Dirty Streets’ Justin Toland on Following A Feeling For ‘Who’s Gonna Love You’ (INTERVIEW)

Photo credit: Destiny Freeman

Longtime Memphis residents Dirty Streets will be releasing their new album Who’s Gonna Love You via Blue Elan Records on September 29th. It’s their first release with that label, but it’s at least their sixth album, with many miles of recording experience along with the way. This time, they worked with Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, John Prine) as Producer at Sam Phillips Recording Studio and built upon their longtime live ethos in substantial ways. 

In terms of songwriting for their album, the goal has always been to draw the audience into the song, but this time they took more risks in allowing for simplicity and building on a particular feeling for each song. Sound-wise, you’ll hear a powerful roots rock live feel alongside thoughtful delivery that definitely creates an enveloping vibe. I spoke with vocalist and songwriter Justin Toland about the band’s history of recording, the milestones that put them where they are now, and making sure to convey their personal truth in songs.  

Hannah Means-Shannon: Did geography play any part in working with Matt Ross-Spang as Producer for Who’s Gonna Love You?

Justin Toland: For a long time, here in Memphis, it felt like things were moving very slowly in terms of people building at all, but now the city’s kind of booming, and to have Matt here is amazing. He’s been doing a lot of cool work here, and in other cities, but now he’s building a studio here, and to have him operating out of this city is very awesome. He’s bringing a lot of cool band here to record, too. 

HMS: I’ve known people who moved just to be nearer to a Producer who they liked to work with. It’s a great position to be in.

JT: It’s fantastic and hopefully we get to work with him a lot in the future. I actually knew about Matt through proximity for about ten years. He’s known about town. He worked at Sun for a short period when he was younger. They still have a fully operational studio there. I knew that he’d done freelancing and that he’d recorded a Jason Isbell album. I heard later that he’d moved to Sam Phillips Recording and had been recording a bunch of bands over there. 

More recently, I heard a record he’d recorded with Sheep Dogs and I really loved the way the record sounded. I reached out to him and told him how much I loved the drums on that record, and he said we should make a record together. That was the seed that had been planted, but his career took off even more, so we really didn’t get a chance to talk to each other until our drummer’s brother was working at Sam Phillips. I’d see Matt and we started talking again, so it just kind of worked out.

HMS: It seems like those possibilities should always be kept in your back pocket. You never know.

JT: It’s often just timing, aside from something being a good idea. I knew it was a good idea. Once I sent him the demos, I knew the songs we had would be perfect for his production.

HMS: Dirty Streets have had a lot of experience recording, since this is your seventh album, though one was a live album, right?

JT: Yes, that’s crazy! I didn’t even realize that. I’m always thinking about each album by itself when we’re making it. I think our first album came out over ten years ago, though the first couple of albums that we did were completely independent and self-produced as ventures. It’s been kind of a long journey into making records and releasing them.

HMS: I know it’s easy for me to say, but I think that’s a sensible trajectory because you probably learned a lot of things through doing your own production that have been helpful for you later. Maybe you’re more likely to be able to express what you want in the studio, for instance. 

JT: Our first record was actually recorded inside of a music venue when it was closed. A friend of ours brought his recording equipment, and we basically used the venue as a studio space. We cut that record in a couple of days. While we were cutting that, I was still asking him a million questions. There were window AC units in this venue that we had to shut off while we were doing takes, and it was the middle of the summertime. 

Our whole first record, Portrait of a Man, was recorded with us just sweating so badly. Every time you got done with a take, you were so excited to listen to a take, but also to have AC blowing again! Since I didn’t know anything about recording then, I asked a million questions, and my friend let me try to do some mixing, too, which I was terrible at. I learned a lot from that because my mixes were all really bad. It taught me that production and recording are an art within themselves, and it taught me a lot about what I liked and didn’t like. 

We were very fortunate with our second record to work in an actual studio for the first time with a guy named Doug Easley, who had a studio in the 90s called Easley McCain in Memphis. They had worked on some Jeff Buckley stuff before he died, and with White Stripes. He was very knowledgeable about recording a live band and he also taught me a lot about how to get a natural feel in the studio. It was a good route for us to go, because we had a lot of offers to work with producers as a band right off the bat, and we could have gone that route, but at the time, I really didn’t think we were ready for that. We hadn’t really found our sound. Recording a couple of times more by ourselves actually helped us find our sound. By our third record, I felt like we started having a unique and definite sound. I’d also learned to write songs by then.

HMS: That is such a great point, because if you go into a studio and don’t know what you want, you can drift in so many other directions. 

JT: I definitely think that’s true. I think the thing that the Producer can bring the most light to is your songwriting. They can really push you in your songwriting. The one thing we always did try to do, as a band, was to focus on the songs and the songwriting. Now, when I look back on those first albums, even if the production is lackluster, I do still think there are some good nuggets of songs in there. 

HMS: Do you all tend towards a live style when recording these days?

JT: In this band, since the beginning, we’ve always recorded everything live. We’ve layered some stuff, but we rarely replace anything. The basis of every track is a live feel. On this record, for the first time, I tracked all the vocals live, too. The Producer was dead-set on trying to do that, and I think he was right. We got better takes. We were going to replace most of the vocals, but we ended up keeping almost all of them. Some of the guitar solos are even the live solos. I think that’s always been something that’s a part of the flavor of our band. 

HMS: It puts a lot on the line to try to do things live. 

