A CONVERSATION WITH... DEAN LEWIS
This ending is simply the beginning for Dean Lewis and his latest album, Epilogue.
Credit: Ben Cook
What would you write in the story of your life? Would you pick apart heartbreaks and highlights? What parts of you would you let, and want, the world to know?
Dean Lewis has been answering that question ever since he began writing songs that are raw, and intimate, yet don’t give too much away until he’s ready. His first few hits, ‘Waves’ and ‘Be Alright’ led Dean into the spotlight, one that he didn’t know wanted him back.
Reflecting on the years of touring and making music, he jokes about one night in a pub that was the definition of humbling. “There were maybe 25 people in the room and no one was listening to me. Maybe some people even laughed during the set. But my manager told me there would be a PR person there, so I knew I had to try and impress them. I had to keep playing. Getting signed to that PR agency really changed my life and gave me such amazing opportunities. But it was awkward up there. I wouldn’t wanna do that again.”
And what are those amazing opportunities? He, like many artists who will talk about how they aren’t in this for the fame, will hardly mention their awards or nominations. They’ll focus on the collaborations they have, the artists they’ve worked alongside, and the beautiful moments they have with their listeners. If you didn’t know Dean from any other Australian guy, you’d think he was some casual singer-songwriter who routinely played in small pubs to occasionally dismissive audiences.
You wouldn’t know that he’s in the Spotify Billions Club for ‘Be Alright’, has multiple songs that are certified platinum, has won three ARIA Awards, and has millions of adoring fans around the world. You’d know about the fans, but he’d shy away from throwing numbers in your face. That’s not what he’s in it for.
“I don’t take days off, days off are for doing what you love. And I love making music, so I’d just be doing that!” He laughs. “Man, no one asks me about my vacation plans and I see why.”
This is why he still loves playing those small venues, except now the people in the audience are there for him. “I’m comfortable at the level of fame I’m at now. I know that’s not how it works, you either go up or down, but this is where I want to be. I just have to keep working to be here.”
“I love that in some cities I can play massive venues and in others, I can play small theatres. I get the best of both worlds still. I get to walk outside as a regular guy and only get recognised once every, like, six weeks. I get to make music and people want to listen to it! That’s what I want, that’s where I want to be in life.”
And right now, amidst touring with music from his latest album, Epilogue, he gets to look back at his years of touring, writing, and living. Even though some of his songs on that album are heartbreakingly devastating, when Dean talks about his album, it’s like he’s a kid sharing a secret he’s been dying to tell.
Epilogue is a welcome return to the sound that Dean’s refined and known for. This album, he draws sonically more so from his first album, A Place We Knew (2019), an album stylised by his uncertainty in and excitement of the world around him. But he takes from the lessons he learned and the experiences he had while writing the second, The Hardest Love (2022). That was a time when it felt like things were over for Dean and his career. To make matters worse, Dean received heartbreaking news about his dad having an aggressive and life-threatening form of cancer. So, questioning how to cope with the potential of losing his dad, Dean wrote ‘How Do I Say Goodbye’, a ballad asking how you say goodbye and live in a world where that person you love might not be in it. But that song is not only a song that Dean gets to occasionally perform with his dad, it’s also the song that put his name back on the map.
Recovering from those intense emotions, and experimenting with his sound, Dean released The Hardest Love, an album capturing the heartbreak, anxiety, and pain with a cautious and pop-oriented twist. But according to Dean, it wasn’t where he wanted to be with his sound again.
So now two years later, with the release of Epilogue and the start of his most recent AU/NZ tour, Dean isn’t ending his career or saying goodbye to music. He’s presenting a culmination of his whirlwind journey so far and a glance at what comes next.
Even though he had to shoehorn time between tours and performances, he nestled away in sessions in Hollywood Hills and Hawaii to tap back into what makes him…him.
He didn’t lose who he was, but he wanted to revisit that Dean from years ago. “I had nothing then and I was living with my grandma. I’m in a much different place, yet I have that same youthful excitement. I never lost that drive to make great music. This is my craft, my life, and my purpose.”
“Writing songs and creating is what I love.”
A storyteller to his core, Dean uses Epilogue to toe the line of the different sides of reflection. Lead single ‘All I Ever Wanted’ muses on the pain of looking back and realising how much time you spent wishing things would be different in the future. “I thought that if I got to where I was going in the end, the grass would be greener and everything would be okay and I’d be content. But it was much more different than I expected. I thought back to the time when I had something pure with someone who cared about me. How that was what I wanted but I was so focused on going where I was going next. Now it’s too late.”
The passage of time and grieving people gone is a theme that carries throughout, a bittersweet meaning to the word ‘epilogue’. One of the songs most likely to bring a tear to anyone’s eyes on his tour is ‘Clelia’s Song’, a guitar-driven memorial with lines that beg for Clelia to pick up the phone, to send him a sign, and to know, more than anything else, to know that she’s still being remembered.
“It’s about this girl who was like a sister to me and my brothers. Unfortunately, she was very sick and she passed away, so I wrote this song for her. Not only for her, but for her family and mine to keep her name and memory out there. We’re always thinking about her.”
The realisation of being alone, from breakups or death, leads Dean towards a confession. ‘Empire’ presents sparse chords and handclaps as backup for Dean’s soaring vocals. He admits the depth of his loneliness and how he’d still be there for the person who left him on his lonesome. “My best friend was so heavily involved in every aspect of my life, she was always so encouraging. But she needed to prove that she could do things on her own and I wanted that for her. So this song is saying that I’ll be here for her if she needs me. But I don’t think she’ll need to call. She’s got this.” What a way to start an album.
Dean’s got this, too. While he’s still trying to find the balance of who he was and who he is now with everything he’s experienced, he’s using this album to tease new potentials for his future music. So this album contains his first proper love song, thanks to the only other vocal collaborator on this album, Sasha Alex Sloan. The singer-songwriter, known for her emotionally potent lyrics and unique songwriting, came into the studio one day with Dean, gushing about her partner. She was, and is, in love. “It didn’t start as a love song, but it came so naturally. I was feeding off her energy and we built the song off the love she has. I tapped into the people I have loved and love, and it was so real. ‘I want you or I want nothing at all.’”
Hope joins love on this journey, especially with songs like ‘Trust Me Mate’, a tribute to those who have been by his side in the tumultuous journey with fame and music. A comforting song, it reminds himself and listeners that when people say ‘you’re going to be okay’, it will be okay. The people telling him mean it, it’s not empty platitudes — it’s love.
But moving on and wrapping up chapters of your life means reflecting on the now-embarrassing things you did. You’ve grown, you’ve changed, but when you’re a songwriter, those choices can be memorialised in songs. ‘The Last Bit of Us’, the closing song on the album, is technically the final song of The Hardest Love, an album focused on one girl. This song is a send-off to her and that time of his life, centred around those final moments that you know will be the last time you see someone.
Songwriters, like Dean, pick and choose what parts of their souls to bare. We won’t know every heartbreak, every joy, every butterfly effect moment. But with Epilogue, he goes beyond ‘letting us in’, he once again lets down the walls he put up through these last few years. We follow along through his grief and his healing and leave with a few more tears and a stronger understanding of who storyteller Dean Lewis is.