We recently connected with Alex Dapkus and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, appreciate you joining us today. We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

There is nothing more valuable than the time we offer eachother. There’s no gear, no instruments, not even sweet effect pedals that can match the value of the time and effort we give one another. We have put years of ourselves into this band and the relationships we have with eachother. I mean this truly was a huge investment. It took a lot of work for us to build upon the chemistry we naturally have. Our investment to eachother paid off because every single one of us shows up to practice, commits to performing, and works on the music that we write. There is nothing more that any of us can ask of eachother.
This could just as easily have been a band that didn’t make it out of the basement had we not all invested our time and energy. Sometimes it was tough. Each one of us has gone through so much, and despite that, we continued to show up for eachother. “Buying the dip,” if you will. Even when life has been hard for us, we never stopped putting in the time.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I remember Sam (guitar/vox) started playing the guitar and was regularly getting together with another one of our bandmates, Cameron (guitar/vox) to play music in his Sam’s dad’s basement. The first day I went after being invited to come play bass, I remember it so vividly. His dad has a band too, that basement is also their practice space. The vibes were already there. After playing our first song together, The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”, I recall stopping for a second and just telling them, “That was the coolest f*cking moment of my life”. I had never played in a band before and playing together felt so right. Nothing compared to that. It wasn’t long after that when Jake joined the band (also guitar/vox, believe it or not). Jake was the only one of us that had been in a band before. He had some connections to local venues, which I thought was just the coolest thing. We all talked about it and decided it would be pretty cool to try performing live. At this point, we were basically a cover band. We had maybe one or two originals, and I’m sure we sounded like shit at first. It turns out that I loved playing with my band, but I really loved PERFORMING with my band. It was just an immediate addiction. None of us have wanted to stop. It was a very sudden and profound realization for all of us that Horselover was going to be something very interesting in the city of Toledo. I don’t think we even scratched the surface of our potential, either, until Luke (drums) joined the band. We were looking for a permanent drummer and had auditioned a few guys -seriously great drummers, an absolute pleasure jamming with them- but when Luke was playing with us, it felt like he had been our drummer this whole time. I remember Sam looking at me during Luke’s audtion and just mouthing to me “He’s the one”. It gives me goosebumps.
Now, we are a five piece band consisting of three singing guitarists, a bass guitarist, and a drummer. Our sound is massive. I definitely like to throw around the whole “wall of sound” notion. We play original alt rock music all over our city, while occasionally throwing in covers that we may have stuck in our heads. We live for audience engagement. For example, I play with a wireless transmitter and I spend most of our sets in the audience rocking in our fans’ faces. The party doesn’t stop when we are done playing, either. We have just as much fun hanging out in the audience and dancing to the other bands on the bill before and after we play. If you come to a Horselover show, you are a friend to us, no questions asked. We want to know your names, we want to hear about your passions, and we want to be your friend. What we provide is a safe and open space for people to enjoy good music. It is an entire experience.
We are so proud of the impact Horselover is having on the community, and the people and bands we have met along the way. We’ve even had the privelage of playing with touring bands that we idolize, such as Remo Drive, Daikaiju, and soon we are playing with Moon Walker and Waitress. Unreal.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Toward the beginning of the year, I received a call from students at Bowling Green State University. Seniors in the Music Industry program. They told me that they had a list of 10 local bands and they wanted to select a couple to work with and offer all sorts of management services. The main focus being on social media. Luke and I sat for a zoom interview and we just chopped it up and had to basically convince them that we were the band for them. The interview went great, a couple weeks later they hit us up and told us they wanted to work with us. I mean how cool, right? It was so incredibly validating and exciting to think that these people not only heard of our band, but wanted to help us out with the behind the scenes stuff. It was amazing, I learned so many valuable things from that. The most important lesson was definitely the importance of consistency. You need to be posting all the time and you need to engage with the audience you have. Quality is very important, but without quantity you essentially have nothing.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In the beginning, we played for quite a few empty rooms. Nobody knew who we were, and we weren’t playing original music. I think anybody in their right mind would have decided to just keep jamming in the basement instead. We had been performing for over a year before we saw familiar faces and realized, “Hey, I think these people are actually intentionally coming to Horselover shows”. We had to put in a ton of work to create an experience that people would see, tell their friends about, and come back again.
Before all the venue owners and promoters knew us, I had to get creative to land us gigs. One time I went to a venue and spotted the owner and sat next to him at the bar. I struck up a conversation and offered to buy him a drink. He laughed, poured me a drink, and we chopped it up. I told him about our band and asked pretty directly for an opportunity to play there. I must have called in favors from every person I had ever met because that venue was PACKED the night of our performance. It was amazing. We put on a hell of a show that night, the people were going crazy. It was so rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Horselover_Toledo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1FjRWn5QAA/?mibextid=wwXIfr
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/71f7Pamy98nd4BZPjOoZZV?si=02nKl21vQ_S6mFRQ8IZV0g

  Our newest single: https://youtu.be/EwVsjEwcDAA?si=xd3WUiAoeBJhpNBu

Image Credits

IG: @photodave_photography

IG: @willspoint_n_shoot

IG: @theabyss.photography