Dustin Bird

GOCCM: Nice to meet you Dustin.

DB: It’s great to meet you too.

GOCCM: Where do you call home?

DB: Stirling

GOCCM: Stirling, really? My daughter lives in Tweed and Kiernan lives in Belleville.

The song you wrote, “Wake Up,” and I quote, “shows the upbeat side of his songwriting prowess and solidifies his place in pop country’s wave of rising stars.” (Source: Rhythm & Boots)

DB: Thank you.

GOCCM: It talks about lost loves. Then I see you have songs, “Love Problem” and, “Unscripted.” Am I sensing a theme about love and its various phases here?

DB: It is. That whole string of singles I put out with “Wake Up” and “Love Problem” and “Unscripted,” and we put out a song called “People,” as well in the midst of that and that was kind of an outlier. That string of 3 songs are tightly connected within the concept of them in that different phases of love and phases of relationships. You know that was definitely something I felt like, as a writer, I need to get out. And, it was a certain sound, as a producer and artist, that I wanted to infuse and put out to the world.

That’s out there, and we are going to be playing those songs here tonight. We are also going to be playing some brand new ones that are kind of an evolution on that, and a bit of like a new direction for me, so I am pretty excited about that too.

GOCCM: Wonderful. And in “People” you mention different types of people. What type do you think you relate to the most?

DB: Well “People” is really genuinely about everybody. So it is a song for everybody and about everybody. It is really to say we all come from different places, and we all go through different stuff, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot that we can relate to one another with and I think that’s really all that song is about. For me, some elements of that song are personal to me, and other elements are things I have seen people go through, but I really just wanted to tie one big story together. There was a combination of a lot of people’s stories.

GOCCM: When did you start your musical career?

DB: Well, I am 23 now and I started I suppose when I was like 15 or 16 getting really into it. It has been a few years kind of figuring out who I am as an artist and who I am as a writer and learning to produce music. Back in high school I started producing. It was a lot of trial and error over the years figuring all that out.

In the past 3 years for me it has been a real commitment to country music, and up until that point I have been dabbling a little bit in pop, little bit in folk and everything so a lot of those influences you can kind of hear, and especially in the new stuff I pull in all kinds on influences — and it is like vocalizing who I am as a person, and that is really what I want to do with my music. That’s the core of what I want to get to: to be able to say, this is Dustin, this is me, this is who I am. So that’s pretty exciting for me, but it has been a journey and constant process learning to find my voice and learning to sing.

GOCCM: Certainly. For your audience to be able to see who Dustin is in your music will really help you connect with them.

DB: I hope so. We have had a lot of conversations, my team and I, about just how much do we want to stay confined to these outlines that have been kind of manufactured by the country industry. How tightly do we want to adhere to that.

And there is definitely elements of that that I love, like elements of mainstream country music, and there are elements that I am like over that, sick of that, and so anything that I am not entirely in love with I don’t want to put out.

And so, you know, if people connect with the music — that is the ultimate goal for me. And if radio loves one of the songs, okay great. But, if we are putting out a bunch of songs and not all of them are right for radio, then, that is cool too. It is all about being able to tell my story and hopefully people can connect with that and me through that.

GOCCM: So, as we said, you are a singer, songwriter and producer. Would it be safe to say your work on “Together We’re Strong” project would be a career highlight as a producer?

DB: For sure, I mean for production we had about 17 artists. That was a crazy project to pull together. It took us a long time, a couple months to string everything together. But, at the end of it, the response that we got and the amount of support we were able to achieve with that was incredible. It was a really big highlight as a producer to be able to work with all those people and to be able to put a song out with all those great artists on it.

As a songwriter, having co-written that song, having people connect with it on a personal level was really inspiring for me. I just thought it was great. I felt really, really fortunate to be able to do something like that, especially throughout Covid, when there was lot of hopelessness surrounding it. You know what I mean. So, we just set out with the idea of writing something that would pull people together and it would be cool to raise some money with this song for musicians and other members of the industry through the Unison Fund. That was the core of the idea.

I started to send out a preliminary draft of the project out to artists asking if they would like to be a part of this. Everybody was like for sure we will jump on. So a lot of tracking from home, a lot of redoing stuff as we couldn’t be together and bounce things off each other for harmonies and other parts. it was a lot of phone calls, a lot of dealing with whole element of it, but, I think it came together beautifully.

GOCCM: It did. Do you have off the top of your head approximately how much money you made for Unison for that project?

DB: That is still something we haven’t seen yet. Because it is quarterly and because the song came out May 30th, we are going to see the first month in the end of September, but then the majority will happen in December, so we will likely be able to donate to Unison at that point. We were hoping to do that earlier, but the song just took so long to put together, to get right, and to put all the pieces in place. So coming out with it May 30th was a further stretch from what we initially anticipated, but I am glad we were able to get it out that soon even.

Up until a few weeks prior to the release we were really, really tight in terms of what needed to be done, and all the stuff for PR and promo and everything, and getting the SnowBirds involved, and of course the Jennifer Casey crash was super devastating. We had to sort that out. She was like a massive supporter of the project. She really believed in it. We reached out to her family and asked if they were okay with us dedicating the video to Jennifer. So, we put the video in her memory. A lot going on with that “Together We’re Strong” project, and I am glad it is out in the world.

