My interview with Joe Sutkowski of Dirt Buyer. Dirt Buyer released their most recent album ‘Dirt Buyer II’ in October of 2023 via Bayonet Records. 

Diya: Good afternoon, Joe. It’s lovely to see you. How are you doing on this fine January afternoon?

Joe: Hello, hello. I’m in the basement at work and I’m doing just fine. Feeling nice.

Diya: Good.

Joe: And I hope everybody else feels nice too.

Diya: Yeah. Let’s start from the beginning. So I did some digging and learned that Dirt Buyer was born out of Berklee College of Music practice rooms and is largely inspired by your own emo roots with the likes of My Chemical Romance and Muse. Can you tell me a little bit more about your musical background and how it influences Dirt Buyer’s artistic philosophy?

Joe: Sure. I mean, this is kind of maybe goofy, but I remember being in high school, I discovered escapism pretty early on in my life. And playing music was always one of the things, maybe the only thing, that really helped me to feel grounded. I don’t know, I had kind of a tough time just early on in my life. And then I remember being in high school, listening to Muse. There’s this one live video of Muse where they’re playing a sold out show at Wembley Stadium and Matt Bellamy walks out and he’s got this beautiful red suit. I’d imagine myself in Matt Bellamy’s position just, I don’t know, playing songs for a bunch of people that were really stoked on it. I don’t really have any direction, per se. Dirt Buyer was born out of an accident. Accidentally born. I graduated college and I moved back home with my mom and just kind of rode the high of not being in school anymore for two weeks. And then I was like, well, now what? Like something has to happen. So I ended up moving back to Boston. During that time I was playing guitar in this band, Lady Pills, that is based in Boston with Ruben that I started Dirt Buyer with. We wanted to make a fake record label and just record a bunch of different kinds of music under different names and release those songs under the fake record label. So we were making noise rock and a bunch of other stuff. And Dirt Buyer was our emo band. I remember being in a practice room with him one day and I played the riff for “Josephine” and I was gonna just disregard it. And he was like, “No, we should record that.”

Diya: Yeah.

Joe: So in that moment, Dirt Buyer could have been or not been. But then we just kind of continued doing the emo thing where we’d be in a practice room together, he’d put his iPhone on the floor, and we would record the drums and guitar to the same track, which is what you hear on the first record.

Diya: Beautifully recorded, by the way. I like how the guitars are really front and center.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, totally. Ruben mixed and produced it, too, and just, you know, really flexed his magic touch.

Diya: Yeah.

Joe: So we released that album and the rest is history. It kind of became my life after that. Like, Ruben’s not even in the band anymore, and Dirt Buyer is still a thing. My main influences are artists like Leonard Cohen, Sparklehorse, and Elliott Smith. Like, artists that write songs that can totally stand alone. If you took all the production and stuff away, the songwriting is really strong. And, yeah, it’s just so lyric driven. Like, I really appreciate Leonard Cohen’s academic, streamlined, poetic way of writing. And then I like the less academic, fantastical lyricism of Sparklehorse songs and the in-between of Elliott Smith.

Diya: I definitely noticed the Elliott Smith influence, especially with the vocal processing specifically.

Joe: Yeah, totally. That’s a given for sure. I think everybody feels the same way about Elliott Smith.

Diya: Oh, yeah. I’ve definitely seen a lot of artists, especially Alex G, kind of do something similar with vocals.

Joe: Yeah, totally. Everyone likes Alex G, too. I have to not listen to so much Alex G because it will just influence my writing too much. I just really like strong songwriting. Like singer-songwriter, band, where you start out with a really strong song and you kind of build it up, just make it better.

Diya: Kind of like Big Thief, probably.

Joe: Totally. Yeah.

Diya: Yeah. A lot of this album is very somber and elegant, especially the vocals, which remind me a little bit of Jeff Buckley because of their timbre and delivery. I think the guitar riffs are also really spacious and expressive, which I enjoyed. Can you tell me a bit about Dirt Buyer’s’ creative process of this album, along with its emotional landscapes and how they show up through some of your songwriting, vocal, and instrumental choices?

