“I’m trying to put a little bit of… something into rock music. A little bit of love and just realness.”
A brilliantly charismatic voice, with rock, funk, punk and gospel in his heart, De’Wayne has that ‘something’ you hope to find in every new artist. His latest album, June, is packed with stone-cold summer hits that feel like events, carried off with Prince-like panache. It’s not going unnoticed. Lenny Kravitz has become a friend and mentor.
When we talk, De’Wayne is on a US headline tour, deploying performance tips he picked up from church pastors as a kid. Every show, he faces audiences that don’t look like him.
“I want to be honest,” the 28-year-old says. “The threshold for black rock artists is small. But when you let us through the door, you have a Lenny, you have a Prince, Chuck Berry, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye… I’m just trying to be that person of this generation that can raise my hand and be ubiquitous.”
Born De’Wayne Jackson just outside Houston, Texas, he grew up singing in church and shuttling between divorced parents. His stepfather was a pastor. His birth father was “more like a kind of Houston ‘hood guy’” who played soul, R&B and gospel music. On weekends they wrote songs together. De’Wayne’s anthemic, 80s-vibed soft rocker Sundays is an ode to their relationship.
“He would tell me these stories, like: ‘We can have big dreams’. My mom never really told me that. I’m really thankful for everything he did for me.”
His teens were spent gigging, handing out CDs and sharing music online. He developed a broad appetite: Hendrix, Prince, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Lenny Kravitz and The Killers are just some names he cites.
At 19 he moved to Los Angeles with 200 dollars, a suitcase, and a fierce work ethic instilled by his mother. For years he juggled shifts in Taco Bell, pizza joints and other places with gigs and shoestring tours. Meanwhile he was turned down by labels, and eventually fired from Taco Bell after taking an abusive customer to task.
“I was working these jobs and hustling and writing songs, and I had people around me that believed in me but… Yeah, Taco Bell. I was fighting people, it was bad! But it was good too, because it makes the music industry not so hard for me.”
You can hear those experiences in the big political swings of his 2021 debut Stains – its rock, hip-hop and pop strokes screaming for the world to listen. By contrast, the mature, silky soulfulness of June points more clearly, he suggests, to who he really is.
“I want to inspire people to not give up on themselves. I wanted to tell my story, because in the age that we live in, people connect really fast and they go viral. It wasn’t the same for me. I had to work for ten years just to get people to listen.”
June is out now via Fearless Records.
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