Singer Dorothy Martin and her eponymous rock group will return to North Texas for a performance at the Granada Theater on Sunday, March 27. Up to this point, they have been among a crop of acts such as Halestorm, Greta Van Fleet and Highly Suspect that preserve the seemingly fading sound of contemporary and classic rock, all the while constantly fielding variations of the dreaded question, “Is rock dead?”
While Dorothy’s first album, cheekily titled ROCKISDEAD, is in fact a straightforward fist-pumping rock ‘n’ roll onslaught, the band's second album, 28 Days in the Valley, was a slightly more nuanced affair, steeped in blues and country earth tones under the guiding hand of producer Linda Perry. This time around, Martin says she’s finally following her own arrow, style be damned.
“I just tuned out any other voices from the past that said what direction I should go in,” she says. “I feel most myself doing rock ‘n’ roll, maybe with some elements of classic rock, but definitely with some elements of hard rock.”
All this has led to Dorothy’s upcoming third album, Gifts from the Holy Ghost, which was inspired by, among other things, a near-death experience involving one of her sound engineers. It was a sobering experience — one of many in Martin’s recent life — that fueled her desire to be in charge of the ship and refine her first love: songwriting.
“I always loved to sing, but what I discovered on my journey is how much I loved to write songs and lyrics,” she says, “because I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘musician’ — I can strum the acoustic guitar to write songs, but it’s a tool for me to express what I’m writing. Even more so I like collaborating with really great musicians. That gives me the wave to surf, so to speak. I don’t have a backup plan. I’ve always said, ‘If you have a fallback plan, you’ll fall back.’” Martin laughs at the idea that she’s riding a razor’s edge of a career choice and continues: “It might take a little streak of insanity, where you’re just like, ‘I’m gonna do this and I don’t have a plan B.’ It’s dangerous, it’s fun, it’s exciting. I feel like a total pirate when we’re out on the road. What’s more exciting than that?”
Martin is certainly not alone in that bit of insanity. The new album is packed with collaborators, mostly on the songwriting front. She’s co-written songs with rock stalwarts such as guitarist Keith Wallen of Breaking Benjamin and Adelita’s Way, guitarist Chris Traynor of Bush, producer/guitarist Trevor Lukather, former Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Jason Hook, as well as with Nashville-based folk singer-songwriter Audra Mae, who contributed the entirety of one of the album’s ballads, “Close to Me Always.”
“She wrote the song for her friend whose father passed away,” Martin says of Mae. “It was so beautiful I had to have it. She’s incredible.”
The album is expected to be out at some point in April while Martin and the band are on the road, but she remains tight-lipped on its actual release date.
The cavalcade of collaborators didn't create a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation, Martin says, but the opposite. In fact, she says the abundance of collaborators expedited things.
“[The process] is definitely influenced by the other people you’re working with, their energy,” she says. “When I’m writing with somebody, it’s like a relationship: Do you have good chemistry with the person? Are you in tune? When I have that with someone, it’s such a blessing, I keep writing with them. When we toured with Breaking Benjamin, Keith was like, ‘I want to work with you’ and we wrote a bunch of songs together. One of them is on the record, and a few of them I’m saving for the next record, and I will be writing with him more.”
"Elton John once said a great song can be written in 10 minutes. Those are the most fun, because it becomes a channeling session, where you become like a human antenna or receptor." –Dorothy Martin
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Conversely, Martin says the collaborative songwriting process did not yield an overabundance of songs, per Prince’s axiom of “You have to write 100 songs before you get one great one.”
“Sometimes you can write three great songs in a row,” Dorothy says. “We did about 40 songs for this record and then we pared it down to 10, and it was easy to tell what was going on the record and what wasn’t. I always say it’s like a cosmic download, like the lyrics are being cosmic-Fed-Exed into my brain. Elton John once said a great song can be written in 10 minutes. Those are the most fun, because it becomes a channeling session, where you become like a human antenna or receptor. I made a joke saying, ‘I think there’s an angel whispering these lyrics into my ear.’”
Given Martin's reverence for rock idols past and present, it's surprising that Dorothy is signed to Roc Nation, the hip-hop label founded by Jay-Z. As a nod to her recording home, Dorothy recorded a cover of Kanye West and Jay-Z’s chugging, guitar-driven anthem “No Church in the Wild.” Is this a hint of a sonic shift to come? Perhaps, but not necessarily soon.
“I kind of agree that a lot of rock outfits do sort of stick to the formula to preserve the sounds,” she says. “I actually haven’t consciously thought of it until now; that’s not something I’m necessarily interested in doing. I like to experiment. I like to incorporate and keep it cool. What’s new, what’s the same but a little bit different.
"I’d be open to even more hip-hop influence ... one of my favorite records right now is Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay-Z. It’s so cool! There’s no rules. Once you box yourself in, I think you limit yourself, and why would you do that? Music is about expansion and growth and keeping everything open.”