Joe: First, I’m going to say–that is such a huge compliment to compare it to Jeff Buckley because he’s just such a beautiful legend of a musician. The songs were all written in, like, late-ish, 2019, maybe some even before that, and then early 2020, and then recorded in February 2020. They’re all kind of born out of trying to really just figure it out. Generally, emotionally, there was a lot of stuff that happened that wasn’t so sick. And I don’t know, I guess that was my way of processing all the stuff that had happened and was going on during that time. But, yeah, of course, I was listening to a lot of Sparklehorse and Elliott Smith and was really inspired by just how beautiful the lyrics are. And I don’t know, it just feels like a lifetime ago, because it’s 2024 now. And I still feel really attached to those songs, but everything is just so different now, for sure. Just had a lot going on and I had a lot of stuff I was thinking about. I was listening to a lot of music and I was just trying to write as many songs as I could, like, keeping it simple. There’s just a lot going on and I needed to expel a lot of negative energy, and that’s just the way it happened. Dirt Buyer, too.

Diya: Just kind of a time capsule of sorts, maybe.

Joe: Yeah, all of the releases have been a time capsule that just kind of happened in the moment. And then I moved away from them pretty quickly.

Diya: No, I definitely get that. I did previously touch on the emo influences, and we did talk a little bit about Muse and Matt Bellamy. And then we have MCR, and then when I was listening through Dirt Buyer II, I noticed some gorgeous chords in the guitar riffs and vocal harmonies, coupled with the fact that this album is pretty dynamic, with devastating blooms of noise and softer, quieter verses. The lyrical themes of loss and weathering away connections stood out to me the most. I’d like to know what were some of the main inspirations for this project. And that can be media other than music, literature, religious epiphanies, spiritual occurrences, films, etc.

Joe: I discovered William Blake, who is probably my favorite poet. He’s like this romantic era guy who…I don’t know. I think I was watching the Sparklehorse documentary. I think that he was, like, the main…I just wanted to know everything that he knew…In this documentary, he mentioned that his main influence for everything was this guy, William Blake. So I was like, I have to know what this is. I found this book of poems called Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and it just totally changed my life. I always had it on my desk and I would always reference it, looking for a word or a pretty phrase or sentence or something. It informed how I wanted to say the things that I was saying on the record. But yeah, during that time, I had rekindled my love for My Chemical Romance, I was just listening to the Black Parade constantly. And, you know, Gerard Way is just so dramatic and theatrical. Like Jeff Buckley and Matt Bellamy.

Diya: Yeah, they’re kind of, like, tenor vocalists, probably.

Joe: Yeah, totally. And that just kind of seeped into the way I was doing things. It wasn’t really even on purpose. Maybe it was. I don’t know. I mean, I dyed my hair red and I was really playing into the dramatic My Chemical Romance thing. But, yeah, I think what changed a lot for me was discovering Songs of Innocence and of Experience. No skips, all bangers.

Diya: I take it you were pretty excited about the MCR get together reunion.

Joe: Oh, yeah. I actually saw them. The first big show I ever went to was My Chem on their Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge tour in, like, 2004 or something. And then 19 years later, I saw them again at the same venue, and they still sound so crazy good. Maybe even better at this point. Yeah. Love MCR.

Diya: Yeah…I was a former emo kid.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Diya: Yeah, I get it.

Joe: You’re always gonna be an emo kid.

Diya: What I mean by that is I just graduated to goth. I didn’t actually, like, get out of my emo phase.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It sticks around for sure.

