Wesley Dean on His Move from Australia to Nashville: 'I've Lived a Thousand Lifetimes in the Past 2 Years' (Exclusive)

The musician had a dream to become a country star in the States, something he'd already achieved Down Under as the winner of 'Australian Idol' in 2008

Wesley Dean moved from Australia to Tennessee in 2021 with his wife Charlotte, their two kids Willow and Jackson, and a million of their collective dreams in tow.

"There was no time to think," remembers Dean, 41, in an interview with PEOPLE. "The Australian borders were closed, so we had to get special permission. So when we were approved to leave, we had to go."

Making the overseas move even more hectic was the fact that it occurred during the pandemic, and there was no certainty as to when Dean and his family would be allowed back to see the loved ones they were leaving behind.

"It was an, 'Is this the last time I'm going to ever see you?' sort of thing," recalls Dean. "But once we left, we knew there was no turning back. It was definitely an all-in experience."

But Dean had a dream to become a country music star in the States, something he'd already achieved in Australia as the winner of Australian Idol in 2008, the singer of a platinum selling No. 1 single “You," and the creator of a gold-selling album, The Way the World Looks.

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But soon after landing on American soil and changing his name from Wes Carr to Wesley Dean, the long haired, beard-adorned, platinum-selling artist says he quickly began experiencing the ugliness of the music business.

"The manager that I had at the time wasn't who he said he was," Dean recalls. "There were also some pretty dodgy customers along the way that sort of took advantage of somebody sort of green in a new town. And then I met another local here that also took advantage of us for a while. I felt like I was going backwards."

Luckily, Dean is one of those people that can look at ugly situations and find the beauty within them, a beauty that he says ended up materializing on his new album Music from Crazy Hearts. 

"I've lived a thousand lifetimes in the past two years," says Dean, who plans to tour both the states and Australia later this year. "But honestly, a lot of these songs came out of not really thinking about much. It was very self-conscious, but these songs were kind of landing and every time they landed, I learned something from them. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle."

This lightning flashes brightly on "Mercy," the first song that Dean wrote for the album that indirectly came because of the "experience of coming over here and getting knocked around for the first two years."

"I'd met some angels in Nashville that have been here for a long time that were heavily ingrained in the music business, and they encouraged me to just get writing," remembers Dean. "And this song literally woke me up out of a dream. I had to go chase it. The song was pretty much done in 10 or 15 minutes. It’s about embracing something in your life that you've hid away in your soul, because you are too scared to embrace that part of you. It is a song about trusting in something higher than yourself, more so than just your everyday experience."

It was no everyday experience either when Dean found himself in the desert. filming another striking music video, this time for the gritty album cut "Gunslinger."

"I’ll never forget when the sun was going down, the sky every shade of blue, pink and purple, and I was playing my Tennessee Rose Gretsch guitar, looking out over the sacred, spiritual desert I'd dreamed of visiting since I was a kid," recalls Dean of the haunting video filmed partially in Joshua Tree National Park.

"The sound of rattlesnakes, the record temperature heat while dressed in leather, I sang the song like my life depended on it, and the landscape couldn’t have been more perfect to bring the essence of the song and video to life."

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