record, but I think that speaking for myself, the things that I find most rewarding are those things that are engaging from top to bottom, and that are creatively challenging. I think it would be a waste to not further pursue that. We’ll see. I don’t know. It’s hard to speak. Everything’s not in physical… nothing’s concrete at this point in time, but I think it would be a lot of fun to do something, even if it’s not our next studio album, but to do something that works with other people, or collaborating with certain musicians or artists.

DCist: Definitely. Anything that breaks away from the cycle of “recording an album and tour the hell out of it” has to be rewarding creatively.

JD: It’s something that is fun to think about, and at this point in time I think it used to be we could write a record, and then turn three years of touring on it before we started thinking about what we do next.

I think that because Rooms of the House was such a rewarding experience for all of us musically, the thought of creating something and really diving into it, I think that the incubation period is getting shorter, and the less comfortable we are just playing the same songs every night. I think that everyone just wants to go back to a cabin somewhere and try to write something else. It’s fun to think about how that might shape up in the future.

DCist: Is starting your own label/imprint a step towards being able to scratch that creative itch?

Jordan: Totally. It’s part of the appeal of having our own imprint in the first place. You want obviously to have closer to total control over your art and what you’re doing and how it’s presented was a significant part of making that decision, but the other thing was that we do want to have a medium for everything, and have an outlet to present not just music.

I think when we first decided that we wanted to do that and we released that record, we had idyllic, grandiose ideas about how that would shape up in the immediate future, and realized that not only did a lot of work go into it, but you have a whole lot of different things going on in your life at the same time. It’s difficult to make everything happen on the timeline that we wanted.

DCist: The group is still neck deep in the promotional cycle for Rooms Of The House and are on this tour with Title Fight and The Hotelier. Later this year, you guys will jump over to Europe with Two Inch Astronaut. 2015 is looking pretty busy for the band.

JD: Last year, Rooms came out and we did almost four months straight of touring without a break in between. We did the U.S, then we flew to Europe, and then flew to Australia, and Singapore, and New Zealand. It was probably too long for anybody to be away from home and traveling.

We did the heavy cycle and this year we’re trying to just take the opportunity to, I don’t know, go some places we haven’t gone to and do some different things. We’re doing a lot of seated shows on this tour, and playing quieter songs, and rearranging some other songs to be more fitting for that environment.

We’ve got a short run in Europe like you said, and then we’re going to do South America at some point I think, later in the year, which is pretty wild. We’ve never done that. Then, I don’t know.

Everyone’s always making music in their respective homes, and there’s always a level of collaboration between everybody, even when we’re not really doing something. Like I said earlier, I think the incubation period is getting shorter. We all get that creative itch earlier than we used to when we could just leave for seven months out of the year and play every show we possibly could.

I think that we’re going to start writing at some point later in the year. In the past there’s always been a pretty solid idea every time we’ve sat down to start a record. I’ve had a concept, and the direction, or somebody’s had songs written and we’ve worked from there, but this time it’s a complete blank slate. I hesitate to put a time frame, even a rough one, on anything, but I’m certainly confident we’ll start more solidly making ideas and starting to write.

La Dispute play The Howard Theatre with Title Fight and The Hotelier tomorrow night. Doors 8 p.m. $20 in advance or $25 day of show.