What a year it’s been since we last chatted to Jackson Dean at CMAFest in 2022. If you missed that interview you can catch up with it right here. This Maryland native has had his first number one in ‘Don’t Come Lookin”, made his Opry debut, been announced as an Opry NextStage artist and toured with the likes of Blake Shelton. He recently released an eight track live album recorded at the Ryman auditorium in Nashville and now is making his UK debut at the Highways festival at the Royal Albert Hall! He’ll back over here in August for the Long Road festival and some dates of his own too. We were thrilled to catch up with him and chat all about it.
It’s lovely to catch up with you and welcome to England! How was the flight and how’s the jet lag?
Thank you, man. It hit me a little bit last night because I didn’t sleep a wink on the flight over. I spent most of the time on the TVs on the plane playing an arcade game! (laughing) We couldn’t check in to the hotel till 3pm so we had a pint and wandered around Kensington Park in the sunshine! I did sleep from 6pm till 6am overnight though so that is not too bad.
Is this a quick ‘in and out’ or will you get chance to do a bit more sightseeing as well?
We’re going to go see some stuff around London later today (Friday). We fly back home Sunday so we’re around for a few days.
You’ll find the UK crowd at the Royal Albert Hall will know all the words to all your songs and not just ‘Don’t Come Lookin’. Have you been warned about that!
I have and I’m so excited to see it, dude. The line up is so good and full of like-minded people and artists. Stephen Wilson JR is such a bad-ass, so are Morgan and Kip too. I’ve been a fan of Kip’s for a long time now. Very like-minded people and I’m excited to see the fans sing the words back to me.
I’ve done a couple of things with Kip before in the past. I think the last time I saw him was in Portland, Maine. We swapped guitars for a while and he played mine for an hour or so whilst we chatted. Kip’s the kind of guy that likes to look off in the distance and talk about shit, you know? You be you, dude, I love him.
We last talked backstage at CMAFest about a year ago now. Has that year passed in a blur or have you been able to enjoy it and soak it in? What have been the most impactful memories of that year too?
It has been a blur. Some things come along and you’re like, ‘We’re here now, man, OK, cool!’ There’s been so many things in the last year. Got to play the Opry, got to play the Ryman, played some awesome shows and festivals but the favourite thing that happened was that once we did the Blake Shelton tour we were able to get a bus! When we get back home after this trip we’re out on the road for the rest of the year and I’ve been able to swing a bus for those shows too.
I feel very fortunate to be able to tour in that way now.
The most impactful memory was probably the tour with Blake. My dad came out on the second to last weekend for that too! We were playing cards on the bus together! Blake was wonderful to me. On the first day of the tour I was standing in the production office with my tour manager wearing camo pants, my boots and my Carhartt jacket and he walked in wearing virtually exactly the same stuff!
The ‘Live at the Ryman’ release is fantastic. It’s quite unusual for an artist at your stage of your career to release a live album so early. What was motivation and thinking behind that decision?
The original plan for those recordings was just to capture ‘1971’, ‘Heavens to Betsy’ and ‘Wings’ and attach them to a deluxe version of ‘Greenbroke’. We record our shows every night so that we can listen back and see if there is anywhere we can improve but then Scott Borchetta (Big Machine CEO) heard the version of ‘Fearless’ from that night and then he came back and said, ‘Lets put the whole set out’.
Having seen you live and listened to the Ryman release, with no disrespect to the studio version of these songs, but it feels like it seems to have captured your live persona a little more than the studio did.
Absolutely! There’s so much magic that can be done on a board in a studio but it’s a different kind of magic when you play live on stage. I’ve been with my band a long time. I’ve been with Shaun since I was 13 and we’re not playing any tracks out there on stage or layering things on top of or underneath what we do. So many artists are, like, ‘There’s the MacBook, just hit play,’ right? That is not what we do! When you use tracks and other tricks to augment your live shows there can be no deviations or spontaneous moments – we like to be different every night in its own way. Whether you play different versions, play longer notes, extend a song a little. We love the spontaneity. It’s not something that often happens in Country music but I never really know what’s going to happen when we step out stage each night.
‘Heavens to Betsy’ has become my favourite song of yours. Will there be studio versions of that and ‘1971’ sometime in the future or are they just going to exist in that live, Ryman format?
‘1971’ will exist purely as it is now. That’s how the song is because whatever we could do to it in the studio wouldn’t improve how it is on that recording. It speeds up, slows down and is quite a freeform moment which you couldn’t replicate in the studio.
As for ‘Heavens to Betsy’, right now, it’s going to exist in its live format but if we ever did get to do a studio version of it I’d probably want to do a Bluegrass version of it. The original demo is based off of a one take and then you build on top of it. I did the demo with Jordan Rigby and Barton Davis of Boy Named Banjo. He played along with me and then I told him to pop off in the solo section and it was so good! It reminds me of something like Mumford and Sons with that rolling banjo. If we ever did it on a record I’d want it to be like that. Maybe Dan Tyminski or Mac McAnally could be on it too and we’d make it a thing! I love different versions of songs. Darrell Scott has done about six different versions of ‘You’ll Never Leave Harlem Alive’ and I love each and every one.
‘Don’t Come Lookin’ has opened up all sorts of doors for you. Your first number one, it was on ‘Yellowstone’ too, congratulations! Tell me how important this song has been for you.
It’s been so awesome, man. That song is me through and through. I’m glad it went number one and it wasn’t abut a woman, that is quite rare in Country music these days, right? It was different. Every time someone talks to me about that song they are like, ‘my god, dude, I love it!’ My favourite quote about it has to be from Jelly Roll. He was, like, ‘Every time I hear that song I wanna start a bar fight!’ (laughing) It’s the first number one, it put me and this whole deal on the map. It’s cool, too, because the idea and the base of it came from my mama. I spend a lot of time talking about the character and demeanour I have from my dad and my mom always jokes that she’s the ‘dead Disney mom’, right? (laughing) ‘Don’t Come Lookin’ came from interactions between her and I so she can have her moment in the sun now! She’s a firecracker.
Your thoughts must be turning to your second album now. Have you got some sophomore songs tucked away or have you not begun the process yet?
Oh, we’ve begun! We just got out of five days of tracking at Blackbird studios in Nashville. We did 12 songs plus a one take that I did, all brand new stuff. Pretty much the same wrecking crew that we used on the debut album. Fred Altringham, Craig Young, Kenny Greenberg and Rob McNeilly. We also have the very pleasant surprise of Dave Cohen on keys and pads and Jake Hughes coming in to play some acoustic guitars too. The process has begun and I’ll tell you that there’s some really epic shit on this next record, man!
I feel like we have pushed ourselves and elevated what we can do, for sure. It was five really intense but awesome days in the studio with these guys. I’m so excited to drop these songs on the world. There’s nothing on the record that you might be expecting, I’m telling you, even going down into the arrangements – some shit that no-one around right now would even dare to do, honestly, it’s going to be so cool. Yes, there will be solos and poignant lyrics and sounds being made that are not coming out of a computer, right? There are lyrics coming that will make you look things in the eyeballs and confront yourself too! I’ve got three days vocals left and about four songs to sing.
There’s no hard decisions made yet on the release schedule but I would love for it to be out over the winter and then we can go out and tour it all in 2024. That’s what I’m hoping for. I’ve got four different tours and coming back here again later in the year so it’s going to be a busy one, the books are closed for this year and it’s time to start working on next year now!
