Documenting the Dirt Road
Design by Sophie Parrish
By Ronan Canzoniero
Emerson alum Zac Poulin shoots Amherst based art-rapper DJ Lucas’s interviews on Down The Dirt Road With DJ Lucas.
Each episode focuses on musicians from a different state where the Appalachian mountains reach. Such as Industry Standard from Glen’s Falls, NY, who makes what he calls “Glen’s Falls music” but what I would call “noise.”
The series, which is featured on the YouTube channel Dark World Records, Lucas’ own label, now boasts interviews with musicians from 13 of the Appalachian states alongside videos stretching back 14 years. For example, a music video for Lucy AKA Cooper B. Handy’s 2014 song “WET WET” shot like a found footage horror movie.
A majority are Lucas’ own genre-blurring songs that have commenters claiming he can take on any type of music. Well as long as the lyrics are about living in 413 (the area code for western Massachusetts) and smoking a lot of weed.
On November 11, I went behind the camera and interviewed Zac Poulin to explore how artistic collaboration spawns from friendship and why it’s important to give a platform for real people in Appalachia to show off their real music.
Q: The project started around 2021, when did you join?
Zac: I joined the project the March right after I graduated, so March of 2025. Lucas had been thinking about the idea since, I think, even before 2021 – he travels a lot up and down the East Coast, spent a lot of time in the Appalachian region and noticed things about the region that he wanted to share with people. So, once I graduated and once he saw some of my video work, he reached out. We’re good friends, have been for a while, and he said do you wanna work on this project and I said yes.
Q: How did you meet DJ Lucas?
Zac: We’re from the same town, he’s 10 years older than me. When I was very very young, I was a fan of his punk band Who Shot Hollywood. He was 17, I would’ve been like seven and I saw them perform at the Eric Carle museum. Fast-forward 10 years later and I saw him on a podcast called no jumper and I looked him up and saw that he was from Amherst and so I tried to buy weed from him. And then time went on and we just realized that we knew each other and kind of had similar outlook on life and being from the same place really helped.
Q: What is your process for finding musicians?
Zac: There’s a few people that we had in mind that we knew we just couldn’t miss. So, we spend the majority of our time with those people and then sometimes we just fall into random situations like someone will introduce us to their friend who makes music or we will hear about some unfaced rapper and we have to go find them.
Q: What’s the story with Industry Standard?
Zac: We were going to New York and [Lucas] said “this is about to blow your mind” and I thought “all right how bad can it be?” and then we met up with Industry Standard.
Q: The video with Industry Standard got 200,000 likes on Instagram, how do you feel about that?
Zac: [During our first meeting, we told ourselves] we have to fight the algorithm, like if anything blows up like we gotta delete the video. And then that blew up, but we didn’t delete the video so I don’t know what that says about our commitment to fighting the algorithm or perhaps the algorithm is stronger than we could’ve imagined.
Q: Which artists that you’ve interviewed do you listen to?
Zac: Well, we listen to them in the car. There’s a few, Adrian Michael the singer from West Virginia, I think he’s amazing. Dutch Smith, the Christian rapper from Pennsylvania, he’s very talented. We listen to a lot of Dang, he’s also from West Virginia – he has some bangers. My buddy Big Backwoods from Connecticut, I can’t get enough of his music. Yeah, those are the main ones. And also shout out Mook Sosa from Pennsylvania too, crazy man.
Q: Appalachian music is considered synonymous with American folk music, how have you dealt with this definition?
Zac: Yeah, I mean, I think with time definitions change and characteristics of certain regions definitely change and part of the series is to kind of reinvent that perception of Appalachian folk music as being the only type of music in that area because that area has definitely undergone significant change. The reason we chose Appalachia is, we thought it was pretty characteristic of America. You know there’s a lot of crossroad towns in Appalachia, railroad towns and also historical American Cultures and created identities because of all that industry and travel that has happened through the mountains and it’s also kind of isolated. That’s a big part of what makes someone behave in like someone’s social qualities is their level of isolation. We thought that the isolation at the mountains provided would be an interesting thing to examine in terms of how it affects artistry and musicianship.
Q: What comes next after Appalachia?
Zac: We wanna make a full length movie, an hour and a half, compiling all of these together and sell some DVDs and sell the soundtrack for the series from the songs that Lucas made along the way. We do want to have showings, probably three showings across the Appalachian ranges so people who are in the episodes can come.
Q: At what point do you begin filming?
Zac: It’s really a case by case basis. Generally we just go by the vibes. Both Lucas and I are pretty relaxed and also fairly stoned most of the time that we’re doing the episode so I think people often drop their guard down more quickly than if we were perhaps more legitimate looking. Which allows us to bring the camera out a little earlier. Also, I think we’re lucky with our subjects, they’re pretty eager to be on the camera. I mean most of them are musicians that have had relatively little commercial success, and see this as a big opportunity. Most of the time people are their authentic selves, we are able to find people and break into their core. It’s just something that we’re both good at. But there are some people that we can tell are performing for the camera and if we don’t think that is relevant to their story or their music, then we just won’t include them.
Q: What filmmaking styles are you trying to emulate?
Zac: I do think Emerson helped me develop my eye. I studied journalism there and I had a few professors who really helped me develop my eye for getting the best possible shot. I would say all of my senior journalism professors. I probably just took everything I learned from them and applied as much as possible. I’ve been watching a lot of Anthony Bourdain after the series and I’m just realizing it’s pretty similar, but I hadn’t watched that before starting. I think the style of myself and a lot of these artists is pretty much just doing what works as gracefully as I know how, not really trying to reach above my capabilities. I think that results in an even better project than trying to do something that’s over your head.
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Universal, Sony, and Warner own 68% of the music industry; Harry Styles thinks straight white men never win the Grammy for Album of the Year; MTV is shutting down at the end of this year, although it died many years ago; Pitchfork, “The Most Trusted Voice in Music”, is owned by Condé Nast which also owns Vogue — no wonder The Life of a Showgirl got a 5.9; and worst of all, Sombr has over 55 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
In the ruins of a music industry that once supported originality, independent and underground music scenes have popped up and responded with artists like Yuno Miles and 100 gecs.
These are artists that look like and sound like they went to our high schools, and didn’t take music classes.
Taking on the role of documentarians reporting on a community that is consistently refused to be addressed, DJ Lucas and Zac Poulin excel in finding these artists.
Artists that we could sit in the back of pre-calculus with while Ms. Andrews pedanticizes about determining limits through algebraic manipulation.
Artists that we could be friends with.
And we want to see our friends win.