Summer Dean Isn’t Waiting To Be Let In
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
Written by: Meredith Lawrence
“Feels damn good today / To be a thousand miles away,” country singer/songwriter Summer Dean observes in her song “A Thousand Miles Away.” Though superficially a breakup song, it easily doubles as a reflection on Dean’s career, as well: “I guess I could have settled down / and kept pretending I was someone I couldn’t be / Lived my life in just one town / But who’s to say that’s what a woman really needs,” she sings.
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
Though she played bar gigs in college, after graduating, Dean got a teaching certificate and taught elementary school math. Somehow, that lifestyle always felt like settling. So, Dean quit teaching to pursue music full-time when she was 39. And she’s not waiting for permission to take her shot at music any longer. “Can’t you hear me knocking,” she asks in her amber-hued voice, in a song named by that line. It’s more of a declaration than a question: “I’m letting myself in,” she continues. Life as a touring musician, particularly one building her career, is punishing, but exhilarating: “Life behind this wheel / In motel beds and truck stop meals / I’ve never been so free,” Dean observes later into “A Thousand Miles Away.”
Like so many of country music’s granddames — Patsy Cline, Loretta Linn, Dolly Parton — Dean’s telling her stories her way. Both “A Thousand Miles Away,” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” appear on Dean’s first full-length studio album, Bad Romantic (2021), which followed her debut EP, Unladylike, released in 2016 while she was still teaching and playing gigs in the evenings (and napping under her desk the next day, to make up for the late nights). In the last few years as a full-time musician, Dean’s headlined and opened tours across the U.S., released a duet with Colter Wall (“Lucky She’s Lonely”) and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry. Coming up, she will headline Texas’ storied Gruene Hall, in January, and is working on new music.
Dean writes classic honky-tonk country songs, rooted in Texas country traditions, and narrated from the perspective of a life lived thoroughly, and one which models different life choices than she felt she had as a child. “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m 41 / I’m supposed to be divorced and done,” Dean sings on “Lonely Girl’s Lament,” (released on The Biggest Life, her 2023 album). Again and again, Dean reminds listeners of the other path, another valid way to live life — thriving, happy, and sad; growing up in North Texas she felt expected to follow a familiar path – becoming a wife and a mother – a wonderful life, but not one she craved for herself, she says.
“It's definitely not a ‘this’ or ‘that’ situation; and it took me a long time to realize that that doesn't mean you don't get lonely, or you don't get sad, or you don't have wishes every once in a while,” Dean says. “But you're not any less of a woman because you have this kind of lifestyle versus that one. And I can say that all I want, but I still have to remind myself of that too.”
““Please remember that if it wasn’t for agriculture, you’d be hungry, naked, and sober.””
Dean grew up outside of Wichita Falls, Texas, where she learned to work cows on her grandparents’ ranch, which her parents now steward and are restoring, and which she (along with her brother) will one day inherit. At her shows, Dean likes to remind audiences: “Please remember that if it wasn’t for agriculture, you’d be hungry, naked, and sober.”
From an early age, Dean absorbed Texas’s particular, heady blend of country music and dancehall culture. And it lit up her brain so thoroughly that even as a teenager, she never went through an emo or punk phase, she says, joking, “Reba was my emo,” and citing an intense Reba McEntire devotion.
“There's a drive and a sound in the Texas dancehall that I haven't found anywhere else,” Dean says of the music she loves and loves to play. “There's just something in that Texas dancehall drive that it's just completely hooked me. It feels like I'm playing a Mega Death song, but it's just a standard shuffle with people two-stepping. But inside I feel like I'm completely metaling out.”
Jumping into a music career in her 30s and 40s affords Dean the life perspective to tell mature stories, based in her own lived experience, and which let women live their own, disparate paths. “I don't have a lot of love songs; I haven't been in love very much. I don't have a lot ‘you cheated on me, so I'm going to key your truck and blow up your life,’ songs like that, because I don't have a lot of experience thinking and feeling those things,” she says. “But I do have experience thinking and feeling alone and feminine, but having to do a masculine job.”
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
From that duality and Dean’s humility come her immense stories. In “Picket Fence,” she refuses to compromise just to fulfill expectations; in “Yes Ma’am, He Found Me In a Honky-Tonk,” she defends her lifestyle to a potential lover’s parent; on “Move Along Devil,” she sends an unworthy ex packing; and she mourns an unfilled crush in “She’s In His Arms But I’m in the Palm of His Hand.” But far beyond heartbroken or heart strong, Deans songs also tell the stories of women struggling to thrive in other ways, as well: in “Dear Caroline,” she sings to a girl troubled by the dustbowl’s impact on her family’s farm; and reminds herself that even in the darkest moments, “The Sun’s Gonna Rise Again.”
Dean’s quick to clarify she’s strong and capable because her life requires it, not because it’s always what she wants to do. And, because she knows its might give someone else the courage to do it her way, too. “One of my favorite reactions … it's women that feel empowered because someone on stage or someone in the public had the same feeling as them,” Dean says of her twist on girl power. “It's motivating to me to know that I'm not the only one sad about this, or I'm not the only one feeling these things.” She recalls vividly watching Jenna Bush Hagar and Hoda Kotb hosting the TODAY show. In the same episode, Hager weighed herself, and publicly talked about how hard it is in a society that equates thinness to femininity to be anything but; and Kotb told her own story of finding love in her 40s.
Now in her mid-40s herself, Dean styles impeccable stage outfits that include crop tops and tight pants because she wants other people to have the courage to dress the way they want to, too. “I get my strength from giving other people strength. That's the best feeling to me, because the more of us embrace all this, the less weird it will be. It won't look old; it won't look heavy; or it won't look that way; it'll just look normal,” Dean says. “Music is not an invisible art anymore. Music is very visible now, and so we have to embrace that, but I can't fake it. I'm glad that people feel strength in it. I hope it catches on like wildfire.”
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