Dean Lewis on taking control, navigating TikTok and his latest album ‘The Hardest Love’.
Get to Know:
Dean Lewis
Get to Know is our brand new series of features profiling some of the world’s most exciting artists. Speaking over Zoom, Dean Lewis talks taking control of his production, navigating TikTok and the genuine heart behind his latest album ‘The Hardest Love’.
Photo Credit: Kent Tarver
When Dean Lewis appears on camera for this press conference, he’s cheerful, engaged and excited to discuss his upcoming run of shows in support of his second album ‘The Hardest Love’. Speaking with Lewis is like sparking up a conversation with an old friend, in fact, he even recognises a dedicated fan who’s here to ask questions. In a sweet moment, they have a brief exchange about the shows she’s attending and it's clear he has an admiration and respect for some of his longest supporters.
It’s that aura of mutual respect that has not just made Lewis such a relatable personality but also what has driven his heartwrenching songs to connect with hundreds of millions of listeners. Speaking over Zoom, he’s fuelled by a cold coffee mixer which he relentlessly slurps away at to the humour of attendees “Sorry It’s disgusting, I’ll be playing Call of Duty with my brother and I’ll be chewing ice, I’m so unaware of this, it’s an iced americano refilled with water and its almost down to the end, and I’m probably gonna refill it again because I’m an animal” Lewis explains with a chuckle.
It’s perhaps hard to imagine this chilled-out Aussie is part of Spotify’s ‘Billions Club’, a select group of elite artists that have managed to reach a billion streams for one of their songs on Spotify (company including Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd), or that he regularly sells out tens of thousands of tickets across the world.
Don’t let his earnest and relaxed nature fool you however, Lewis is a workhorse and pays serious attention to his craft, whether it's songwriting, producing, or the social media aspect of the industry. He’s incredibly open in conversation and over the course of an hour delves deep into TikTok’s growing presence in music, his past relationships that fuelled his latest record and his father's journey to remission, which has struck a chord with many of the conference attendees.
“There’s a famous quote that says people have their whole life to write their first album, and then six months to write the next one. I feel like I’ve had double the amount of time for this album than the first one”
On… The Hardest Love
Lewis’s second album ‘The Hardest Love’ arrived over three years after his debut. Perhaps a surprising length of time considering the push for singer-songwriters to capitalise on their early success “There's a famous quote that says people have their whole life to write their first album, and then six months to write the next one. I feel like I've had double the amount of time for this album than the first one” describes Lewis. That lengthy process spanned the world as Lewis wrote, recorded and produced throughout the pandemic. “I started writing the album in this hotel on Sunset in West Hollywood. I wrote in Nashville for a while, then I came back to LA and then went to London.”
‘The Hardest Love’ feels far more personal than his first record ‘A Place We Knew’. It’s clear from the line of questioning towards him and the deluge of comments left at the conference that his music has made an impact and forged a strong connection with his listeners. Talking through the story of the album Lewis explains that he writes songs about his life, and a lot of the album was written over lockdown. He credits six tracks on the album to be all written about a girl he thought he was “going to end up with”. Whilst romantic, there is also a heavy amount of loss and uncertainty on the record. ‘How Do I Say Goodbye’ for instance which he goes into more detail later, is about coming to terms with his father's cancer diagnosis whilst ‘The Hardest Love’, the track itself, focuses on the passing of his friend to an unexpected illness. Ultimately, Lewis describes the record as a ‘time capsule’ of what he was going through in his life.
Due to the nature of the remote recording process, Lewis took on more production duties “I had to learn how to do a lot more on this one,” he says. “I had to learn how to record my own vocals for a few of the songs; how to record my own acoustic guitar. ‘All For You’ I recorded by myself, just me alone at an Airbnb in Malibu”. A testament to Lewis's increased confidence in his production skills, he is credited on the entire record for the first time as a co-producer.
