After scoring placements on Spotify’s Hot Country Artists to Watch, CMT’s Listen Up and Amazon Music’s 2023 Breakthrough Artists to Watch in 2023, it’s no stretch to say that Jackson Dean is one of the hottest young voices in the genre today. Today, he is back with his highly-anticipated sophomore album, On The Back Of My Dreams.
Dean announced the album’s release back on August 2nd on social media, noting, “If you like country music with a vagabond spirit, you’re going to love this record.”
Produced by Luke Dick, a frequent collaborator with the likes of Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley, On The Back of My Dreams is a masterfully mixed record, filled to the brim with soaring guitars and weighty percussion that capture the wide-open nature of the album.
The twenty-two-year-old noted that the record has been in the works for years, “We’ve been working on this album for several years now and the thought of people turning it up and getting lost in the journey of it all is really doing something to this thing beating in my chest. A lot of love and life was put into these 13 songs and I hope people find something in it…joy, healing, connection, thoughts, memories or even just a good groove.”
The standout on the record very well might be the 11th track, “Jane,” a sultry track filled with some fantastic percussion that Dean describes as a “misty, witchy little nursery rhyme:”
“The title bares its name from a lyric in my favorite song on the album, a misty witchy little nursery rhyme named ‘Jane.’ It has this surreal, ‘is this real life?’ feeling to it that carries throughout every song on the project—and across my reflections on the last few years of this journey chasing the music dream. I’ve lived a lot of life and have watched a lot of life be lived and each of these songs were written from a single frame of a moment, almost as vignettes, drawn from daydreams, nightmares and everything in between.”
Dean is currently on the road with reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year, Lainey Wilson, on her Country Is Cool Again tour. Upcoming dates include the following:
- 9/13 West Valley City, UT
- 9/14 Nampa, ID
- 9/15 Missoula, MT
- 9/19 Fresno, CA
- 9/20 Stateline, NV
- 9/21 Stateline, NV
- 9/26 Vancouver, CA
- 9/27 Auburn, WA
- 9/28 Ridgefield, WA
- 9/29 Tempe, AZ
Listen to “Real Real” and “Another Century” here: