Dean Lewis Isn't Content To Only Make Bedroom Singer-Songwriter Music

Dean Lewis’ Be Alright is the kind of song where the phrase ‘hit single’ doesn’t quite capture its success. It's probably more apt to say the 2018 jam is a ‘monster smash’. It sat at #1 in Australia for five weeks, going six times platinum. And it became a global calling card, introducing the 31-year-old Sydneysider to an international audience when it cracked the top ten throughout Europe. And, Be Alright also meant that Lewis’s debut album, A Place We Knew, was going to arrive as a much anticipated first LP.

“I thought Waves was a life-changing song for me,” Lewis says, referring to his debut 2016 single that hit #12 on the local charts. “But this has gone way beyond that. Waves was big in Australia, this is big all over the world. Even now, it’s Top 40 in America, man, it’s mental. I feel very lucky, because I know a lot of great songs get put out and then nothing happens. [But] straight away I knew it was a good song, because the first time that I played it, people came up to me and were like, ‘That song about the phone, that’s a good one, are you gonna release that?’ So, the reaction was good straight away.”

So, then, the question begs: why does Lewis think this particular song has so struck a chord, with listeners far and wide? 

“What I can guess,” Lewis says, “is it’s about the vocal, and the emotion of the voice moreso than the melody or the production. A lot of songs that I’ve done, it’s been about that; you can chuck in a lot of production, double-track your voice, make the chorus sound ‘big’. But, Be Alright is a song that’s so dependent on the vocal that the arrangement could’ve been just a piano. There’s also something universal about a song where it’s someone telling you, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ But, I wish I knew exactly why [people love it]. That’d be awesome.”

When Lewis was releasing Be Alright, he harboured genuine ambitions: “I had this goal of, ‘I wanna hit 200 million streams,’” Lewis says. These are big dreams for someone who — as a kid, bouncing between Cammeray, Cremorne, and Mosman in Sydney — didn’t grow up dreaming of making music; instead, he was more into basketball and video games. Wanting to make music was never his ambition until that dream came to life, in an instant, when he was 18, when his dad showed him a DVD of Oasis playing live. 

“I remember the way that [the Gallagher brothers] walked on stage, it was just, ‘This is what I wanna do.’ It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lewis recounts. So, he asked for a guitar for Christmas, and after that “spent [his] time watching The Kooks and Oasis on YouTube, learning how to write songs”.

Of course, the idea of playing stadiums seemed utterly unattainable, but songwriting itself came quickly. Lewis felt, instantly, that it was a natural artform for him. “The first song I wrote, well, it was terrible, but it came very quick,” he recounts. “The creation of ideas was there from the start. I feel very lucky. Idea creation is something that feels very natural to me, I pick up a guitar and ideas flow out. It’s like a tap. Maybe it’s all the time I spent listening to Oasis, but there’s just all these melodies in my brain, and they just keep flying out. I just have to make sure I push record.”

"I want to make more of a band thing, this big festival sound. I always wanted it to be so much bigger than one acoustic guitar."

Lewis, at first, thought he’d find a music career as a songwriter-for-hire, working in the backrooms of the pop industry, penning songs for others. But, he always kept some songs for himself, and harboured dreams of a solo career. Given how he’s wired, it made sense for Lewis to take control of his own songs. “I’m a bit of a control freak,” he admits. “With everything about songwriting and music, I’m just so involved in every element, it’s all I think about. I feel the need to take control of that. I feel it so strongly, in my personality, that things should be a certain way, and no one can tell me differently.”

The success of Be Alright means, for many listeners, Lewis will be personified as a sensitive balladeer. But, beyond his ambitions for play counts - which were blown away, Be Alright has been spun, as of press time, over 630 million times, globally - Lewis has big ambitions for his music. 

“I don’t wanna make singer-songwriter, just-a-guy-with-a-guitar-in-his-room [music],” he says. “There’s so many of those guys out there. I want to make more of a band thing, this big festival sound. I always wanted it to be so much bigger than one acoustic guitar. I remember when I did the Mahogany Sessions in the UK [in 2016], and saw how everyone else was doing it, I thought, ‘That’s not me, I’m going to get off the acoustic guitar, get off the piano, and try and build it bigger, be a real festival act.’”

After releasing his debut EP, Same Kind Of Different, in 2017, Lewis set out to make his first album, which took him to various studios, in various countries, working with various producers. He was, always, chasing musical dreams. 

“I’d just work on something, over and over, until it sounds like the song that I imagined in my head. I’d listen to [other people’s songs] and say, ‘That sounds insane, the production level!’ And then I’d think, ‘Why doesn’t [my song] sound as good as that?’ And then I’d just re-record it until it did. That kind of pissed everyone off, because you might end up recording a song four times, and it’s a lot more expensive.”

Lewis at the 2018 ARIA Awards after winning Best Video for Be Alright. Pic by Christo Herriot.

But, Lewis continues, “I know [what] I sound like. I know what a Dean Lewis song is. It’s, like, first-person lyrics, telling a story, raw. Usually some sort of loud, prominent acoustic guitar in there. All my songs have a very distinct approach, this first-person storytelling... Half A Man and Don’t Hold Me, both of those are about actually not feeling good enough. There’s songs about relationships. Then there’s Hold Of Me, where I really felt, like, ‘I don’t wanna write another sad song.’ So it’s kind of about me saying to this girl, ‘Just trust me, I know you’ve been hurt, but everything is gonna be ok.’”

In bringing together these songs, Lewis eventually settled on a title for this debut that seemed evocative of the whole, and – to the songwriter – a micro-narrative unto itself; inspired from a phrase he heard via an in-flight radio station, no less.

“A Place We Knew, it tells a story in a single sentence,” Lewis offers. “To me, it [evokes] that I recorded these songs in all these different places around the world. 

"And, secondly, it has this specific feeling to it. You know when you drive past an old house you used to live in with an ex-girlfriend, or whatever, and it’s two years later, and everyone’s moved on, but there’s all those feelings, and emotions, and memories of that place, and it’s quite a bittersweet feeling. A lot of the songs have that longing to it. That’s so powerful to me. It sums up everything.”