Q&A: Hippo Campus at Hinterland
IN GOING BACK TO THEIR ROOTS — Twin Cities band Hippo Campus has come to announce what they call their best album ever, flood. Jake Luppen (vocals), Nathan Stocker (guitar), Whistler Allen (drums), Zach Sutton (bass), and DeCarlo Jackson (trumpet) spent endless hours together relearning how to understand each other as friends, musicians, and as a solid band. Through loss, sobriety, and therapy, the group wrote close to 100 songs in preparation of their next record only to realize they didn’t like what they were making. Back to the drawing board numerous times, the 13-track album, flood, was finalized and is set to be released on Sept. 20.
In over a decade, Hippo Campus has laid the groundwork for one of the strongest fanbases in the music world. Even when shows have been canceled or plans have changed, the Hippo community finds a way to meet, collaborate, and enjoy any time they can spend together. Earlier this year — after the band had completely wiped their social media history — Hippo Campus announced a show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre to celebrate their new era. However, due to high winds, the show was ultimately canceled. Despite the money, time, and travel that fans put in to see their favorite Minneapolis-based band perform live, they still rallied together (in the same high winds) to meet up anyway and created a fan experience like no other.
With their fourth full-length album on the way, stated to be a record of rebirth, Hippo Campus are using their years of experience to better themselves as people and musicians. Flood marks an entirely new chapter for the Hippo Campus universe and we are excited to be along for the ride.
To get a closer look into what’s to come, we chatted with Luppen and Stocker at Hinterland Music Festival in St. Charles, Iowa. In the heat of the weekend, we learned more about flood, how the band has restructured themselves, and what a strong community can do for veteran musicians. Read the interview below.
LUNA: Earlier this year you wiped your Instagram and mentioned that the recent time has been a hallmark year for you all. How are you feeling now about the recent changes internally?
LUPPEN: Well, as a band, we feel really excited overall about it. I think over the past year and a half, we've really gone back to our roots in a major way. We read the last record in the room together and live tracked it. We're starting off this tour with a bunch of underplay shows and 500-cap rooms. So I think we're just excited to get back to our roots and fall in love with doing this thing.
LUNA: What rituals or routines do you have in place that have really transformed Hippo Campus?
STOCKER: I think a lot of the focus was on communication habits and establishing a healthy way to sort out problems when they arise, and also a healthy way to reinforce the pillars of the band that we hold dear. One of them being unity, and achieving unity through lifting each other up instead of constantly kind of taking the piss out of each other. Balancing that with the friendships that are at the core of this thing has paved the way for us to do whatever we want creatively, and in a collaborative environment it becomes a lot easier to make decisions and achieve a healthy relationship professionally.
LUNA: This year you’ve kind of forgone touring and have stuck with playing festivals. How does it feel that even with limited dates people are still traveling to see you perform, regardless of location?
LUPPEN: That’s sort of, at this point, why we continue to do this thing. It’s all for them. We’ve taken a very patient route to get where we’re at and, carrying off what Nathan was saying, it’s all about sustainability and making sure those people know how much they mean and how much is spent trying to fill a 5,000-seat venue with people who don’t know but who really care about the music. We want to connect with those people that have been with us from the beginning and who have been down with us growing and changing.
LUNA: You had a Red Rocks show planned that was unfortunately canceled due to weather. What do you think it says about your fan base that even with the cancellation they still rallied behind you all and showed up to create their own fan event?
STOCKER: It was really special that that could happen, and the first wave of emotion was just heartbreaking. It was just that helpless feeling where you can’t do anything about the high winds, but to speak to the core of the fanbase, man, showing up and turning an unfortunate situation into a really beautiful and great opportunity for bonding.
LUPPEN: It really made the whole thing transcend us, which is something we’ve always wanted. It’s something bigger than us or the music. It’s about the community of fans. It’s theirs just as it is ours.
STOCKER: Shout out to our whole team in assisting in all of that and making it happen.
LUNA: Your upcoming album, flood, is a culmination of over 100 songs pieced together. What was the process like in narrowing down those songs to a more cohesive setlist?
STOCKER: There's no way to sum it up entirely, but it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of versions. There’s so many versions of any album out there and very rarely are they a one and done kind of deal. We really dove into that idea — how far can we go before the record stops to exist? It turns out you can go pretty far out. Sometimes it’ll still just be kicking and so we were recording songs five times each and it was a lot, it was strenuous and really difficult at times.
At the end of the day, instinctually you know which songs are working together and the sense of unity within the band is really key to making a democratic decision on which songs we are going to cut and it’s a whole lot of recipes.
LUPPEN: I don’t know if we’d do it again!
STOCKER: We can never really do it again in the same way.
LUNA: Demos are a really big part of your discography, is there a chance that even the songs we haven’t heard yet will still be released in the future?
STOCKER: I think it’s unclear at this point. I know for a fact that we all have favorites and, in a lot of ways, the hardest part of the process is saying goodbye to those kids that weren’t strong enough to make it, but we’re not really thinking about that right now. We’re kind of just focusing on the songs that are on the record and we’re stoked to see how they are live and what kind of extensions we can add onto them in the live scenario. We’re just kind of juiced overall and focused on the 13 songs that did make the list.
LUNA: What should fans expect from this new era of your music? It truly feels like this will be a turning point for Hippo.
LUPPEN: Just music tailored for a live show. That’s what we went into the record trying to do and I think that’s what we want to bring forward as we are moving into our thirties. We made records for the sake of making interesting, weird sounding records which has been really informative, but moving forward with Hippo, it’s always been about the live show and how that connects with the fans in the room, more so than our recorded music. We just want to prioritize that moving forward. Maybe in our fourties we’ll start making experimental stuff.
LUNA: How about you all personally? How do you hope this change and openness to vulnerability will shape you as people and musicians?
STOCKER: Let me tell you, it’s been a week. The surprises that life throws at you and we can’t control any of that. Being a musician is how you respond to that in a musical form and it just gets me excited. There are moments where you look around and are like, “Damn, how did I get here?” Even from last week, the month before, or even the year before that. Not to get too heavy, but you can’t think about it too hard.
LUNA: What do you hope fans new and old will be able to take away from flood?
STOCKER: We talked about this a bit in the making of this record and we didn’t want to worry about the aspect of the quality of listenability as much because we realized that there are records that you can analyze to death about why it’s in your head, why you love it so much or why you hate it so much and at the end of the day, the artists who make that thing are probably not thinking about it as hard as you are. Or it’s just a more gradual process. They did all that thinking and that’s what they came up with, but you can’t tear that down in the span of a record.
On the flip side, the records that mean the most to us are those unexplainable sort of things that just fall into your lap and you realize you were missing it and didn’t even know it. I think that that was kind of the feeling that we hope translates.
LUPPEN: It’s just kind of a deep level of care and we hope other people recognize how much we care about this. We make jokes and whatnot, but we really do care at a very deep level with the music that we’re putting out, and it really is all about that. Everything else that we have to do and put out now and online, we’re not good at any of that stuff. It doesn’t appeal to us. We are musicians purely for the sake of we just enjoy making music. All that stuff is confusing and mad respect for the people that are into it and there’s any artistic way to do it, but for us it really is that this is all we know how to do and we’re trying our best to put out a many records as we can and to put on the best show every night so that we’re at.
STOCKER: Take what you will. Love it, hate it, we’ll still be here.
LUPPEN: We’ll still be trying our best.
STOCKER: We’ll get you to like us someday!
