We were fortunate enough to not only spend some time with the wonderful Jackson Dean when he was last in London back in March (read HERE) but also witness his knockout set in Berlin as part of the German edition of Country to Country. Fast forward six months and we are on the verge on his eagerly anticipated sophomore album ‘On The Back Of My Dreams’ which will be released on September 6th via Big Machine Records (available to pre-save HERE) and is depicted as a textured, experiential body of work, where each song was derived from a flash moment of imagination from Dean’s mind, giving listeners a look into the depth of his artistry and leaving them with things to ruminate.
Hey Jackson, how are you doing buddy? “I’m doing good man, how are you?”
My throat is a bit ropey and I’d like to say it was due to partying too hard at The Long Road but it’s been kicking around a little longer than that. We all missed you though man, battling all the wind and rain without you. “Ha ha, I wish I could’ve been there man, we’re coming back though but I can’t tell you when yet.”
Yeah we know how things work but that’s good enough to leave us with. I suppose it get’s the all important question which you can’t actually answer right now of: “does 2025 have a little window of a couple of weeks where you might need to dig your passport out again?” out of the way? “All I can tell you is that it is soon.”
That’s good enough for me. How have you been though? We waited a long time for you to come over for the first time and then you came over a couple of times quite quickly so I guess the last six months has been the longest since we have seen you over here, so what have you been up to apart from getting this album ready? “Man, we went on a big headline tour in the winter and it was nuts. I’ve just been on the road solid, we did take about a month off in May and I said to my guys, everybody breathe whilst I did some other things. We’ve just got through festival season and we’re in some shows with Miss Lainey Wilson, we’ve done several trial runs and done a couple of shows with her here in the States and in Australia and whatnot but we’re really stoked about that, to be out there getting some repetition and routine.”
It's looking busy through the rest of the year, I saw your dates in September through November and you and the boys are constantly at it on the road again. “Oh yeah, touring indefinitely. It’s funny, people ask us all of the time when does this tour end and it’s like which one? That’s what we are here to do man, we’re here to bring beautiful things into the world and recreate it live in the flesh underneath the lights.”
You mentioned that you had been to Australia and I think you headed down under straight after we last saw you so you pretty much did a complete lap of the globe. “Yeah I had been down there once before and had a beautiful time so that trip we literally left to the east and returned through the west. I did the lap, it was awesome and we stopped off in Singapore, it was a really cool time.”
So, you were prepared for the shoey then this time. “Ha ha ha ha, yeah I did two of them on stage. Not in the same set but you do it and they leave you be, neither of them were brand new boots though, they were well worn in. I literally poured a Moscow Mule in to it and it was funny, they loved it and went crazy for it.” Moving away from beverages out of boots and back to today, it’s a pretty exciting time with the album about to drop. When we last spoke, we didn’t talk a lot about what was on the horizon but I got the impression that it has been there or thereabouts for a while so I guess the waiting game is nearly over and you’ve been itching to get it out. “Yeah, there’s a lot going on in country music right now, a lot going on in music period. Trying to find a window to work in is tough, there’s a lot happening out there but it has been two years since ‘Greenbroke’ and this is a big step up from that. ‘Greenbroke’ was great and did a phenomenal thing for us, I still carry that with me through all things in life but to make this better than ‘Greenbroke’ was the goal and it’s been a long time coming.”
When we saw you play the times you were here last year along with when I saw you in Germany earlier this year, people have already seen some of these songs on the road like: ‘Big Blue Sky’, ‘Train’ and obviously ‘(Heavens To) Betsy’. You talked about ‘Greenbroke’ being a couple of years old, were all of the thirteen songs on ‘On The Back Of My Dreams’ written in that period between then and now? “Yes, yes these are all songs that were done after ‘Greenbroke’.”
A debut record is your introduction saying this is who I am, particularly at that time in your life and I guess a sophomore record can reach a wider audience where you can go on from this is who Jackson Dean is to this is what Jackson Dean has to say. “There are a lot of heavy messages across this record like with ‘Free’, ‘(Another) Century’ and ‘(Heavens To) Betsy’. It was really fun to put this together and thread the needle through all of these songs because as it reads right now in sequence, it’s split between light and dark pretty much and ‘(Heavens To) Betsy’ splits it right down the middle. There are some fun things up front and some fun things at the back but on paper, these songs are really beautiful, the heavy ones are really, really beautiful. What we do is about firing on all cylinders, pushing ourselves to the max of our capabilities and each song is deserving of that in the best way that we can do it, where the music is all that the words cannot say, that’s why we give it one hundred and ten percent.”