GOCCM: Well, and the people that you raised the money for, they are still going to need it in December. I mean, we are far from having this pandemic over.

Now, in July you teased us with a mention of a new project you were excited about.

DB: Yes, so, there is some stuff in the works, and that is some of the stuff I am going to play tonight. You will get exactly what it is tonight. It is coming real soon, so I don’t mind giving a few more details away about it.

We went into the studio and did some stuff live off the floor. As a producer, I usually just track my stuff in the studio, and everything is studio-polished. It’s all me. I am playing all the instruments. As cool as that is at times, as rewarding as it is, I still wanted the live feel. That is something that I haven’t been able to capture yet in my music.

“Unscripted” was produced by Jeff Dalziel, and he had a lot of great artists, players on that song, so they definitely brought that — but I wanted to get a band in studio to track these songs, and that’s it, you know . Really just keep it as real as possible. Without having shows all summer I have been craving that like crazy.

This show here tonight is going to be really exciting for me. I am excited now to play this show because it is going to be the first time with the band outside that live off-the-floor recording. We haven’t done a show, so I wanted to do something that was representative of what we do on stage and, at the same time, introduce new songs in a new way and just show a different side of me a little bit.

The new music is a live performance, so I am really excited about that. It will roll out this fall and we got some awesome looking videos with that. We captured it all that day in the studio. It is really, really cool and I am really pumped.

GOCCM: I wish you well in your endeavours. I am really glad we are getting to hear those songs tonight.

DB: Oh, I am so excited to play them. I hope I don’t forget the words. I was playing them the other night and I was looking at my notes to remember the lyrics so hopefully I don’t forget the lyrics. But, I can stumble through.

GOCCM: Yes, if you stumble along, you can fake it as we won’t know. We won’t have heard it anywhere else.

DB: That’s what I do in most of my songs . I don’t think I have ever sung one of my songs properly. I just make up verses, sometimes I swap them out. Who knows.

DB and GOCCM: (laughter)

GOCCM: But, you know if we want to hear the perfection we can just play your record, the CD, the whatever.

DB: Exactly.

GOCCM: But to see a person live, you don’t want it totally polished.

DB: That’s what I wanted to capture with the live off-the-floor was the lack of perfect polishing. I am working with a producer in Kitchener, one of my buddies, Shawn Moore, and he’s a great producer. He really nails it when it comes to tracking a band. We are co-producing this, and he was mixing all this stuff, and he asked me, how tightly do you want me to edit this. I’m like, don’t listen to me when it comes to editing. I am notorious for editing things really tightly and making sure that everything is flawless. I’m like, use your judgement on it and let it be what it is. Because I know if I get my hands on those tracks I am just going to polish them right to the grid, so I want to make sure that it retains a live feel, that it feels like the day that we tracked it. I don’t want to suck the life out of it. That’s what I wanted to capture.

You know this show here today, we’re not running any backing tracks, so it’s going to be a little bit more open in the sense that we don’t have any kind of filler. That’s not something I am against. I love back tracks. They make the sound huge and massive, but I want to make sure that we can do without them. I want to make sure we can play this show and have it sound massive and awesome without these tracks. I don’t want to lean on these tracks.

Because we can’t get into rehearsal space, I want to do this show live and see how it goes. I think it is going to slam. And then come next year or 2022 or whenever shows come back, I might throw some backing tracks in there, but that show is already going to rock. That’s my plan, and I hope people are going to like it.

GOCCM: I am sure they will, and anybody who is here today is just as pumped as the artists because you have been missing being on stage and we have been missing watching people on stage. So, it was worth a 5-hour drive for me to come.

DB: 5 hours!!

GOCCM: Yes, 5 hours to get up here to Barrie. This will be my first drive-in concert. So, I am really looking forward to it.

DB: Thank you for making the trip. That is a long trip and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and let us talk about ourselves a little bit.

GOCCM: You haven’t had as many interviews this summer.

DB: Oh no, We had interviews for “Strong.” We were renovating a home studio during that PR campaign, so I am like wearing old tattered shirts with sawdust all over them and underwear 😁 so I’m throwing on a jacket to get on Skype and do a CTV thing, and that’s been the experience for interviews.

It’s easy I guess in that sense, but it’s not really the same as going into the studio and sitting down and having a good chat. so I appreciate you being here and just having a chat with us. It is, honestly, refreshing .

GOCCM: Oh good.

DB: It’s exciting and it kind of brings some life back into it where I am not behind a screen all the time.

GOCCM: Yes, I think we are all craving personal contact. I mean as much as we can’t touch each other, but at least we are within the vicinity of each other and no screen in between.

DB: It is weird. I jumped onstage at a recent drive-in concert with another artist. The drive-in thing is cool, but it isn’t the same. I really want to get back to that, so I am glad that we can do things like this that is a step in the right direction. Let’s be safe, responsible and let’s work hard so that we can get back to that and not mess around in the meantime.

It is just so draining and weird to be behind a screen just doing social media lives. It is fine and sure it’s exciting, but you go on a live for an hour, and it’s just not the same. There’s no in-person energy. It’s not the same way of communicating. Let’s get back to live. Let’s get back to doing it.

GOCCM: Let’s get back to pre-Covid days. Well it’s been great to talk to you and I look forward to seeing you on stage tonight.

DB: Thank you.