Full Q&A along with links and streams can be found below.

Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)

Our band consists of me, Scott Cryer and Rob MacDonald.  We are from Toronto and have had a history of writing in many different styles almost to a fault…heavy to soft, rock to pop to Americana to the blips and bleeps of electronica.  In our most recent album, Canadian Beach, we’ve focused on Americana for the most part with tinges of indie rock and electronica here and there.  The lyrics on the album largely consists of tributes/support/respect to the underdogs in the world.

Our sounds has frequently dipped deep into layered soundtrack-esque tones that have been shaped to a fair degree by our friend Wayne Lorenz.  Wayne comes from the school of Daniel Lanois and in reality works with him on a regular basis.  Although Wayne only provided advice and support on Canadian Beach, Wayne’s spirit and influence is there.  I think he’s burned his influence into our DNA over the years.

The style of Canadian Beach has also been influenced to a significant degree by our friend in Sweden, Christer Bjorklund.  Christer played drums and mixed most of the album. He also had some of his musician friends play bass (Urban Hed) and organ (Severer Magnusson) who are killer players.  Christer somehow was able to make the recordings sound larger than life and airy with lotsa space for the notes to bounce around in.  He has a great pop ear and hopefully we’ll get to record with him and the other stellar Swedes again.

One thing we’ve always like to work with that adds a real character to vocals is gang vocals.  For one of the tracks on Canadian Beach (Writer’s Block) we had singers from around the globe contribute to create our own Dirt Farmer choir.  Contributors included,  from Canada, (Jennifer Foster (former back up singer with The Pursuit of Happiness…great band by the way), Peter Murray (bass player extraordinaire), James Clark (a local Toronto pop star), and from the US (Jeff Roberts (who has his own batch of beauty songs) and Mary Oginbene who is the singer for the ultra cool surf goth big blue Arizona gritty urban band…The Lovely Intangibles) and from the UK, Jim Pearson who is a probably one of the best songwriters you haven’t heard of…yet!  Jim also fronts the band, Scaredycats. We’re probably going to keep doing this in the future because it’s fun as hell.  With the ease of sending tracks back and forth across continents and oceans, connecting with people you admire has never been easier.  Some real magic can come out of these collaborations that would have never been possible, in a practical sense, only 10 years ago!

What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to stay the course?

When I was 12 years old, Bradley White was playing acoustic guitar for 3 girls and would have been 11 at the time.  The girls were cooing…oh bradley!  I knew I must learn guitar immediately!  I wound up getting an old beat up Kay guitar from a neighbour and then asked my folks for lessons.  They told me, “we don’t have any talent so why should you!”.  Undaunted by that, I proceeded to play the hell out of that thing about 6 hours per day.  My folks thought there must be something to my request after all and then they set me up with a years worth of lessons from a guy named Paul Harman.  He was cool in that right from the beginning, he’d teach me 3 chords and say to come back next week with a new song from them.  I was always making and writing my crappy little songs, loving every one of them.  You could say I had a relationship with music growing up.  It was always there for me.  Always comforting.  Still is to this day. I get twitchy when too much time goes by without playing (like a week on vacation somewhere).  On vacation, I’ll wind up finding music stores just to go in and play a bit.  I get inspiration continuously by simply hearing and watching all of the incredible talent that is out there.  With technology now, so many musicians can get great recordings from their basement (like me) and have so many venues where to post it online.  There is so much good music out there.  It kills me from time to time.  I’ll stumble upon a band I really dig, that I’ve never heard anything about before, and they’ve had a million plays on youtube or whatever.  It’s like, how the hell did I not know about this band??!!!!

Who or what are your biggest influences when it comes to your creativity?

