With his new album, Magnolia Sage, Jackson Dean put a different spin on his established gritty persona.
In his first Big Machine album, 2022’s Greenbroke, he declined to include more than one love song in the midst of the project’s swampy sound.
With this latest release on the newly formed Blue Highway label, he is fully embracing a relationship, returning multiple times to amorè as he explores more soul textures in the music on the heels of a January 2026 engagement.
If Dean is thinking differently about interpersonal connection in his material, some of his willingness to take musical chances is strengthened by another key relationship, his ongoing collaboration with producer Luke Dick (Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town). The two creatives met at a 2019 party celebrating “Burning Man,” a song Dick co-wrote for Dierks Bentley and Brothers Osborne, when Dean was a mere 18. It wasn’t long before they became a musical team.
“Sometimes you just click with somebody,” Dean says in a conference room at BMI Nashville, ahead of a party for his single “Heavens to Betsy.” “When I met him, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a plethora of knowledge that I have standing right in front of me.’ I never really know how to explain, like, what it is between us. He’s Sensei, I am student.”
That’s not a fully accurate description. Dick was indeed at a different stage of life at the time — mid-30s, married with children — but they think of themselves more as musical brothers than as teacher and pupil. Like brothers, they have a fair share of similarities, particularly their mutual passion for exploring new music from a range of origins. On this particular day, they’re enamored of progressive Canadian folk group The Barr Brothers.
They’re mutually obsessive enough to dive down deep rabbit holes to find the perfect guitar solo and flexible enough to jump at a last-minute opportunity to land a song in an outside project.
But they have their differences, too. Dean arrived at BMI in a crisp, black suit and speaks slowly, quietly mulling his words as he strives to capture an abstraction. Dick showed up in a bright, striped shirt and loose, comfortable, shitabaki-style pants, and talks more forcefully, finding the right phrases to turn an inanimate concept into something a bit more tangible. That mix of ethereal creativity and concrete reality was evident for Dick when he began exploring Nashville.
“I was 20 years old, and I rebuilt this double-wide trailer in return for engineering experience and a record to be made,” he remembers. “That’s how I got schooled [on the business] to begin with, driving down on the weekends in between jobs because I couldn’t afford a record, you know, raising a kid and figuring it out.”
After their introduction at the “Burning Man” party, Dean and Dick first wrote together in June 2019. There were no figurative fireworks that screamed “We’re going to work together for a while,” but it didn’t suck either. Their tastes seemed compatible, and there was enough promise that they continued to book more co-writing sessions.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Dick says of that first co-write. “It could be something that just doesn’t move, there’s no chemistry or something like that. But it felt really good the first time. And to me, you’re following the breadcrumb of: Are you compelled to write again? How does he feel in there? Did he want to do it again? And so you follow these little breadcrumbs one step at a time, rather than getting ahead of yourself with creativity and relationship in general.”
Musical relationships are complicated. Every A-level creative comes with a team, and reading the full panorama of personalities can be the difference between a collaborative match and a disconnect. For a producer and artist, the relationship is even more central to the results; it can be the difference between a hit and a dud.
Dean and Dick’s professional circle overlaps significantly — they’re both signed as songwriters to Little Louder Music, owned by Eric Church and Arturo Buenahora Jr., who introduced the two.
Their partnership plays out in both the writers room and the recording studio. Dick and Dean co-wrote all but one of the tracks on Magnolia Sage, and they work to maximize Dean’s creative freedom and comfort in the studio despite the underlying pressure to accomplish as much as possible from expensive musicians in a pricy room as the clock ticks.
“I’ll get on the mic and just do what I do,” Dean notes. “You know, I heard somebody talk about Robert Plant one time, how he was one of the most interesting singers, because where you think he would go up, he’d go down and do something different, and where you think he’d go down, he’d do something sideways.”
Dick’s role in that scenario is essential. He’s established a familiar core of session players who provide continuity. That gives Dean a greater sense of safety, knowing he can take chances in the performance that he might not in another environment.
Dick is “creating the space for an expression that someone doesn’t know that they need,” he says, comparing his duty in that part of the collaboration to Dean’s role. “It’s the way that things fit together. There’s the ring, and then there’s the jewel.”
Seven years since they started their journey together, the artist and producer have developed a connection that feeds their individual creative needs while building Dean’s wider relationship with a growing audience. They’ve learned how the cycle of their collaboration works — making an album can be an exhaustive process, and once it’s completed, they typically need time to generate ideas for the next one.
“You gotta let the tank fill back up,” Dean asserts.
Even as he promotes Magnolia Sage, the fuel for the next go-round is already evident. Dick saw Dean perform recently for the first time in months, and he was already sensing that Dean had developed some new creative vocal and guitar threads that are worth exploring. Dean can’t identify what that new thing is yet, but it’s in the context of their brotherhood that Dick typically brings an undefined abstraction to a clearer form. They’ll continue indefinitely on that path until one of them needs a break.
“In my purest form, I really do want people to find ways to expand themselves,” Dick says. “If that’s with me, great, and if it’s not, that’s great, too. I don’t take things personally when it comes to this. I am personal about the music. I don’t take change personally.”
75 Years Ago: When Hank Williams Got Hot With ‘Cold, Cold Heart’
The country icon’s song generated a bevy of pop covers
Hank Williams built much of his reputation as a songwriter by taking the temperature of his marriage, and one of his signature songs followed a heated confrontation.
In the fall of 1950, Audrey was hospitalized with an infection, and the two got into one of their many arguments. While complaining about her, Hank allegedly told an associate she had a “cold, cold heart,” and he recognized it as a possible song title. He authored “Cold, Cold Heart” in a scant one hour on Thanksgiving Day and recorded it four days before Christmas at the Castle Studio in Downtown Nashville. MGM released it as the b-side of “Dear John” on Groundhog Day, and in the May 12, 1951, issue, it rose to No. 1 on Billboard’s country jockeys chart. The magazine featured three country rankings at the time — including a best-sellers list and another representing jukebox play — and “Cold, Cold Heart” became the fifth of 11 Williams singles to top one or more of those charts.
Pop icon Tony Bennett recorded his own version of the song that May, and in November, it began a six-week run on the list of best-selling pop singles, subsequently adding two more weeks atop the pop airplay tally.
Bennett’s recording was one of nine “Cold, Cold Heart” covers mentioned in the pages of Billboard during the final quarter of 1951, including cuts by Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington. In recent years, it’s been referenced in the lyrics of Maren Morris’ “My Church” and Sam Hunt’s “Hard To Forget.” — Tom Roland
