Justin Martin
Courtesy Photo
Justin Martin is in a good mood. “I feel completely blessed right now,” he says on the phone. “I’m freaking out a little bit! All the stars have aligned.” His sophomore album, Hello Clouds, arrived last Wednesday (April 20), sandwiched by a pair of Coachella DJ sets. To top it all off, his album comes out on his birthday.
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Martin is known for his longstanding affiliation with Dirtybird Records, the San Francisco label he helped found. Ears perked immediately when he released “Sad Piano” in 2003 (through the label of former Everything But The Girl member Ben Watt). The track merged a pensive, hesitant keyboard line with other elements that were far more aggressive — limber bass, bursts of abrasive noise, pops and wizzes that suggested festive firecrackers. Martin followed this initial success with a steady drip of singles and EPs; his debut album, Ghettos & Gardens, came out in 2012.
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Much of the follow-up was written as Martin maintained a grueling tour schedule. “I don’t think I could hit the road harder than I did last year,” he tells Billboard. “I basically already toured every possible city you could imagine. Well over 150 tour dates in the last year.” The whimsical title of the record is a reference to the endless stream of airplane windows he encountered bouncing between gigs.
Hello Clouds was originally slated to come out last year. But Martin sometimes struggled to carve out time to write for the album. “It’s not easy,” he says. “I’m obviously terrible at it. If I could write as well on the road as I could back home in the studio I’d be way, way more prolific. But a lot of cool ideas come to you when you’re sitting there, gazing out the window.”
The producer now sees the delays are part of his blessed existence. “I really feel like every little bump in the road, whether it was missing a deadline or – that was actually the main thing, just missing deadlines – it actually gave me an opportunity to really polish the stuff I’ve been working on.”
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Though he toured last year without releasing the album, those dates functioned as an extended lab to tweak material that eventually appeared on Hello Clouds. “A lot of the field testing had to do with getting the mix down right, and making sure it not only sounds good in the headphones, but it sounds amazing rumbling through some massive bass bins in a club.” Some songs, like the title track, underwent more extensive revisions. “I kept fiddling with it,” Martin remembers. “It was good, but it wasn’t right. I kept adding little bits and pieces, especially with the bassline — making it more interesting — and the acid line. It started off as a really simple track and got more intricate as time went on.”
Martin is adamant that albums give an artist more leeway than a single designed to incite crowds into movement. “With a project like an album, as opposed to just making tracks for the dancefloor, you can get a lot more experimental and do a lot more songwriting,” he tells me. “It’s more about the body of the work than whether or not the track is going to bang in the club.” “After my debut I had a little more credibility,” he adds, which gave him additional flexibility to experiment.
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Accordingly, he worked with a number of vocalists. “Hold Them,” which closes the album, is one of the prettiest moments on the record; the song reaches back to the mix of melancholy and brawn that made “Sad Piano” so effective. “There was a really stripped down version of [“Hold Them”] that didn’t have the vocal,” Martin explains. “I was looking for some raw piano samples to add to the top of the track. It was just a happy accident that I found a track by this girl Mona that I’m just a huge fan of. It just sort of played on the top of what I was working on, and it just fit so perfectly.” He compares her voice to that of Bjork or Karin Dreijer Andersson, the singer in the Knife, and adds happily, “I lucked out with that one.”
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Several of Martin’s stories end in a similar way. Reflecting on the steady increase in the popularity of dance music, he again suggests that he’s been the benefit of good fortune. “It used to be if you played house music, you could play on a bigger stage, but you would play the 2 p.m. time slot,” he notes. “As the day went on, the music would get more and more agro. Now there’s stages that are completely dedicated to our sound. A lot of people stumble upon us after being sucked in by the big name acts.”
“It’s crazy, the last three or four years in particular, to see the wider audience embracing our music,” he continues. “Having the opportunity to have our own stage at festivals, it’s been a dream.”
Martin hopes to scale back his touring a little bit this year and work on some more remixes. Above all, he says, “I really want to enjoy myself.” I don’t know where it’s going,” he adds. “But I’m definitely having the time of my life.”