Following the release of his album – Greenbroke – we interview Jackson Dean about the genesis of the record, the evolution of his sound and working with Luke Dick.
Hi Jackson, how are you doing today?
Not too bad!
It’s been three months since the release of Greenbroke, how have you found navigating its release and sharing this project with the world?
It’s a lot and it’s a lot of go go go, a lot of things happening at once. It feels good to let it go. I held this for a while, even the first five have been out for a while, so it felt really good to let it go.
Have there been any responses from fans that have surprised you with the direction they interpreted the songs?
Yeah, there’s a couple of them where people have taken them in a direction that I hadn’t intended, like ‘that’s not what it’s about but I like it.’ ‘Love You Anymore’ had a couple of interesting ones, ‘Trailer Park’ people are always intrigued by, but they’re also kind of stumped, like ‘what’s the deal?’ There’s a couple where people are on the same wavelength but a different page.
You obviously worked with Luke Dick on this project and he’s such a legend in the industry. Can you talk about the first interactions that you had with him and how he came to be a part of the project?
Yeah, so Luke writes for the same publishing company that I do – Little Louder – and I went over to his house one day and we just kind of hung out and got to know each other. It took us about two or three times of writing to where we actually got something, but the first time we just really hit it off and we started writing demos together. I remember one of the first ones was ‘Don’t Come Lookin” and I just kind of liked where that was headed. I mean I lived off Luke Dick demos for a while and some of them weren’t even songs I wrote, they were just songs where I liked what he was doing and how he was doing them. There’s really no one else in town that I’ve worked with that are producing the kinds of sounds that he is.
Well there’s such a specific sound of this record, it’s completely timeless and a very ‘outlaw country’ vibe, a sound that I think a lot have people have moved away from and you needed a very specific producer to kind of draw that out.
I haven’t heard a lot of those sounds in a really long time and it was really awesome to get to work with him. I just saw him yesterday and it’s always a privilege to work with him.
You’ve talked a bit about some of the songs that weren’t yours that you lived with, but I know you wrote every song on the record, so was that something that was very important to you in leading out and introducing yourself?
Oh yeah, I mean before I got signed, I had put out three records by myself that I wrote all by myself, so when I got to town and they were like ‘hey, we want to put you in a room with some other people, I thought absolutely no, we don’t do that.’ I did it a couple of times and then I got it. It was really important to me, I didn’t want to cut something that I hadn’t had a hand on.
Well you do want to be able to stand behind every song on the tracklist. I know before Nashville you had spent some time in Maryland and California, can you talk about how that journey has shaped the kind of music you’re putting out?
Well, there’s a good music scene in Maryland, there’s a lot of blues and country and there’s a circuit of like 15 of us who’d bop around, especially in the Baltimore scene – there’s a lot of hip hop and alternative in Baltimore. My drummer and I have been making music together since we were 14 and he’s done it for a decade in Baltimore, the first of my stuff he and I did together, so home was very influential to me. There’s so much great stuff there, and great venues now – the Merriweather, Ram’s Head… It was always around, at least to me, it was always there.
Landing in Nashville then, was it a big learning curve getting into the town and the industry?
It was really interesting because I didn’t move down here and then go and play all those writer’s rounds and get noticed, I had been noticed from out of state, so I came in and I was already writing with, off the bat, with Casey Beathard, Luke Dick… really top of the line writers. So, immediately, it was like ‘let’s get in there and after it,’ automatically I felt like the stakes were raised. In the beginning, I was trying to be a sponge and learn as much as I could, I was having to learn a whole new set of skills, aside from my own.
Leading onto the record, how did the idea of ‘Greenbroke’ take place and what did it mean to you?
Greenbroke didn’t really shape up until I started writing for the second half of the record, it was ‘Love You Anymore,’ ‘Don’t Take Much,’ ‘Fearless’ and ‘Don’t Come Lookin” – I didn’t really have a title for the record yet, but I was back home and I think I had just had my wisdom teeth yanked out. I was sitting in my chair, staring out at the screen door and it took me a couple of weeks to flush out. I had the rough outline and I took it to Jeff Hyde and asked him to help me tweak it and it just kind of came to life.
Do you find that happens often – leading with the melody rather than the lyrics?
It can go one way or the other, cos I’ll play for hours and in those hours things will come to me. It takes a bit of time for that sort of stuff. I think as soon as I started writing Greenbroke, I knew it needed to be the title of the record – it had never been written before, and I thought it could be so cool. I took the song to the studio with my band in Baltimore, and my guitarist came up with this kick ass solo and I thought ‘that’s it.’
So what’s up for the rest of the year?
So for the rest of the year, I’m writing a good bit when I can and the rest of the time, I’m pretty much on the road until the week before Christmas. This year, I’m just playing every show that I can.
I’m excited for you – good luck with the rest of the year!
Thank you.