JT: It takes some reckless abandon. Like all musicians, we can get obsessed with perfectionism and trying to get things exactly right. But I think working on those first two albums helped with that. By the time we’d gotten to our third one, we’d done something like 30 songs. The main thing I learned was to go with the take and trust other people. The more you listen to your favorite songs, the more you realize that there are lots of mistakes in there. The feel is the most important thing on a take, by far, to me. I know that’s kind of an old-school mentality, I know, because in modern day, it’s almost industry-standard to be perfect in the studio and have a perfect recording. I’ve been spoiled, now, and I’m not sure I could go back to doing that! The record doesn’t feel at all the same when you’re done with it.

HMS: I’ve heard that a few times from bands who have finally recorded live, that they can’t see themselves going back to the other way of doing things. I know that you all wrapped this just before the pandemic. Were you finding ways to work on other music during that time?

JT: During the down time, I did a soundtrack for a feature film that’s come out in the fall, called Jacir, by a director called Waheed AlQawasmi. I’d never done that before. I did an original score for that, and also wrote a ton of songs. I was just trying to keep the creative spark going, and it was enough to keep me distracted.

HMS: Didn’t Waheed do some of your videos, too?

JT: Yes, he’s directed a lot of our videos, and we have another one shooting this week. I’ve always had a respect for his art. I was originally going to play guitar on a few songs for the film that were more Blues songs, but it led to soundtrack work. It was a grueling process for me, but it was very rewarding.

HMS: It’s an amazingly different thing to work on. Most people don’t realize just how much music has to be created for a soundtrack.

JT: It’s challenging in that when you’re writing a song, you write to grab peoples’ attention to you, like when you’re playing live on stage. You want to draw people in. When you’re doing a soundtrack, you want to draw people to the scene, but not necessarily to the music. You want people to not necessarily notice the music, but to feel it. That was an interesting challenge, but it also changed my whole view of how to write songs. I wondered, “Maybe you can do the same thing on a record. You could draw them in slowly.” So it’s really changing the way that I play music.

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HMS: It’ll be interesting to see that impact of this on the next album. With the song “Get Out”, I like how it addresses this big human feeling we have that moving our location can save the day or fulfill us, but that’s not necessarily true. There is some truth to that, but there’s also more to it in order to change or break free. 

JT: Absolutely. I think the song explores the whole idea. I’m just as guilty as anyone else of feeling that, especially being in a touring band. I go stir crazy, and I just want to go see all these places. We were on tour for a month and did 25 shows recently, and it was amazing to get back out there. But one thing about my life is that my parents were international school teachers and I moved all around the world. I lived in South America and Thailand, and my parents continued to move all around after I graduated high school. Then I stayed in Memphis, where I’ve been since high school. 

Having all these experiences of traveling a lot made me realize that there’s no place that’s really your savior. There are definitely places that I enjoy more than others, always, but if there’s something deeply rooted in your self-worth or happiness, it goes deeper than your situation. Moving can be the greatest decision. That’s very real. Moving to Memphis meant I met the guys in my band. But the song, like most of my songs, is more of an exploration than a statement. 

One of our songs, “Good Pills”, has been in a commercial, movie, and TV show, and I’ve had a lot of questions about whether I’m anti-drug or pro-drug. The whole song, though, is more about the experience of taking pills, and everyone has to take pills. It just explores that idea, and that’s how a lot of my songs are. A lot of times the songs do sound straight-forward, but hopefully they are not preachy. 

HMS: I noticed that about this album, particularly. As a listener, I’m not someone who gravitates toward preachy unless it’s protest music. It’s more honest to me if songs include multiple angles. 

JT: That’s one thing I’ve always strived for. My favorite songwriters are people who are able to express some form of truth in a round about way that really makes you get inside the question. You stop viewing it as an outsider. I feel that’s a goal as a songwriter, to draw people inside of that song with you, regardless of what it’s about. Even if it’s a song that’s as simple as being in love with somebody, if the song is really great, you can almost feel like you’re in love with somebody.

HMS: Often, a song gives people an opportunity to decide how they feel about something, too. In that way, it’s good that “Good Drugs” made people talk. A lot of what we’re talking about applies to the song “Alright”, which is open-ended in many ways. The video, which is by Waheed, is even weirder and funnier than the song, and pokes more holes in a feeling of certainty.

JT: Yes! I think, in the case of that song, the funniest thing for me is that it has the least lyrics of any song I’ve written. I took a “less is more” approach, but the idea of the song is pretty simple. I try to portray that more in the video, which was based on my concept. The song is really about persevering through things, even though I wrote it before the pandemic. 

It fit perfectly into that time where things were just happening, and it felt like life was falling down on you and beating you up, all while you were trying to tell yourself that it was going to be alright. I tried to write the song in a way that was so simple that you could read around it in all kinds of ways. I was trying to capture that feeling more than anything. Sometimes if you get too wordy, you lose the feeling, so this time I went with a simple form as an experiment.

HMS: Do you think that feeling is one that applies to the album more widely?

JT: There are a few really downbeat songs that are really emotional, but for the most part, it’s a lot of upbeat songs that are about longing and feeling alone, like “Who’s Gonna Love You”. That’s a song about longing and being on the road and gone all the time. Emotionally, it’s about how I work through being on the road, and I think you can feel that, that it’s been worked out, by the end of the song. When I’m writing a song, my goal is to exorcise a feeling and get it out. I want to turn it into something, and that alone is very therapeutic. That’s one of the only things that feels true to me. 

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