Although they’d always played in bands separately, the pandemic saw the pair form the group they'd always wanted. Santa Maria and Moreland wanted to create a project that comprised “dance floor rock and roll.” Taking inspiration from their favorite bands The Strokes, Taking Back Sunday, and The Rolling Stones, along with studying the dance-y pop stylings of The Weeknd and Gorillaz, they formed The Dirty Shirts.
Their debut album, In The Get Up From The Get Go, dropped earlier this month.
We caught up with Santa Maria shortly before the album’s release at Wild Detectives, after which he was set to go to Luminous Sound, where he recorded most of the album, to finish final mixes.
“We were both playing for a bunch of different country bands in Fort Worth at the time, and we're always sending each other stuff,” Santa Maria says. “We both lived in different places most of the time that we've known each other, so when we finally both lived in Fort Worth, we pretty much immediately started getting together and writing, and that was right before the pandemic started."
The timing sort of worked out for the old friends.
"We were kind of out of our regular jobs at that point, and I think like a lot of people took the pandemic to follow something they’d wanted to do for a while but didn't have the time," he says. "And it just kind of spiraled into this.”
During the first phase of lockdown, Santa Maria was focused on writing. He'd played guitar in several country bands for the past seven years and missed it. He tried to play sets via livestream, but, as he says, “playing to a phone wasn’t the same as playing to a crowd.”
Santa Maria says much of his writing time was also spent playing Scrabble with his wife, with “lots of wine, and lots of gin.”
Perhaps this was the inspiration for the Dirty Shirts’ song, “Gin and Tonic,” a groovy ode to the cocktail, rife with thumping bass lines and existential lyrics. This is one of Santa Maria’s favorite songs on the album, and one that proved to be a crowd favorite at a listening party for the album, where there wasn’t a single foot that wasn’t moving on the floor as the song played.
One of the first songs Moreland and Santa Maria wrote together was “Shake,” a glorious rock anthem about feeling captivated by a woman on whom Santa Maria lays his eyes for the first time. Complete with infectious guitar licks and pounding drumbeats, Santa Maria finds himself asking, “Where did the air in my lungs go?”
“I took an idea that I had from a song that I'd written years ago,” Santa Maria says. “I said, ‘I like the way this sounds, how do we make this sound current? And how do we make it sound something that's our own.’ A lot of those early songs came from me and Cam getting together. We both play with other people from Thursday until Saturday, we’d both sleep all day Sunday, and then Monday was kind of the start of our weekend."
Santa Maria says those sessions would start in the early afternoon and go well until dawn. Of corse, it wasn't all tedious work.
"There was some drinking and there were some joints passed around," he says. "But, you know, we spent a lot of time figuring out what we thought our sound and our direction was. Cam’s baselines are a huge part of that, and move the songs along.”
In Santa Maria’s home studio, he would record most of the basis of the songs. He and Moreland first started adding elements to the songs, such as live drums, at Modern Electric Studios, but ended up finishing the majority of the album at Luminous Sound, a favorite of Kirk Franklin, Erykah Badu and Vanilla Ice.
On another song, “Please Me,” The Dirty Shirts collaborated with Remy Reilly to create an R&B and soul-inspired sound for the record. The song first came to Santa Maria after he bought a keyboard as a wedding gift to himself.
“I love, love, love Motown,” Santa Maria says. “That's my favorite type of music, hands down. I came up with the bass line for the song, and I was messing with the song on an electric keyboard, and it came out kind of poppy — and then almost Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye-ish. I put the synth on it and said, ‘OK, now that sounds like a Dirty Shirts song. I showed my wife a demo, and I already knew that I wanted a female vocalist on the song, not just a background vocal. The first thing that came to mind to her was like, ‘Oh, you need to call Remy.’"
“I would put Dallas up against any music scene in the country ... It's a group of musicians and people that love music and are really supportive." – Nick Santa Maria
tweet this
Reilly is a Dallas-based phenom who began making her mark in the scene five years ago at age 14.
"I'd been, of course, aware of her like everyone else," Santa Maria says. "She's amazing. She's so great, and she's such a pro at such a young age. I feel like that song has all the individual elements that make up a Dirty Shirts song.”
Santa Maria’s wife, Claire, was the muse for many of the songs on In The Get Up From The Get Go, but Santa Maria says his personal favorite is one called “Detonator.”
“My wife and I were both quite a bit wilder before we met,” he says. “I heard all these stories about her, and she was just a badass, and I wanted to write a song about a strong female character that just ran her scene, and that's what came of that.”
In The Get Up From The Get Go is very much a “Dallas” record, produced almost entirely locally, with Dallas musicians, producers and engineers. Noah Eichler engineered some of the album’s early sessions, with Grammy-award winning Tre Nagella adding the finishing touches.
While he is looking forward to touring, Santa Maria posits that no local music scene has a more collaborative spirit than that of Dallas.
“I would put Dallas up against any music scene in the country,” Santa Maria says. “It's a group of musicians and people that love music and are really supportive. People that are in one band will be super supportive of another band that has a completely different sound. And you'll get shows where if there are four different bands, you could have four different sounds and vibes on the bill. Dallas is home and it's where I always want to hang my hat, that's for sure.”
