This Week’s ‘Backstage Country’ Host: Jackson Dean
Jackson Dean will take over Backstage Country alongside Elaina Smith for a whole week, and saying it’s a week you shouldn’t miss is not cutting it. Between his stories and…
Jackson Dean will take over Backstage Country alongside Elaina Smith for a whole week, and saying it’s a week you shouldn’t miss is not cutting it. Between his stories and his songs, listeners will get a peek behind the curtain of Dean’s life as a country music artist.
Jackson Dean on Listening to Emotional Songs
Smith and Dean talk about “Heavens to Betsy,” Dean’s emotional song about grief. The Maryland-born singer revealed the emotional song that he listens to: “When I think of emotional songs that I needed to hear at times, [it] was probably one of my all-time favorites, ‘Where Rainbows Never Die,’ SteelDrivers. That's when Stapleton was still in the band. And I don't know, it's one of the finest recordings ever, but the whole message hits you real hard, man. My great grandmother just died, and it was around the time that I had just heard that for the first time, and that one has always struck me very hard. The absolute best fiddle solos in music, in my opinion, are in the top five for me. But yeah, ‘Where Rainbows Never Die,’ that one will catch you off guard real quick.”
Tapping Into Creativity
Smith wondered how Dean was coping when he felt drained of his creativity. “Some days you walk in and it's just like ‘Boys, it ain't happening,’” he said. “Some days you walk out and you're like there's a good song [that] needs to be written, and some days you're, like ‘Okay, we need to hurry this up so we can get down the road and cut this thing.’”
He explains, as someone who got signed at 18 years old, that he’s still as passionate as he was when he started. “I was hungry, I still am, but I was a different kind of hungry. It's like you're doing everything that you can, you're in every writer's round that you can get into, you know, networking as they say down here, and everything, and you're just in it and surrounded and immersed in it. When you're doing it for two days, your mind is just engulfed with that.”
Dean continued. “I wish for every human on this planet that they have a passion that they can just completely drop into and get tunnel vision and pursue it. Get to it, be there, and be present, be in as much as you can. Love what you do and do what you love.”
