The happy accident of Dirt Buyer

This is the most vulnerable conclusion that Joe Sutkowski — singer-songwriter and founder of emo-folk project Dirt Buyer — draws from his reflections on his upcoming album, Dirt Buyer III. And while Sutkowski has found catharsis through the music, survival, even, the irony is that it all came together somewhat accidentally.

It would be dismissive to say that Dirt Buyer is a project that “wasn’t meant to happen”, given how vital it was for Sutkowski to communicate through his songs. But initially, it wasn’t even intended to be a legitimate band. After first picking up the guitar in middle school, learning on a starter kit he convinced his mother to buy (his playing which, when thinking back on it, he describes as “so fucking bad”), he found himself at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, roughly two-hundred miles north of his home state of New Jersey.

It was at Berklee that Sutkowski met his friend and Dirt Buyer co-founder, Ruben Radlauer, who also drums in Model/Actriz. After graduating from college, most of Sutkowski’s friends had moved away, leaving him holed up in an apartment on his own. “I was very much by myself,” he tells me. His isolation compelled him to look to music for a sense of camaraderie, particularly in Ruben. “We’d meet up several times a week, and try writing as many songs as we could,” he recalls.

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Those sessions didn’t immediately lead to a serious, full fledged-band; the music that the pair was making started as nothing more than an elaborate masquerade. “We really wanted to make a fake record label and just be all of the bands on the fake label,” Sutkowski explains, a smile passing over his face as he reflects on the band’s origins. At that time, they were all about experimenting, absent of any particular musical identity. They were drawn to the anonymity, collaging different sounds together in what Sutkowski regards as “noise pop shit”, but things shifted when Radlauer found their name.

“Dirt Buyer was the most generic New England emo band name that he could think of,” Sutkowski laughs. “It was totally by accident, but it did become a real-life thing that we wanted. Dirt was supposed to be a fake band too, with fake stories, but it quickly didn’t work. It’s crazy that Dirt is even a thing at all.”

In addition to coming up with the name, Sutkowski attributes his ability to truly realise the potential of the band to Radlauer. During a practice session, Sutkowski was noodling around on guitar, playing what would eventually become “Josephine”. “Ruben was the one that was like, ‘Yeah, we should record that.’ So we did,” he recalls. “And then I took the recording home and made it a song. Once that became a thing, we realised we had a pretty good emo song, and we decided to make a whole Dirt album.”

Naturally, there was some level of hesitation that came from turning their early facade into something real, and genuine. “I really didn’t want Dirt to be a band in the beginning,” Sutkowski admits. “I was so fucking nervous to put it out there, and then to gig on it just freaked me out so bad, but it happened inevitably, and I kind of just embraced it.”

When I ask Sutkowski whether he feels that Radlauer gave him the nudge he needed to take Dirt Buyer seriously, his response is immediate. “He’s the perfect friend and collaborator. He knows just what buttons to push. And I credit him with totally changing my life, and my approach to guitar and songwriting.”

Now, three albums deep, eponymously titled Dirt Buyer I, II, and III, Sutkowski clearly sees how embracing an accident has evolved into something far more substantial. With a newfound commitment to the project, Sutkowski and Radlauer went on to record the first Dirt Buyer themselves, providing a raw framework for their direction — inspired by Sutkowski’s love for Muse, My Chemical Romance, System of a Down, and blink-182. Throughout the albums, there’s a consistent chronology, capturing particular moments of Sutkowski’s life. “When I think about each record, I know what period of time it encapsulates,” he tells me. “All of the stuff that lives in that box is very clear.”

But to some extent, Sutkowski has found himself a victim of his own capacity to vividly articulate life events. When I ask about Dirt Buyer I and Dirt Buyer II, he tells me they’re albums that are difficult to talk about – his memories of them as though he’s watching a zoetrope, with his reflections rapidly moving into the next frame, impossible to capture. This is largely due to the fact that the recording of Dirt Buyer II, which took place between late 2019 and early 2020, finished just as the world shut down due to COVID-19. “We recorded it, and then a few months later, the whole world exploded and just stopped,” Sutkowski says. “We just had to put the entire band on the back burner.”