I originally believed this was due to Lewis having an increased knowledge and control over his production, when in fact after asking Lewis how he found the experience, he was keen to point out that it was actually an increase in recognition for his production input and credit rather than more control that was key to his newfound role. “I don’t like other people to have control over what I’m doing” he explains to me, “I think when you first start out you’ve got to learn the ropes a bit, I’ve always known what I’ve liked, I’ve always been very in control of the sound. I never had anyone telling me how to do it. I was kind of lucky like that, I’ve always been kind of guiding it, and then with my first album, I kind of did the same thing as I did on the second, where when I was with my producers I was very much pointing out sounds. You might pull up another song and go the snare we need to make sound like this”.
In those early days, Lewis points out he never took any producer credits because he didn’t really understand the process, however with ‘The Hardest Love’ he says “now more than ever, I know what I like and I’m co-producing it with the producers. I think it’s more like a nominal thing, I’m doing the exact same thing I’ve always done, I’m just knowing a little bit more, but now we’re just crediting it like that”.
Lewis continued, going further into the intricacies and the bureaucracy of the system. “Production is an interesting thing, it’s not just about being on the computer, and being the person doing it. It’s also that if you’re an artist and you have a direction and you know where you want to go, and you’re collaborating with another producer which is how I usually like to do it.”
This speaks to the directing role Lewis has taken in the production process “There are two people involved and you’re both producing the song because a lot of times people who produce don’t write anything but you bring them in on the writing credits because they might help with a little section or something like that, and that is definitely warranted and they deserve that as well. But it’s the same kind of thing in reverse sometimes as well, and not a lot of artists do production, and they kind of just record and let someone else do it, which is fine too. It’s just something that I’m controlling over”, noting how he likes to have a hand or say in “everything” he’s doing.
Photo Credit: Kent Tarver
“This goes back to my thought and my philosophy on life from my friend, which is, great art finds a way”
On… TikTok
Lewis also has interesting thoughts on the subject of TikTok and the role it has to play in the modern music landscape. “TikTok is the way of the future, it is here, and there are rules as an artist that you work with it. You can choose to not play in that game… and you will not have the success, it’s the reality of what it is” he says breaking down the dynamic.
Lewis is in a rare position where he’s had massive and sustained success before the rise of TikTok, as well as how he has managed to thrive through his use of it. “What I hear from other artists (this from people around me in my team and labels and stuff) is that they're always quite impressed with how I've transitioned from being pre-TikTok to having a Tik Tok following and actually coming across (to that platform) because a lot of other artists that are from before TikTok have struggled to translate.”
The boom in the platform, which highlights small portions of songs such as a snappy chorus, has led to a plethora of artists trying to gain success on TikTok via writing catchy hooks, snippets or whole songs directly to grab listeners' attention. This is something Lewis has been adamant about avoiding, and in fact, credits his success as being due to his refusal to chase that trend. He explains how when he initially released songs such as ‘How Do I Say Goodbye’ and ‘Hurtless’ they found little traction. “This goes back to my thought and my philosophy on life from my friend, which is, great art finds a way”, this led to him posting the song on TikTok and suddenly within “a month, two months” he found himself with 40,000 users of the app adding his song as a ‘sound’ they can play over their videos.
He mentions that people wrongly assume that because of his large monthly following on Spotify, every song he launches will be a success “You need that help, that fire and amplification on a song to grow. A lot of people might think ‘Alright I’ve got 21 million monthly listeners right now’ if I put a song out it’s guaranteed to work, but it’s not like that anymore, people can put out songs and they just will not work” Lewis describes, which is where he says TikTok comes in “you really have to find an angle, and TikTok is really good for that, but it’s also really difficult”.
Lewis also talked through his writing process and why he felt it fitted so well on the flourishing social media platform “How I translate it is, I don’t write a song for TikTok. When I write a song I’m still doing the exact same process… I write a lot of songs and don’t stop, I just keep writing until I have a bunch of great songs. Then I try to have one that you just go ‘Oh my god’, you show it to everyone and they’re like ‘wow’, then you find the angle within that to post about on TikTok”.
