Comment on this story What: Dixie Dirt with Glass When: Thursday, June 17, 9 p.m. Where: Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria Cost: $5   What: Dixie Dirt with Divorce When: Thursday, June 24, 9 p.m. Where: The Pilot Light Cost: $5, benefits the club

Depression brings out the band’s best

by Joe Tarr

Sunlight beats through a window at Barley’s Taproom in the Old City, grazing the faces of most of Dixie Dirt. The group is getting ready to release its phenomenal second CD, On Our Way Like We Never Met, which has been two years in the making.

After several trials and errors and some heavy debt, the band has produced something they’re all proud of. Yet there’s an unmistakable pall hanging over our conversation this afternoon, one the June sun can’t quite burn off. The band is friendly, but there’s a definite gloominess. I wonder if it might be me, so I order another drink and try to wade forward.

The band members—with Kat Brock on lead vocals and guitar, Angela Bartlett on guitar, Brad Carruth on bass and keyboards, and Pete Bryan on drums—are all moody weirdoes, which is partly why I like them so much. And there’s a definite mopiness to their lyrics and songs. But oddly enough, listening to Dixie Dirt play is not a gloomy experience. Hope and compassion poke through the misery.

“Every song written during this time was related to some sort of desperation, which is what we wanted to call the album. It deals with that subject in every single song,” Brock says.

“I think [the music] is uplifting in that we’re not alone in our desperation. So it’s going to be OK,” she adds.

Which is probably why the band’s music seems to register with so many people in town, which is no stranger to melancholy. It took the band far longer than expected to release the CD, a follow up to 2002’s Springtime is for the Hopeless and Other Ideas. Things didn’t always go as planned.

After writing and performing a rock opera for Valentine’s Day 2003, the band intended to move to Athens, Ga. But the college town, known for its competitive music scene, turned out to be more expensive than they realized. So Dixie Dirt started working on its second CD, which they recorded last year at Memphis’ Easley Studio, where a number of indie rock and experimental bands have recorded. The members spent a few thousand dollars to make the recordings but were unhappy with the finished product. They intended to make a pop record, but ended up with something that just depressed them.

“It just didn’t sound like us,” says Bartlett.

“You could hear the hesitation in it,” Brock adds. “Most people probably couldn’t hear it, but we could. Playing in a studio costs so much money it’s about playing to get it done, not playing when you feel it.”

Rather than release an album they were unhappy with, they decided to try again. In the meantime, they’d also written a lot of new material, so the album mutated once again, with some songs being scrapped for newer ones.

This time they recorded it with Jason Boardman, the owner of the Pilot Light who has played with several bands, including Dark Logik. They say Boardman understood better what they were trying to do and gave great feedback. The Easley recordings are perhaps a little more humable; the ones Boardman recorded are more expansive and heartfelt.

The centerpiece of the album is “Teeth,” a sprawling song that clocks in at over 21 minutes. The song wasn’t supposed to be that long, but when they recorded it a spontaneous 7-minute instrumental movement got tacked on the end. “We couldn’t repeat that song if we wanted,” Carruth told me not long after it was recorded. “I was thinking, ‘Please, please don’t anyone stop, keep going, keep going.”

The song took months to write and changed several times, gelling after Brock wrote the lyrics, which go in part: “You are an angel when you sleep, you’re an angel when you sleep, a white-noise symphony is creeping through your teeth, is creeping through your teeth.”

“What does it mean to show your teeth? You could be angry or smiling,” Brock explains. “I incorporated both of those things in it. It’s more of a song to myself. It’s OK. You don’t have to be afraid of the dark, nightmares. There are angels looking over you. And [the song is] a call for help. ‘Let me help you. It’s going to be OK.’”

There are plenty of other desperate moments on the eight-song CD. “Lipstick” (which is where the album title comes from) is about how tenuous relationships can be. “I’ve had so many one-night conversations with people, and you think [the bond] is going to stay, and you see them the next day, and it’s ‘hey’ and it’s gone,” Brock says. “There’s some sort of sadness in feeling a connection with someone and it just dissipates.”

The album could also be heard as an angry love letter to Knoxville, a place that is under their skins, as though they’d rather fight with Knoxville than make love with any other city. “Small Town Crisis” and “Boulevards” have a particularly strong sense of Knoxville: the first about a city trying so hard to be something it isn’t; the second about Fort Sanders and “fun drunken nights you’ll never have again and wondering where it went,” Brock says.

Part of the hopefulness of the music comes from the fact that the band members all clearly love each other, which leads to intuition, intensifying the passion. Possibility is presented.

Or maybe they need the depression, the frustration, the extremes of self-doubt to see beauty and create some of their own.

“The depression is the thing that makes it happen,” Bartlett said at a practice a few months ago, and everyone agreed.

“It’s like the triumphant depression that stomps everything else out,” Carruth adds.

June 17, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 25 © 2004 Metro Pulse