Dirt Buyer’s search for truth

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Dirt Buyer are an earnest endeavor only here by accident. While living in Boston in 2018, and with time on their hands, New Jersey native Joe Taylor Sutkowski and pal Ruben Radlauer thought it would be fun to make up a fake label. Then, listing a bunch of nonexistent bands, the plan was to bring them all to life. But it was one riff in particular that heralded Dirt Buyer’s lo-fi but intense entrance into Sutkowski’s life, laying the groundwork for a whole new way of creating. 

Out of the riff came their first track. “Josephine” also happens to launch Dirt Buyer, the group’s emo-folk-soaked 2019 debut. Recorded on their phones after encouragement from Radlauer, it’s hauntingly wrought with Sutkowski’s heartfelt offerings amid grainy guitar and drums. While influenced on a grander, ambitious level by My Chemical Romance and Muse, it’s singer-songwriter types who offer Dirt Buyer’s vividly haired mastermind an outlet, giving his spectral musings a pointed purpose. The project eventually picked up steam. After a relocation to New York and recruiting then-bassist Emma Stacher, along with tours coming in and an agent and label on the cards, the ball was firmly rolling. Until COVID-19 halted their progress. During this tumultuous time, Sutkowski was at a loss. 

Read more: 9 bands commonly mistaken as emo who really aren’t

With Dirt Buyer’s plans falling through, it wound up being a period of change that, today, leaves Sutkowski reckoning with the project that he earnestly chases. With Radlauer leaving at this time, too, getting their second LP, Dirt Buyer II, to the finish line in between tours involved Sutkowski and Stacher recording in a familial Sutkowski home in upstate New York in 2020. However, Dirt Buyer II wouldn’t see the light of day until 2023, on Bayonet Records. Even as various other projects flit around Sutkowski’s world, including an electronic-tinged solo album, Dirt Buyer — and Sutkowski — are ready to get back on track. With Dirt Buyer III currently in its mixing stage and the members who make up Dirt Buyer to this day (bassist Tristan Allen and drummer Mike Costa) on board, the future is once again within his grasp.

Talk me through your discovery of music and your journey.

JOE TAYLOR SUTKOWSKI: My musical journey has been a really long one, and I don’t remember a lot of it. I discovered my favorite music within the past six or seven years — classic singer-songwriter music like Leonard Cohen, Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, and Judy Sill, where the most important thing is the song. I always say that Dirt Buyer is a singer-songwriter band, just with a couple more pieces. For me, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a song.

Are you a reflective sort of person with your projects?

I am more reflective than I need to be. Reflective to the point that it’s just ruminating. I get very stuck in my present feelings. All the records that I’ve made have been a pretty clear time capsule of what I was experiencing during that time. [With Dirt Buyer], I was reflecting on my life a lot because I was living in a one-bed in Boston by myself, and then my job was at this ice cream factory. I’d go in, there are no windows, and oftentimes I was making the ice cream by myself, and then I’d come home, and I was by myself again, so there was only time to reflect on things that I didn’t really have space to process before. I spent so much time with Dirt Buyer II, where it was looming. My relationship with that record has been pretty complicated, and it’s changed a lot. It did fuck up my relationship with the project for a while. I kind of resented Dirt.

What does Dirt Buyer offer you?

The whole point for me is catharsis. At [Dirt Buyer I’s] point, I hadn’t spoken to my dad for a number of years, and I got a call from him out of the blue, telling me that my grandfather, who I wasn’t close with at all and actually kind of hated, had died. It really pissed me off that that was all he could come up with to try to pull me back in and get me to talk to him. So I took the voicemail that he left me, and I put it in the middle of one of the songs on that record, and it was extremely cathartic for me to do that. I try to channel the energy of that action into anything that I’m making.

Do you see internal progress across the offerings of Dirt Buyer as you’re working through this catharsis?

I’ve done a lot of really hard work on myself over the past few years, and I’ve done a lot of healthy introspection. I’ve made a lot of improvements emotionally, but I don’t know… There’s always fucking something! [Laughs.]

Is there an overarching ambition driving Dirt Buyer at this point?

I just hope I don’t wring the towel dry. I don’t think this is true, but I had a friend in college who would say every artist gets 10 years of great music. We were talking about Muse before — ’99 to 2009 — and my nightmare is to lose my fucking mind and start making really weird, nothing-shit after a while. I guess that’s why I’m so drawn to singer-songwriter music — it’s so timeless. Somebody like Elliott Smith, all of his albums were great, and Sparklehorse, all of his albums were great — genuinely fantastic songwriting with great melodies, really great lyrics. The songs are memorable. I hope that in my life, I get to keep writing songs that I like listening to. I try not to think about what other people are doing too much, and I try not to think too far ahead, but I do anyway. I’m already thinking about what I’m going to make after this thing that I just made.

Do you have a restless or focused creativity?

I make these songs because I have to. I would get really anxious if I didn’t, and it has always been that way. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of restless and focused. Restless in the sense that I just have to keep doing it and there’s no end point in sight, and then focused in the sense that I can just do it. I have a difficult time focusing on anything, and I’m lucky that I can focus on this, and it’s not that difficult. Usually the most important thing is: Do I want to listen to this over and over all day until I get sick of it?