I think when you look at dreams as a concept and how people interpret them differently, then you have the different perspective of the light and the dark on the project which you do get that feel as you listen to the album a third time or a fourth time and a fifth time where you hear new perspectives where people will hear the songs and interpret them differently to how you and Luke (Dick) or you and whoever intended them to sound. “All of these songs on this project are scores of vignettes of life that I have either lived myself or watched be lived through my own eyeballs. The reason we called it ‘On The Back Of My Dreams’ comes from ‘Jane’ but more so what I want people to be able to do when they listen to these songs is to be able to put themselves into them and see and feel what they need to. Yes, it’s about us playing some dang good songs and they are beautifully written but this is about how you get from A to B, I want these songs to take people places. As individuals they are all vignettes of life and I want people to live moments to these songs, my music culture is derived inside of my truck so I want you to ride to something dope. The way that I want to put together my records is that I want every song on it to embody an emotion or the characteristic that not only lives within me but in everyone because all of this is to know that somebody out there feels the same way as you and that you are not alone in what you feel.” With what you said about wanting the songs to stand on their own and also with some of those heavy hitters having more meaning, you know there are a lot of songs that I really like. I think ‘Long Goodbye’ has a cool vibe and it’s really funky, then I absolutely dig ‘Heaven’ at the back end of the record. As well as you and Luke (Dick), that song has Laura Veltz in the writing credits and to me she is just magical. You can always tell when she has been involved with a song because she is able to leave a sprinkle of stardust behind on all that she touches, then you combine this with a stadium type sound that you would expect Imagine Dragons to be cutting and belongs over a highlights montage at the end of an NFL game. “Totally, Luke Dick sent it to me half finished. He was like I started this with Laura, do you want to hop in here and I was like absolutely! Me and him flushed out a second verse, put a bridge in it and ran it down. I tell you, honestly, when I go and think about us playing big songs like that, I think about how it would sound at the Royal Albert Hall. How would it sound live at the Royal Albert Hall? How would we do it there? This whole record was also put together with that in mind of how we are going to do this live, how they are going to evolve and all of that stuff. ‘Heaven’ was just so intense and not too cheeky but it’s a beautiful song, then the music behind it has got some cahonas.”
Then lastly on ‘(Heavens To) Betsy’ which is the lead single from this project and you said kind of splits the record down the middle, in the press releases that were put out before the track went live, it mentions along the lines that it was a track which you didn’t think would see the light of day. I read it was something that was kicking around and just couldn’t get out of your head so what was it initially that you weren’t fully sure about with the track? “It just wasn’t the direction that I saw us going in the beginning. I literally wrote that song in the next room, right there three years ago and I started playing it on radio tour. When you go on radio tour, you and do five or six songs at a station and I just started playing it to kill time. These songs are made to be played full band and it’s supposed to sound like that. I watched it bring grown men to tears, I had so many people come up and ask me about it and it just organically grew on it’s own. I thought we could have it on the live record at the Ryman because of course we are going to play it if people love it, we could have it there and that would be the last it’s last hurrah. Because of that song, I have seen about as much ‘Live at the Ryman’ vinyl as I have seen for any other projects and that record, that song has done so much for us and that song really touches both sides of the plate in a really deep way. Depending on how you look at it, in a really unexpected way, I’ve seen it do a lot of people a lot of good.”
Well, like everyone, we’re looking forward to hearing you play it live once again over here at an undisclosed time and place at some point in the hopefully not too distant future then lastly best of luck with the record when it drops on Friday.
‘On The Back Of My Dreams’ is the new album from Jackson Dean which will be released on September 6th via Big Machine Records and is available to pre-save HERE.
You can find details for all of Jackson’s upcoming shows by checking out his WEBSITE or you can keep up to date with all that he is up to by following along on INSTAGRAMTIKTOKTWITTER & FACEBOOK.