We caught up with Jackson Dean during C2C week for an interview about his relationship with the UK, ‘Fearless’ and more.
I feel like you need like a loyalty stamp card at this point coming back to the UK so much. How are you enjoying it? I feel like you’re now developing that relationship with the fans…
I really do. I love your accent and I really enjoy the passion over here. I’ve seen so much vinyl of mine over here and I’ve signed some. I’d say we have a lot of people ask for vinyl. It’s coming back. It’s something tangible that you can hold and cars don’t come with CD players.
There’s a lot of authenticity in it, that old school feeling that I feel runs through your music – that always has been like a foundational thing – nodding to the heritage but also keeping things current.
To be as good as them, to strive is kind of what I’m about. You know, they all did it their own way and now I do it in mine. Everything I’ve built has these little muscles. It’s not crazy, but that’s kind of what it all boils down to.
Before you signed with Big Machine, you had years honing your music and doing the independent thing. Was that important, in terms of honing your music and finding yourself?
Everything I did before I got signed got me to where I am now. I got signed while out of state. That was right before the time when people started started signing Tiktokers and that got out of hand. I signed my deal right in the midst of all that. It’s kind of crazy that that happened in that time. I came from the ground up, out of state 1000 miles away. They called me from Nashville and it took me a while to warm up to Nashville. I really loved making music and everything that I had made. I don’t want to have a record in Nashville be a dark horse. It took me a while to be like ‘okay, let’s do this’. I love making music with my boys in Baltimore – those were the first couple of records that we did. It’s incredibly important. You’re not going to give me a bunch of money and I’ve never played a show before it doesn’t make any sense.
You almost want to have found your sound and developed who you are as a person and then come to Nashville to polish it up a little bit and find the right writers and producers to work with.
The Nashville stuff definitely makes it cleaner. But how dirty can you make the clean? That’s what I’m interested in. This record coming through the speakers really is crystal clear, but the sounds coming through them are awesome. It’s not just clear cut country, there’s like a rocky grungy kind of thing, which I think is what makes it so interesting.
I want to talk about ‘Fearless.’ Obviously, you put multiple versions out earlier this year, with different flavours. Why was it important to give that song different aspects?
‘Don’t Come Looking’ and ‘Fearless’ were on the same half of Greenbrooke. We always thought that ‘Don’t Come Looking’ was the right hadn’t and ‘Fearless’ was the left. When we came back and revisited the track, I’ve just sang it like 400 times over that year. You start casting your magic differently, your voice gets stronger, you start figuring out different places to breathe and like where to strain and do runs. There’s a thing about live music that is constantly evolving. It’s such a free art and you get one shot. We wanted it to be the second one to radio but we could not put that version out there – I sound like a little boy. I just sang it 4 or 500 times. So, ‘The Echo’ came and I thought we could get aggressive and then the next day we got back it was electric. Then we thought, we need something just a little bit more palatable and that was the echo. We just kept coming back to it, we took out the high hats and the first chorus we gave some vocal frequency sounds. We took some guitars out and we amplified and put some delay on it, so you have a whole new delay on the chorus. It’s literally like taking a camera and just changing the lens.
It’s almost like your gallery wall, displaying different versions of the song, with different colours.
Yeah, that song is full, so many moments to where you can have the audience in the palm of your hand. Those are the moments you pull back and then go straight in for those those special moments.
So, last question, you did the video recently with your family. What was that like?
So, that’s my brother Kyle – my oldest brother. He’s a twin. So, Kyle worked at a pirate ship in Eastport. It’s a kids thing – it’s very improv. I did it for a summer so he and I can run trips. It was a blast. I would have an infant here and an infant here, out on the chop on the bay, on the bow of the boat, with six foot waves. So he has that experience. I called him and was like, ‘Yo, bro, I’m gonna need you for three days’ and his wife, we call her Ernie. They had no idea what it was going to look like. I think they got like a rough outline of what the videos are like. They had no idea what they were walking into, but they came for three days and it was a beautiful, special thing to have on film. It just made sense to me and there’s there’s no like backstory of why we did that.
It came out beautifully. Thanks for coming back to the UK yet again!
