SONG: “Dirt Poor”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Dirty emotions: Microbes in soil may affect hormones tied to love, mental health and social bonds”, PhysOrg, 26 August 2025, as used in the post “Dirty love: Soil steering our emotions”.
ABSTRACT:
This was a fun one, and I actually like the way it sounds. It came together quickly, based on a simple chord progression on a nylon-string acoustic on which the D string had popped in the middle of the night, so I restrung it an octave lower than usual. I guess this is the inverse of the Nashville trick of replacing the D string with a high-E tuned down to a D an octave higher to make a fake 12-string. I guess this is a Nashville fake baritone guitar?
The structure of the song followed that progression, and was actually made with Hannah Marcus in mind, a lo-fi songwriter from the 90s and 00s who I’ve only discovered in the last month or so because John Darnielle posted a song of hers up on the Bluesky. I don’t know if she ever really did this particular thing, but she does seem to do some surprises in progressions that are similar – the thing is to have a verse of three lines, not four, which goes into a fourth line that uses different chords and is a different length, so it’s basically a mini-chorus. It was only after I recorded that, some percussion, and a bass line that I got into a whole other kind of influence, which is that I noticed the bass line was familiar, and then I realized it had the same pattern, in the first half, as “Unsalted Butter” by The Long Winters. So I listened to that song a few times, and got very fascinated by the production of it in a way I hadn’t been before — all the layers of elements (female backing vocals, electric guitars, an organic drum that comes in over a drum machine after a verse or two has gone by), the dynamics of the thing.
The production really worked well. I was actually surprised at how it sounded in my headphones.
The words came last, sort of all at once, and are neither like Hannah Marcus nor The Long Winters, and not really like myself, my usual self. Rhyme and meter are mostly accidental in this (although I couldn’t resist rhyming “rich” as in earth with “ditch” as in the furrows in which we trap ourselves). I admit the repeating “make sure you wash your hands” at the end was done with The Long Winters in mind, but the Song Exploder episode about “The Commander Thinks Aloud” and not “Unsalted Butter.” The sentence “Make sure you wash your hands” really sounds more like Dead Kennedys lyric, I think.
It’s about soil controlling our emotions. I hope but am not entirely sure that comes through in the song as written. Where “Unsalted Butter” sometimes sounds like a hard-boiled detective thriller, this song’s lyric I guess sounds like a dirty Southern gothic. I wrote the words basically all last night, did a few brief revisions, and grabbed an hour of empty-house-time to sing at volume. I also did the backing electric guitar — one of those layered elements, though done really differently — by micing an amp, something I haven’t done in literally years. I had to squirt contact cleaner into the jacks to get a signal, even. But it’s a for-real, organic amp, the same Yamaha I’ve used since 1990.
With more time on the words, I probably would have introduced something about puppets, about being controlled, but maybe that would not be an improvement. The dirt doesn’t really have any desires. It just changes us from the way we used to feel to the way we feel now.
LYRICS:
She sprayed pesticide In the compost pail
And the smell in the kitchen Would make anyone sick.
The rain fell … So we were trapped inside
and the mud grew thick / And I felt dirty / And I couldn’t get cleanThere was black ….Under my fingernails
As something shifted Beneath my feet
We couldn’t hold hands … As we drove down the street
and the mud grew thick / And I felt dirty / And we couldn’t get clean
We couldn’t get clean…[SOLO/V3 2 lines]
We couldn’t get clean …
My concrete shoes, my miner’s pick
and the mud grew thick / And I felt dirty / And we couldn’t get clean
We couldn’t get clean…[SOLO/V4 2 lines]
We couldn’t get clean…
And the mud grew thick/ And I felt dirty / And we couldn’t get clean
It felt like worms Crawled around my bones
Inside our home Soap was a crime
It felt like… it wanted me to want you
but the mud grew thick / And I felt dirty / And we couldn’t get cleanWhat’s with that look, she asked /
And I said it was only an earthquake
Not a heartbeat, not gas[BRIDGE]
& Things grew thick … Up from the ground
And I felt dirty … and things fell down
The earth is rich… From ditch to ditch
…And we are dirt poorOUTRO
We are dirt poor…
Make sure you wash your hands (x7)