Consequently, the album was shelved for three years, until Sutkowski’s friend Katie, who runs Bayonet Records — the label that Sutkowski is presently signed to — pushed to release it in 2023. “Katie really wanted to put that record out, and I felt it would be a good fit there. And she’s amazing, she does such a good job with anything and everything,” he notes fondly. But by that point, Sutkowski’s relationship with the material had already changed. “The record was like three years old, and everything that happened during that time was just so, incredibly in the past. When it came out, I had no emotional connection to it like I did at one point. Or it was just different. It didn’t feel so much like mine anymore.”

In an attempt to salvage some of the connection, Radlauer went through all of the songs with their friend and collaborator Hayden Ticehurst and mixed everything again. “Everything just sounded so much better. That was exciting and helped me kind of get back into that zone,” Sutkowski says. And being in the zone for that time paid off, as just two weeks after Dirt Buyer II was released in October 2023, Sutkowski was back in the studio recording Dirt Buyer III. “All of the songs were written, so I got right to it,” he says. “What’s cool now is that the music I have coming out right now, I still feel pretty emotionally connected to while it’s coming out, which is a new thing.”

Unlike previous albums, where Sutkowski wrote exactly the number of songs needed and headed straight into the studio, the songs that form Dirt Buyer III were selected from a collection of roughly twenty-five tracks. “Usually when I make something, I’m aware of it while it’s happening, and I never make more music than the album needs,” he explains. “Like, Dirt Buyer I was eight songs. And when it was done, I immediately knew it was done, and I was aware we were making a record. And then, Dirt Buyer II was the same way, where all of the songs were written for one specific thing.”

“But, Dirt Buyer III was a collection of like, twenty-five songs that I’d written over the past couple of years,” he continues. I brought them to my friend Chris, who co-engineered and mixed the album, and we sat down and picked out what he felt were the best ones from the bunch that would fit together the best. When I was writing Dirt Buyer III, I was just taking time to write as many songs as I could. I didn’t know what it was going to be.”

What emerged was a collection of songs which chronicled a turbulent period of Sutkowski’s life with a stark cognisance. During his late twenties, he found himself grappling with alcoholism, relationship difficulties, and family trauma, admitting, “These songs are songs because I didn’t have the language to communicate my feelings.” As such, they have become a lifeline.

On lead single, “Betchu Won’t”, Sutkowski’s seclusion and disappointment around not being drawn out of it is poured into an aching folk ballad as he sings, “Always alone / I can never leave my home / Try and get me out / I bet you won’t / So I’ll hide away at home”. Yet, it conflicts with a dire bid for connection and self-sacrifice, as he gently yields, “I never wanna try again / But I can try again this time / And maybe you’ll get it right”, over a trodding acoustic melody. And while this is a gentle introduction to the headspace that Sutkowski existed within, the deceptively snappier pop-punk step of “Get To Choose” calls it a draw as he croons “I gave it everything I’ve got / You needed everything I’m not”, while opener “Baseball” tears into a sense of rebellion against expectations imposed throughout childhood, with Sutkowski battling against a dense terrain of loneliness and subservience prevalent within the album’s emotional fabric. “Writing the songs was a huge part of the process of making it out to the other side,” Sutkowski reveals. “And therapy, and just really giving a shit about myself.”

Although Sutkowshi has acknowledged that shift in his ability to express himself, ultimately, he feels that little has changed across the Dirt Buyer series. The bare bones of the records are largely the same, but he did give himself a chance to truly make Dirt Buyer III his best album yet by going all-in on the production side. Where previous albums were self-recorded, this time everything was tracked in a professional studio with Ticehurst and Radlauer. “I spent a lot of money making it,” he tells me. I wanted it to be really, really nice,” he says. “From the front to back, it was all recorded in the studio, really fucking nice and really expensive. That’s probably the only thing that’s different.”

One thing that stuck out in the composition, however, was the absence of an opening theme on Dirt Buyer III — unlike “Dirt Buyer I Theme” and “Dirt Buyer II Theme” on their respective albums. When I ask Sutkowski why that is, he mainly chalks it up to the lack of a clear-cut plan for the record. But curiously, in retrospect, he identifies closer “When You Were a Kid” — a track which reels through a series of childhood memories, and is described as an “outburst” or “purge” — as the theme of the album.

