Island Records
With TV appearances including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, a headlining U.S. tour, a gold single and now the release of his debut album, A Place We Knew, Australian singer/songwriter Dean Lewis has discovered that making it big in America hasn’t been nearly as hard as he thought. It’s been a pleasant surprise for a guy who thought U.S. success was just a pipe dream.
“We have this thing in Australia…everyone knows it: to break in America, it’s impossible,” Dean tells ABC Radio. “I guess now maybe it’s becoming a smaller world….but in the past, it’s been impossible.”
“You also hear about how slow things move in America, on radio and stuff like that, but for me it’s been quite fast,” he marvels. “So everything that I’ve heard about here — and the impossibility of it — all seems very possible right now.”
Friday’s release of A Place We Knew follows the global success of Dean’s hit, “Be Alright.” But he says don’t expect a whole album full of those sad breakup ballads.
“Actually, ‘Be Alright’s’ probably the saddest song on there, in the sense of like, the tempo,” he tells ABC Radio. “There’s definitely a lot of other stuff, and there’s horns on there as well — y’know, just trying to make some of the choruses pop.”
Dean says A Place We Knew reflects who he is an artist, something he claims he didn’t have a clue about when he released his 2017 EP, Same Kind of Different.
“An EP is like, you throw everything at the wall, you don’t really know what your sound is,” he explains. “I didn’t know what my style was. Now…I know straightaway how to make a song sound like me.”
Dean kicks off a European tour April 2.
Copyright © 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
