Interview Horse The Band's David Isen on Moldovan politics, Lou Malnati's album-inspiring pizza

In 2008, California hardcore act Horse The Band abandoned booking agencies and managers and embarked on a four-continent, 40-country “Earth Tour." In an era defined by the record companies' diminished role and the growing trend of DIY promotion, the self-funded, self-planned tour was another victory for musical autonomy—just max out the credit cards to buy plane tickets, find some fans across the world willing to book a show, and you’re rocking out in Eskisehir, Turkey in no time. After releasing its first record, Desperate Living, on Vagrant last year, the band has returned to its world-traveling ways, coming through town for a rare American appearance at Subterranean on Wednesday. Before that show, The A.V. Club caught up with guitarist David Isen to chat about the “Nintendo-core” label the band has earned, how close him and his bandmates came to being marooned in Moldova, and how Lou Malnati’s became the inspiration for the fabled Pizza EP.

The A.V. Club: You've issued a statement saying the band is now named Wicked Decision. Is this for real?

David Isen: I don't know. I forgot about it until you just mentioned it. I guess we really never said it was a joke. I don't know if anyone paid attention though. I guess you did.

AVC: So there might be a name change if people recognize that you actually did make the change.

DI: Yeah. We just want to confuse people. 

AVC: So, to be clear, you guys are not changing your name.

DI: Yeah, I guess that's right. Not to say we won't in the future, but right now, we're Horse The Band. I’ve been doing a lot of cover songs. I work under the name DJ Danny Maverick and I make different kinds of electronic music. Sometimes I do extreme interpretations of songs.

AVC: What songs have you been doing?

DI: Well the one I’m working on now is the song from Dirty Dancing, “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.” It’s pretty fucking cool. Our last album was—I don’t know if there was a sound we were going for. It was just an idea that we were actually going to spend a lot of time collaborating and making sure we like every single part of every song. We were gonna allow ourselves to explore some different territory.

AVC: In 2008, in a statement about your world tour, the band said it had become “disillusioned, bad-attitude nerds, and pariahs of the established music industry.” Do you still feel that way?

DI: Yeah, pretty much. In a different way. Now people give us respect for what we’ve done, but still don’t want us anywhere near their tour or festival. Everyone’s like, “Man, I read about that tour, I give you props, I totally respect that,” but no one will put us on any festival or even consider us for any big tour.

AVC: Why won’t they touch you guys?

DI: I don’t know. After seeing the e-mails that get exchanged between booking agents, I can imagine what happens is someone says that we’re hard to deal with, like we show up late or drunk a lot. 

AVC: But you guys are pretty punctual for the most part, right?

DI: No. We’re always late.

AVC: You admit to that.

DI: In general, we never admit to anything. 

AVC: How did the South African tour come about?

DI: It was different from most tours because it was three weeks and we only had 10 shows, so we just had lots of activities in between and stuff. We really explored a lot of the country, which is not very typical, but it was really good to be able to do that since we were in Africa and it would have been a waste if we had been playing shows the whole time. 

AVC: Is there a big fan base down there?

DI: Yeah. Any country that has a white suburban population and access to the Internet will have a proportional number of fans there as anywhere else. It was pretty cool to meet the people into our shit all the way over there. And we went to Mozambique and there were actually black Africans there at our show, which was really cool.

AVC: On your world tour, were there any moments where you thought you’d be arrested? Let's start with Dubai.

DI: Well, we didn’t go there because our singer thought he was going to get arrested because he was trying to clean all the weed out of his clothes and he would periodically just find a little weed fragment buried in his pocket. He’s having a nervous breakdown the first night of the tour and we were like, “All right, I guess we need to not go to Dubai if we want the tour to continue.”

AVC: Were there any lawbreaking activities?

DI: We were really careful, at least the first half of the tour, because if anything goes wrong we’re just completely fucked—we would miss all our flights and be stuck. There was no weed allowed on the tour, no drugs of any kind, we were very careful to follow all the local customs and rules. I think once we got to Europe we loosened up a little bit. But still, that week we flew into Belarus, we were nervous about that because it’s a totalitarian country and no band had been there in like five years other than Cannibal Corpse or something. But we went in and no one even asked us a single question. And then we almost entered the dangerous territory of Transnistria.

AVC: Where?

DI: There’s a strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine that is controlled by ex-Soviet generals who took their tanks there after the Soviet Union collapsed and they now control this territory that’s not recognized by most countries and not on maps. They do arms smuggling. We were told if you accidentally go in there, you’re going to get your passports taken, all your possessions taken, and they’ll send you walking back to the Moldovan border with nothing. We almost got lost in Moldova because our GPS broke and we got stopped on the highway by the Moldovan police saying that if we went any further we would be entering Transnistria.

AVC: You’ve played in five continents now. What kind of deep understanding of the world can you impart?

DI: [Laughs.] I don’t know. The weird thing is that we saw all this stuff on the Earth Tour, all these different countries, all these different ways of life. And then we played a couple of shows in South Africa and few days after, we took a tour of the township, which is where the blacks were forced to live during apartheid. And as soon as we walked in there, it was like, “Oh, shit. This is how 80 percent of the world’s population lives.” And in all of our travels, we’d never even seen that. So we still don’t know anything, even though we’ve seen all that.

AVC: You think you’ve only seen the more privileged parts of the world?

DI: In general, but we have seen some really insane poverty in third-world countries, in Europe and Asia and Africa. We definitely have more perspective than probably 95 percent of the population of America, probably 99 percent of the world, but we are still nowhere close to grasping the nature of reality. The more you learn, the more confusing everything is.

AVC: How much of your success is due to the “Nintendo-core” label and its association with Nintendo?

DI: Probably a lot. There’re a lot of different ways that people can relate to it. There’re some people who come up to us in shows and they’re like, “Your music sounds like Nintendo. I love it so much.” And then there’re other people who are into the one or two actual lyrical references we’ve had. But people who aren’t into it, there is the subconscious nostalgia they feel when they hear those sounds. They bring back warm memories of hearing Nintendo games on keyboards.

AVC: Is it true that Lou Malnati’s was the inspiration for the Pizza EP?

DI: Yeah, we thought of the idea while sitting at the Lou Malnati’s in Lincolnwood with my grandparents.

AVC: Did you discuss the idea with your grandparents?

DI: Well yeah. We were just sitting there, we were really bummed out about the way that particular tour was going, and we were also really happy about the pizza we were eating. And you know, one plus one equals three. We drove home and wrote an album about pizza.

AVC: Was there anybody in the band that thought, “Come on, this is ridiculous”?

DI: Not really. Well Nathan [Winneke] was not that happy about having to write five songs about pizza. He enjoyed the process of thinking of the idea, but when we decided to do it, he was like, “Do I really have to do this?” I didn’t like the idea of having to drop out of the tour even though it sucked, 'cause it’s bad business. We really pissed off the booking agent, who after that became one of the biggest booking agents for all the bands that we want to tour with, and now he hates us. But you know, when we thought of the idea to drop out of the tour to do the pizza album, I was down to do it.