Jackson Dean has always been a bit of a free spirit, having spent a lot of time alone in the woods when he was a kid. Then at age 18, he moved into a one-room cinder-block building with concrete floors, no heat and no plumbing, on the back of his grandfather’s property, where he lived for two years. While it might sound miserable to a lot of people, Jackson says the experience helped shape him as an artist, as a writer, and as a man, and it definitely influenced his creativity.

“A lot of the tunes on the record I started writing in there. A lot of inspiration was drawn from that room in the shack. It was just a really good place to be, and it had a lot of mojo and some magic about it. But I mean, there’s not many kids my age, I think, that would willingly go into one room with a woodstove and a mattress on the floor in the other corner and live there for two years and work. But truthfully, I would do it all again in a heartbeat, without question. It was such a good place to grow and like let your mind wander. You know how many worlds you can walk through in your mind if you just let yourself wander? That was the place to do it, and that’s why I loved being there so much.”

The record is Jackson’s debut album Greenbroke available everywhere. It features his hit song “Don’t Come Lookin'” which is top 15 on the Billboard Country Airplay singles chart this week.

By: Buck Stevens