Jackson Dean

One Liner:  Nothin' but Country from the kid who went viral with the National Anthem.

Wikipedia Genre:  Country
Home: Odenton, Maryland (now likely Nashville)

Poster Position: 19
Weekend Two Only.  Sunday.

Thoughts:   Solidly enjoyable Nashville country - but a lot of generic bits in the lyrics, like "gravel roads" and "liquor in my coffee cup" "don't let your Daddy see you" and "small town Saturday night" and trailer parks, etc.  Not that this is bad, he has a great voice and sings the lyrics with convincing fire, but it also sounds like something I've already heard playing in the background of a Rudy's.

He's gotten to open for some big names in country - Brooks & Dunn, Kane Brown, and Brothers Osborne - and got a hit off of his one album was was used on the show Yellowstone.  I have a real love-hate relationship with that show.  Objectively, it is a terrible soap opera of a show, a red meat, tough guy, loose women pile of garbage.  But the scenery is ridiculously beautiful, and I'll be damned if I don't want to see what other idiocy those doofuses get into as they murder their way through the characters.

That big hit is called "Don't Come Lookin'," and it has 4.5 million streams.  Much less than I expected.

That is actually a solid song.  I wanted to clown on the guy, but it's rock and roll and country mashed together in a tough travelling song.  I also like that guitar with the feathers on the front.

Odd aside - here he is playing the National Anthem, in his football uniform, at the center of a football field.  This was 2018, so just four years ago he was playing high school ball.

As you can hear in that video, his real name is Jackson Dean Nicholson.  And he pretty well killed it on that performance.  That video went viral - over 741k streams as of now - and catapulted him into semi-stardom.  He had made a few albums prior to that time, but was just doing regional shows and whatnot.  His Athletic Director invited him to do the anthem, they filmed it, and the rest of history.  Afterwards he got invites onto talk shows and news things in NYC and L.A.

Just the one album - Greenbroke - which is a term for horses that are only partially trained and not fully broken.  I kinda like that.  His story includes living in the tack room of his family place - without running water or AC - he's just get jugs of water filled up from the spigot at his grandad's place.  

Second-most streamed tune is "Wings," also from that 2022 album.  Just over 2 million streams.

Fine.  But when he sings about dancing with the angels, I cringe just a little bit.  I like the cut of this guy's jib overall, even if some of the lyrics are trite and unoriginal.  He has the unfortunate distinction of being on the same poster as Zach Bryan and Joshua Ray Walker, so he's running a distant third on the country lyricism scale.

Either way, I'd probably go watch it.  Better than the horrible thing that I just started called Slayyyter.