“It’s kind of like when you leave a place, and take a picture of your mom with you or something,” he continues. “And then you set it up at your new place as a reminder of a time that feels special or significant. I wrote it, and it just stuck in my mind. For me, it feels like a portal back to a time that is really easy to romanticise. Being super young, growing up in the suburbs, walking along the train tracks.”

Although he’s finally found the words to detail a defining chapter of his life, and the introspection that has come with it, Sutkowski acknowledges that there is still work to do, and his journey — both personal and musical — is still ongoing. “There’s this titanium wall between my logical and emotional brain sometimes, where I’ll be freaking out about something, and I know exactly what I’m feeling and where it’s coming from. But then there’s the nervous system aspect, how do I actually get myself to chill the fuck out?” He pauses. “I still struggle in a big way, but I’m much better off now.”

A friend once told Sutkowski that “a lot of living life is learning how to live”, and the statement has become a crucial principle for the artist. “It’s a forever thing, working on yourself,” Sutkowski says. “Just keep showing up for yourself. It’s not a fix, but it’s maintenance, and it does help.”

Ultimately, music is the maintenance; it remains the constant that makes sense through everything else. “It’s like the one thing that feels correct,” Sutkowski says simply. And at the end of the day, he’s just happy to write good songs — something that he is proud to have achieved with Dirt Buyer III. “I mean, I love the way the record sounds,” he muses. “There’s a time and a place for everything, and this was made in a studio with people that I really love and trust. I’m really just most interested in making a really good song, and that’s the most important thing. That’s the whole point.”

When I pose the impossible question of “what makes a good song?”, Sutkowski tells me that he’s pondered it for hours, “thousands of hours”. And much like the push that he has received from his collaborators to take his craft seriously, to give it a chance and put it out there, he looks to his peers as a compass for inspiration.

“When I think of somebody who can write a really good song, it’s my friend Nate,” he says, referring to Nate Amos of This is Lorelei (in which Sutkowski has played guitar as part of the live band) and Water From Your Eyes. “He’s so good because he cares so much about music. He’s such a nerd about everything that he likes, and has this encyclopaedic knowledge about everything that he likes. He cares so much about also just writing a good song, sometimes with weird elements in there, but always with really tight melodies and lyric writing that fits the rhythm.”

But at the same time, Sutkowski recognises that encyclopaedic knowledge and urgent desire to write a good song are something to be admired, but aren’t crucial to his own process. “A good song is a song made using only the tools that it needs,” he affirms. “Songwriters have all of these tools in their toolbox, and have tons to reference, but knowing what tools to use is so important. Keeping it simple, not overthinking it. As long as it’s got love and care.”

It’s a similar approach to how Sutkowski is learning how to treat himself and his emotions, keeping the path of music-making and healing tightly intertwined. Keeping it simple, and doing it all with love and care, while hoping that his realisations can benefit others navigating similar darkness. “It was really important for me to write all of these songs, have these experiences, and then package it up and make something,” he says.

“I’m excited about sharing it because I just hope that it helps somebody else and maybe encourages them to take a look at themselves, hopefully trying to prioritise mental health and knowing that it’s okay to not be okay. I just want to put it out there and hope that it helps somebody in some way.”

Throughout our conversation, even in moments where it becomes difficult to revisit the past, Sutkowski is in high spirits. He’s already eager to get back in the studio, though not in an urgent way. After years of writing through pain he couldn’t fathom, he’s focused on playing shows, taking his songs on the road, and attaining a new form of catharsis.

“I have more to look forward to now than I have ever,” he says thoughtfully. “It is really exciting, and I’m really thankful. I don’t know what the future is, or what comes next, but I’m keeping on, you know what I mean?”

As Dirt Buyer III lands, the project — something formed just for kicks — feels truly fulfilled. And while Sutkowski doesn’t quite know what’s next, and isn’t in any hurry to find out, he can tell me one thing for certain with a gracious, assured smile: “I feel like I’ve totally got all of the language now.”