Diya: For sure. I’m also really interested in the music videos released for this album. I definitely noticed a running theme of rawness throughout Dirt Buyer II. And the music videos really seem to underscore that with gorgeously shot performance footage with lots of vermilion hued lighting on “Fentanyl”’s music video and a series of shots of you chopping wood followed by shots of fire for “Gathering Logs”. Both videos are visceral to me because I feel like they portray a sense of feverish urgency. Can you tell me a little bit more about your choices to include these types of shots in your music videos and how they function in tandem with the album’s themes? Yeah, I mean, the “Fentanyl” video, I wanted it to portray what it’s like to see Dirt Buyer live, because I feel like the live shows are really important. The other half of the record is like the live show energetically. It is important context for listening to the record or just Dirt Buyer in general. And then the “Gathering Logs” video, I think it was my partner who was like, “You should just make a video of you furiously chopping wood for this song.” And I just thought it was a sick idea. So I got some of my friends to help me shoot a video like that and make it an actual thing. I think it’s as simple as I thought the idea was cool and it ended up working out.

Diya: Yeah, I definitely think–because the tone of your music is very much heavy and expressive, and I feel like chopping wood is such a literal way to act that out. Just hacking away at something.

Joe: For sure, yeah. I think that the way I perform is the same way that I was chopping the wood. Just, like, really going for it. I don’t think I was doing it right. I was sore for, like, the next week. I remember waking up the next morning and being like, oh, god, why does my whole body hurt? My partner was like, “You chopped wood for like, four hours yesterday.”

Diya: That would explain it.

Joe: [Laughs] Yeah.

Diya: What would you say is the most essential piece of gear to the sound of Dirt Buyer II?

Joe: In 2019, we did a tour with Surf Curse. Halfway through the tour, we ended up in Nashville and I went to this little guitar shop and they had this 1960 Hagstrom Viking. It was so beautiful. I’d never seen one before. And I played it and it just melted like butter in my hands. I mean, I’ve been playing the Jesus guitar kind of as a meme, but also because it’s like, you know, an amazing instrument, but I don’t think I have a nicer or better sounding guitar than the Hagstrom. So I ended up buying it and I asked the shop if they would ship the guitar that I was previously playing back to my mom’s house in New Jersey. So then I just played the rest of the tour with that guitar. And then when we got back, we recorded the whole thing using it. And I think that that’s, I don’t know, probably a super important thing, that informed the way that the guitar tone was gonna sound. And then I had this Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man pedal that I think is basically the sound of the whole thing. Yeah, it’s this really awesome delay vibrato pedal that just has this really specific sound, and it’s just so creamy and beautiful, and I just wanted it on everything.

Diya: Yeah, absolutely. I did notice that there’s kind of two sides to the album’s guitar tones, the really ethereal lush verse types of sounds, and then the ax-chopping sort of guitar where it’s very much heavy and you’re kind of just throwing yourself at it and it really hits you. I really like that very prominent duality. I like that a lot.

Joe: Yeah!

Diya: Yeah. Lastly, if you were stranded on a desert island and could only take three pieces of gear with you, what would they be and why?

Joe: I’d probably take the Hagstrom with me. And then two changes of strings. There you go.

Diya: Three pieces of gear. (Joe: I’ll just grow my fingernails out.) Do you have a special set of strings?

Joe: Yeah. My absolute favorite string company is an upstate New York based company called La Bella. They hand make all the strings or they, like, use one of those super old really big string winding machines. And I’ve just never used anything that I’ve liked the sound of or feel of more than La Bella strings. So shout out to La Bella. They’re very sick.

Diya: That’s interesting. With other artists I’ve interviewed, they’ve always been trying to make the most resourceful choice, where it’s like, “oh, I’m gonna bring a sampler so I can have a workaround”, or, like, a keyboard and power supply or something. That’s interesting. You said a guitar and two sets of strings.

Joe: Yeah.

Diya: That brings me back to what you said about prioritizing the core songwriting instead of all the effects and things you put on top of it. Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you so much.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having me. I hope that I answered your questions sufficiently.

Diya: For sure. Absolutely. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about your songwriting process and how this album came to be and what you put into it.

Joe: Very cool. I love that.