Nashville-based Aussie artist Wesley Dean shares a special version of his new song “Blood Brothers.” This full-band rendition is a preview of the emotionally-charged acoustic version that’s featured on his much anticipated upcoming LP Music From Crazy Hearts, out April 26. Dean will also be in Austin, TX this next week for SXSW. See list of performances below.
Dean is hot off the back of the Crazy Hearts Across America Summer tour where he and his family drove over 5000 miles from Nashville to Los Angeles in an RV via towns steeped in musical history playing shows off the beaten track; Memphis, New Orleans, Luckenbach, Marfa, Las Vegas, and more. With a director and cameraperson in tow, the tour was recorded as part of the upcoming feature Crazy Hearts: The Documentary, where “Blood Brothers” and the other nine album tracks complement the soundscape to Dean’s own story of breaking the industry mold to carve out his name independently.
Watch “Blood Brothers” official video via YouTube
“Deep longing of nostalgia has always been a fountain of endless creativity for me, and ‘Blood Brothers’ is about a friendship from birth that was unbreakable, and then broken,” shares Dean. “The line ‘grown up problems kill off the young’ is the heart of the chorus because time’s sleight of hand can sometimes deceive the young into thinking everything lasts forever.”
“Every line in the song has a distinct lucid memory, taking me back to memories of the small country towns where I grew up. The freedom of two pre-teen boys running through paddocks and ‘getting lost in open spaces’, climbing on farm machinery, kicking the football together and talking about girls. I really wanted to convey that sentimental feeling in this song. The distant dream of two best friends who’ll always have ‘the memories of what matters the most’, because even though adulthood dissolved their connection, the imprint of their innocence still exists ‘somewhere in the corridors time’.”
Previously, Dean released “Don’t Look Back” featuring Sarah Buxton, which Glide called “a gorgeous work of country-laced Americana that resonates with all of us.” With first single “Burn This House,” the two tracks have attracted early attention from BrooklynVegan, Whiskey Riff, Holler and more.
From tip to stern the Music From Crazy Hearts pirate ship was destined to be a record for the road. Captured in just five flurried days at RCA and conjuring timeless images reminiscent of Young Guns, Dean’s basaltic, corduroy-clad voice inhabits characters here like those first popularized in Gunfighter Ballads by Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” Though Dean draws effortlessly and intuitively from the archetypal well of the cowboy ballads that gave original rise to American country music, and Music From Crazy Hearts solemnly salutes both Marty Stuart and Buck Owens with its integrity-driven narratives, this is not just a horse of a different color, but one pointed in a completely different direction. Music From Crazy Hearts is an album full of stories that will cleave you in half, sung by a seeker’s voice that was designed to stitch you back together in a more self-sustaining style than you were wearing yourself before.
For more than a dozen years Dean’s been one of Australia’s best-known artists, armed with a larger-than-life voice that catapulted songs like “You” to the top of the charts. Even so, the Adelaide native found himself boarding an American-bound plane in early 2021 with his young family. Dean’s effortless ability to embody multiple genres, such as roots rock, soul and folk meant, after a brief hiatus from the spotlight of earlier years, Dean was able to return to music on his own terms, writing songs that mixed heartland hooks with heart-baring honesty for his previous album and American debut, Unknown.
