November 17, 2023: “Burn This House” is the hard hitting first single from Wesley Dean’s much anticipated upcoming album, Music From Crazy Hearts, slated to be released next Spring. Recorded in Nashville’s iconic RCA Studio A, the song was an afterthought that Dean threw into the mix last minute, riffing with the band only a handful of times before laying it down live and realizing he’d recorded a firecracker of a track harpooning directly into the heated heart of the world today. It’s a foot stomping, fist thrashing, harmonica pumping song by an artist who doesn’t shy away from risking the comforts of commercialism in favor of writing his truth.
“I was grappling with the weight of humanity being so divided and I started riffing on an idea listing all the different labels I’d heard being used to categorize people,” states Dean. “The pre-chorus lyric, ‘Change is gonna come, there’ll be flames on everyone’, speaks to the fact that while change can be aggressive and uncomfortable, it’s inevitable if we want to find a way forward.”
Hot off the back of the Crazy Hearts Across America Summer tour where Dean and his family drove over 5000 miles from Nashville to Los Angeles in an RV via towns steeped in musical history, from Memphis to New Orleans, and Luckenbach to Las Vegas. Dean wanted to honor the well worn paths of the greats before him, troubadours like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, who earned their audiences face to face, one show at a time. With a director and cameraperson in tow, the tour was recorded as part of the upcoming documentary feature Crazy Hearts, where “Burn This House” and the other nine album tracks compliment the soundscape to Dean’s own story of breaking the industry mold to carve out his name independently.
The “Burn This House” music video was shot with one camera, using one frame and relies only on the morning and evening light of over fourteen beat up locations across the country, from Route 66’s Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX, to a dumpster in downtown Palm Springs, CA. It’s a punchy visual feast with a hint of 90s grunge initiating fans into the psychedelic cowboy/punk country adventure that’s about to unfold, with a music video set to be released for every song on the album.
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.
