Jackson Dean's evolving stardom shines at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl
Jackson Dean's 23 years old and already commands a stage as if he's lived for 23,000 days.
Born 15 minutes west of Odenton, Maryland's eastern tip of the Severn River, he moves with reserved assurance towards an ocean of possibilities like that body of water.
Twelve months ago, Dean was headlining at a sweaty, jam-packed Basement East.
A year later, there was more room to breathe and stand at downtown Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl venue on Valentine's Day evening. However, the power of Dean's presence --as well as openers Dee White and 2024 CMT Next Women of Country class member Mae Estes -- filled the space between the floor and much taller ceilings with the raw funk of generations of bluegrass, country and soul music that fuel the legacies of small towns like Dean's Odenton, White's Slapout, Alabama and Estes' Hope, Arkansas.
Dean's 20222 saw him onstage with Brooks & Dunn. The following year also saw him onstage with Luke Bryan at Bridgestone Arena, supporting HARDY and Blake Shelton. Plus, as he ended 2023 and will continue into 2024, his sound supports Lainey WIlson's campaign to prove country music's timeless cool.
Here are a few more takeaways from Dean's night at Brooklyn Bowl.
His hits are still hitting
The long-tail echo chamber impact of the media's embrace of the rough, rural, rustic and Western edges of country music's culture is apparent in Dean's work.
2022 chart-topper "Don't Come Lookin'" took 18 months from its release date to eventually top country's radio countdown in Nov. 2022. That measure of time included being featured on "Yellowstone" eight months before topping the charts.
Like Lainey Wilson's "Things A Man Oughta Know," Dean's debut single, being a slow grower, benefitted its continuing resonance in country music's 18-34 fanbase. Streamers save their favorite songs -- they also eventually, through repetitive osmosis, learn every word to songs that appear to achieve slow cultural ubiquity in their lives.
Similarly, Dean's follow-up single "Fearless" has knocked on the door of country radio's top-10.
Live, the heavy sounds of Dean's wood-etched acoustic guitar and guttural snarl attract ears and eyes to the stage. Because a dyed and worn cowboy hat hides them, the fire in his eyes arrives like an unexpected hurricane -- but the devastation he's bringing, as he told The Tennessean in 2022, comes from "trying to exist and produce at the center of the creation of two things people can't completely explain: beauty and music."
Dean's style has evolved and mellowed from fury into sound and finally signifies something
In the annals of the type of country music Dean makes, the best comparison has always been to imagine how wine eventually bitters into vinegar when left open for weeks.
Think of the members of the early 1990s supergroup The Highwaymen.
Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson started their careers as varying degrees of countrified soulful crooners. Eventually, years of wine, women and song hollowed that raw, allowing a bitterly-refined sound to emerge in its wake.
Jackson Dean was born three years before Johnny Cash died.
Thus, given his musical roots in sounds made by The Highwaymen and artists of that era, plus early 2000s rockers like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a reverse vinegar-into-wine process has occurred.
Ultimately, this arrives at Dean's style-at-present, best noted as a sort of swamp grunge that arrives when the refined rawness of late-era Cash and Waylon gets dredged through a rusty strainer exhumed from the depths of the Severn River.
This leaves him with a style that, at present, is more "Black" by Pearl Jam than "The Man in Black."
Dean's current setlist includes peeks at his forthcoming sophomore release.
If anything, it's the record that adds weight to the songwriting work of peerless creators like Luke Dick and Mac McAnally that his success-to-date has been platformed upon.
Timeless cool unlocked
Dean plays with the assuredness and intensity of a star that's already been entrenched for a decade and will be there 100 years after.
However, his humility is defined by no desire other than his curiosity. Onstage, he recalls spending his teenage years in a cinderblock horse tack room amid a wilderness-filled backyard, learning to splinter flint into stone knives and craft leather into bags and wallets.
Thus, for Dean, creativity is its own best reward.
At 23, he's the kind of artist where, on any given night, his preternatural catalog of musical knowledge will reveal a cover of 4 Non Blondes' 1990s era pop classic "What's Up" (which demands a duet with Lainey Wilson, who also has covered the track), plus the dual encores of his just-released cover of Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves A Woman" and -- alongside special guests Dick and McAnally, plus openers Estes and White -- The Band's "The Weight."
For an artist whose childhood was spent listening to oldies FM radio with his parents, plus as a maturing song stylist growing into a uniquely powered instrument, Dean's take on Sledge's classic arrives with more heartbreak than likely intended. It doesn't land flush on the heart quite yet; rather, it dizzies the mind after 90 minutes of hearing the rest of his work.
The latter is not quite where he is currently as an artist but more a showcase of what will constantly fuel his perpetually creative wheelhouse.
As in years prior, the spring and summer of 2024 find Dean serving as direct support worldwide for Grammy-winner Wilson on her "Country Is Cool Again" tour. Dean's evolution is one of the genre's best stories to continue watching as a tale still worth telling and never to be entirely told.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Jackson Dean's evolving stardom shines at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl
