When Jackson Dean wrote “Magnolia Sage,” he was an engaged man singing about a life he hoped for. Now he sings it married, and the Maryland-born country singer says the song has changed under him.
“That used to be a wish, and now it’s reality,” Dean told the Chronicle at Country Calling in Ocean City. “We are artists. We paint landscapes and pictures so people can put themselves in it and see their own life in it. But when you’re living it, when you’re living your dreams, it just changes your perspective a little bit.”
Married life, he added, has been “a blast, man.”
Dean, who was born in Odenton and turned 26 on Oct. 6, came to the Ocean City festival with a lot moving at once. His third album, Magnolia Sage, came out in April. A deluxe edition, Magnolia Sage (In Full Bloom), followed Oct. 9 on Blue Highway Records with four new or reworked tracks. His two newest releases are songs he did not write.
Singing someone else’s words
Dean said covering other writers’ songs is nothing new. His band used to play songs by artists like Ryan Bingham and Whiskey Myers so often that fans assumed they were his.
“They’d be like, ‘Did you write that?’ I’m like, ‘No. How do you not know that song?'” he said. “It’s fun bringing things to life.”
“My Cross To Bear” came by phone. Producer Julian Raymond called with a song he wanted Dean to sing, and the track became the closing theme of the documentary Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul.
“As soon as he said Gregg Allman, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m in,'” Dean said. “Sometimes it can be difficult. They try to let you have free rein, and it’s fun finding the correct path with people that want to give you that kind of freedom.”
“The Moon And The Wolf,” a duet with his wife, singer Laci Kaye Booth, was written by Luke Dick, Jessi Jo Dillon and Chris Tompkins. Dean writes with Dick and Dillon often, and he said the song arrived almost too late.
“As soon as Luke sent it to me, I was like, ‘Well, it’s a little bit late to put that on the record now,'” he said. “But as soon as I heard it, I knew I wanted to cut it.”
That is how a lot of songs find singers, he said. “As artists, we’re flying all over the place, and everybody’s back in Nashville. The writers are constantly thinking about all the artists they have connections with. So being top of mind with those guys, them knowing me and what I would and wouldn’t do, is huge.”
Dean has said he is not sure his wife is the moon in that song. Asked if he is the wolf, he did not hesitate. “She is very lunar,” he said. “Yeah, I’m the howler.”
A London crowd, a slowed-down fire
“Hey Mississippi” grew out of the nursery rhymes his mother sang to him. He has since heard a London crowd sing it back, and a live recording from that show is on the deluxe album.
“It was nuts, dude. They clocked 70,000 at the door when we went on,” Dean said. “When I walked out, I had my head down. Usually I don’t break stride. I just walk straight up to the mic, and you can see it on the video. I lift my head up and I slow down. It was just like, ‘Oh my God!’ They love to sing back to you over there, and they know it.”
The deluxe edition also carries “Wildfire (Afterburn),” a slowed take on a song about burning. It started as a joke, Dean said.
“We were messing around on Dropbox one day, and we double-timed ‘Hey Mississippi.’ It was funny, but it kind of went hard,” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, what else can we do that to?’ We came to ‘Wildfire,’ and we slowed it down. We were all like, ‘Oh, wait a minute!'”
He had smooth, late-night lo-fi music on his mind, “not quite club music,” and the layered vocals of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love.” The stacked harmonies on the new version are all his own voice. “It’s just a driving little scoot, and it feels so good,” he said. “That was built off of one take.” The band plans to start playing it that way live soon.
From a swamp in Odenton
Dean grew up on a dead-end street in Odenton that ran into a swamp. Asked whether any of that hides in his songs, he pointed instead to the room where his band found its sound: a practice space it calls 1325, about a 250-capacity room.
“The core of what we do was born there, how we approach things,” he said. “We were a four-piece rock band for a long time, and then Trevor came in about three years ago. It’s still reflected today. Even the live stuff today is just what we were then, on steroids.”
The road to Nashville was not always comfortable. “In a literal sense, I’ve lived in tack rooms,” he said. “I’ve slept in windowsills, back alleys, office spaces, corporate office spaces and closets.” He has since moved a little way outside town. “It’s just good for my brain. But there’s been some roughness, for sure.”
When the labels came calling, Dean sat at a desk with his father and four printed offers. His father’s advice, in saltier words, was not to blow it. Dean laughed about finding dark pipe tobacco from one label in the family mailbox, since he was smoking a pipe at the time. “That was a good day,” he said.
Looking past the West
Dean has said his third record came together with hardly any time. For the fourth, he hopes to be recording this winter and to shape something that “doesn’t have to have such an elaborate run.”
“We’re at a new label now, and it’s a good thing,” he said. “Not quite starting over, but it’s a different animal right now.”
He calls himself a “Sage leaning guy,” but he said the next album points wider than the West. He has played Europe and Australia, a Japan trip fell through and he is trying to reschedule it, and he mentioned South Africa. He pointed to Kip Moore as a model. “Kip will do four continents in a year. That’s no small feat,” Dean said. “It’s about going places nobody we know has ever been.”
The Western streak is not going anywhere, he said. “I put the Western in it. It’s me. It’s not always the lyric. It’s who’s casting the spell.”
Dean’s Magnolia Sage Tour runs through December. For more from this year’s festival, see the Chronicle’s look back at two days of boots, rain and music at Country Calling.
Quotes have been lightly edited to remove filler words, with Dean’s knowledge.
Coverage of Country Calling is sponsored by Coast2Coast RV Rentals, the Official Coverage Sponsor of the Southern Maryland Chronicle. Heading to the shore this fall? Coast2Coast RV Rentals delivers and sets up campers across the Delmarva Peninsula, at campgrounds, private lots and festivals. Learn more at coast2coastrvrental.com or on Facebook.
