Jackson Dean loves everything about the holidays, especially spending time with his family, and being a doting Uncle Jack. The Maryland native always travels home during the Christmas season, although he reveals his nieces and nephews are just beginning to understand what he does for a job.
“It’s totally worth the thousand-mile trip every time,” Dean says. “It’s pretty awesome, getting to be this mythical Uncle Jack that they see and watch on the TV. And then I show up, and it takes them a minute to realize that I’m the same guy. For a minute there, they thought that we were two different people.
“Like, they see Uncle Jack on TV, and then I’m this other guy, Uncle Jack,” he continues. “So it’s a very funny thing with them sometimes. And they’ve been to a couple of shows and stuff, so they’re starting to put it together as much as they can comprehend. But there are two more of them now, and before too long, we’re going to be outnumbered. I love them to death.”
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Jackson Dean Shares Details Of His Next Album
Dean is hard at work on a new album, the follow-up to his sophomore On the Back of My Dreams, out in 2024. The 25-year-old hints that his next set of tunes might show a different side of him, in part because he is in love.
“We got this whole new chapter of music coming out, hopefully this spring,” Dean says. “This record is about my country boy dreams being realized and living them. I got a woman and a dog in a cabin now, and they’ve been my muse of late. And it’s really a love record, honestly. It’s a lot more laid back than On the Back of My Dreams and Greenbroke, so it’s a little bit different. And this record’s for anybody that has ever been in or is still in love and all the goodness and all the other things that it brings as well.”
The Story Behind Jackson Dean’s Recent No. 1 Single, “Heavens to Betsy”
Dean just celebrated his second No. 1 single, with “Heavens to Betsy.” He wrote the song with Benjy Davis and Driver Williams, although he now admits he never thought it would be a single.
“’Heavens to Betsy’ is like the little song that could,” Dean shares. “We wrote it, and never thought it’d see the light of day. But I started playing it on radio tour to get it out of my head… and kill time, and I saw a grown man break down and cry to it. That’s an image that will hit you like a ton of bricks. So we started incorporating a bigger version of it into our live shows and I thought the Live At The Ryman version would be the only place it lived.
“But once again,” he adds, “this song exceeded my expectations… night after night people tell me how it’s helping them through their grief – which is such a beautiful thing.”
Photo: CMA / Acacia Evans