For Lewis, importantly, that angle is rooted in genuineness and honesty within his writing “One thing that I think about more is, as I look back on my songs that have connected to people is they always have an angle to them”. Examples include his hit single ‘Be Alright’ which has over 1.4 billion streams on Spotify, which Lewis puts down to its message of “hope”. ‘How Do I Say Goodbye’ which tackles Lewis coming to terms with his father's cancer diagnosis was “real and genuine about my dad, and it connected to people because it wasn’t just an ‘I love you, I miss you’ kind of song” he says. ‘Half a Man’ is about not feeling “good enough” meanwhile ‘Waves’ touches on “getting older and feeling like life is becoming more monotonous”.
Lewis summarises “All those things have worked for me, and so I think as I look back… I take some of those things that have worked and apply them to moving forward, but I’m still writing the songs that I care about and love, and then I try to find one of those that'll be the TikTok one, but it’s always going to be the best song that I have, I’m never going to craft it for it (TikTok) like a lot of artists are doing… You have to stay true to yourself and you have to post genuine stuff, you can’t always just be looking for something that’s viral, it has to be genuine, it has to be real, and you have to find your own way”.
“I’m almost terrified now because I know how lucky and what a moment it was, and I look ahead thinking, Oh my god, I’ve got to climb that mountain again”
Lewis is however in praise of the platform and the power it provides when situations go right. “I think it's really cool it exists because, for the first time, you can have exponential growth,” he says, using his own track ‘How Do I Say Goodbye’ as an example. “I posted a video of my dad listening to the track and it went from getting 500,000 streams a day, to 1,000,000 in one day and then all of a sudden we were in the global top 200 and everyone was paying attention, like all the people that need to pay attention to amplify things like this. So it all started with me and my friend videotaping this stuff and posting it… that’s how it happened, how cool is that.”
As Lewis mentions it means artists don’t need someone to say they’ll support them in their career, they can make those moments happen on their own but he warns “it has to be special”. This has led to feeling added pressure when it comes to using the platform “I’m almost terrified now because I know how lucky and what a moment it was, and I look ahead thinking ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to climb that mountain again”.
Lewis is also all too aware that having a quality song, does not necessarily guarantee a viral moment. “It’s so scary for everyone because you could have a song that you is the best song, but it doesn’t catch a moment. Does that mean because there is no trend? Does that mean it’s not great?”. With viral success also comes the relentless expectations of social media for an artist to continue it. It’s a platform that is always chasing the next big thing as Lewis explains what happens if a song doesn’t manage to strike it big “everyone will be like alright, what’s next?” which Lewis explains can be daunting if you think that’s the “best thing you’ve ever written”.
Concluding on the subject, Lewis comments on the intensity and burnout trying to make TikTok a success for your music has had on friends and fellow musicians “I think about TikTok so much and I really try. It’s really important but you can burn yourself out doing it. I’m friends with artists that are quite successful on TikTok and the conversations we have on text and stuff is that a lot of people are very burnt out by this, and it’s not really sustainable for a lot of people”. He puts this down to the feeling that you are “chasing something that’s sort of so elusive”. For Lewis, his focus is on what he believes to be most important, “creating songs and touring”.
Ultimately, it’s through his commitment to making genuine heartfelt music and touring the world that Dean Lewis has made truly authentic connections with people. It can be felt clearly through the way in which fans frequently mentioned throughout the conference just how much his music has meant to them, and how they found through his songs, someone who could relate to what they were going through. At the end of the day, that has to be worth so much more than a fleeting viral moment.
Buy the album
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See the tour
You can catch Dean Lewis touring ‘The Hardest Love’ across the UK this Spring and Summer on the following dates. More ticket details and dates can be found on his website here.
Roundhouse, Camden, London - Sunday, March 26th
Roundhouse, Camden, London - Friday, April 7th
O2 Academy, Sheffield - Thursday, 1st June
City Hall, Newcastle - Friday, 2nd June
O2 Academy, Leeds - Sunday, 4th June
O2 Academy, Birmingham - Monday, 5th June
O2 Academy, Manchester - Tuesday, 6th June