Biggest influence for me has always been other musicians who I play with.  Of course Rob has had a massive influence on me over the years in terms of playing and the appreciation of sounds that are off the beaten path.  Rob has always been a trailblazer in finding odd quirky music that after a couple listens it’s like, wow! this is beautiful!  Martin Tielli of the band, The Rheostatics was a big influence on me as well.  Me, Rob and Martin rented a house together in the early 90’s and through our endless jams I really got a sense of freedom with music.  It was ok to get dramatic and not sound exactly like stuff you’d hear on mainstream radio.  I mean that in both a musical and lyrical sense.  As a youngster I think it was all of the folkies in Brampton, Ontario who really shaped my sense of melody and songs as a standalone, solid piece of art.  Geoff Barnes, Ken Moore, Bart Graham, Kevin Todd; all childhood names that did not reach the stars in music celebrity but each of whom, profoundly affected the way I approached music.  Playing with those guys and stealing whatever tricks I could from each of them, it pulled me deeper into the fact that music can really impact someone to the core.  Emotion!  Those guys weren’t afraid to embrace emotion in music and still to this day, if the emotion ain’t there, the music doesn’t do a lot for me.

I’d say of other recording artists out there, the biggest influences on me have been; Bruce Cockburn, The Cars (I learned how to riff by learning every Elliott Easton lick on their first album), Gary Numan (the power of synths and mood), Lloyd Cole (great storyteller), Morrissey (humour and attitude and killer music all combined), Thomas Dolby (melodies and gorgeous layers of sounds) and Daniel Lanois/Wayne Lorenz (just listen to their new album Goodbye to Language and you’ll see what I mean – music that is emotional and music douses your brain in musical landscapes that stay with you long after listening.  It’s a stunning album).

How is your new release different than previous ones? Did you set out to accomplish anything specific?

I guess I covered this above but in a nutshell, we wanted to produce a cohesive collection of songs that were what we considered to be, songsmith-worthy.  We tried to craft the songs in a way that lyrically made sense and were relatable by most people (again, the underdog theme was a common thread throughout), punchy music to tap into the adrenaline of the listener and colour, lots of colour in an attempt to paint big soundscapes that pull you in.  We have planned to create a series of 3 albums  from songs we’ve wrote over the last couple years.  The next in the series will be  Canadian Sugar which will be a collection of pure pop songs followed by Canadian Conundrum which will tap into quirky songs that we also love to write.

Do you face any challenges as an indie musician in a digital age? On the flip side, how has technology helped you (if it has)?

Well, the challenge is making money!  It’s interesting.  We released a self-titled album 10 years ago that did pretty well on iTunes.  We’d get lovely little cheques several times each year because folks actually clicked on the I”LL BUY IT!  button.  10 years later releasing Canadian Beach, we’re getting hardly any sales on iTunes but loads of plays on Spotify/Apple Music etc.  However, for each play we’ll get about $0.000000045 cents.  I’d say more people on the planet know about us and listen to our music now, but the income generated from those plays is significantly less than what we got before.

Technology has definitely helped in our ability to submit songs for publishing purposes, being used in film, recorded by others.  There are a wealth of websites out there where you can submit music quite easily. Success with them is a different story but the opportunities are there that were obscured and way less visible before.

Technology has also helped us and countless others in being able to record fine quality recordings in your mancave.  I remember as a kid looking into studio’s that were dark with the exception of blinking coloured lights on gear and thinking it may as well have been a NASA creation.  Now, I got my own damn blinking lights!

As I mentioned earlier, technology has also allowed musicians separated by oceans to record together. You can cast such a wider net in terms of collaboration these days it’s mind boggling.

How do you feel about streaming services? Any romantic attachments to the physical formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, CDs?

Streaming…as indicated above, is great to have people in Brazil, Finland, Slovakia, wherever to hear your stuff.  However, streaming income just doesn’t pay the bills.

As far as romantic attachments go, I just got a nice turntable this past summer and have been playing all those slabs of vinyl sitting in my dusty milk crates.  Fun as hell.  And ya, that sound is great too.  Crackle, crackle…then warmth…ahhh.

Where can we follow you online and hear more music?

I’d say soundcloud is a good spot to visit us.

https://soundcloud.com/dirt-farmer-music

If you’d like to buy our stuff there is iTunes and bandcamp

https://dirtfarmer1.bandcamp.com/releases

Anything else before we sign off?

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that there is no good music these days.  Those people live in caves and don’t know what the hell they are talking about.  There is more accessible amazing music out there than there has ever been and it’s all just a click away.