“A strong woman has an opinion, a belief. She really thinks about things, in her own life and in the world. Being a strong woman means really being who you are, loving what you love, and knowing that if everything went wrong, you’d still be fine. It means loving a man, but knowing you can be on your own – and happy either way. Me, as long as I’m alive, I’m gonna be happy.” — Roxie Dean
She’s the kind of girl bartenders notice and talk to, and not just to bump up their tips. She’s not afraid to savor the tastes, seek the thrills, live life and tell what she’s seen. She’s Roxie Dean, a pressure-packed jar of Louisiana sunshine, and after a lifelong love affair with country music – as well as stints tending a farm, selling boots, coordinating events and writing hits for Lee Ann Womack, Jamie O’Neal and Tracy Lawrence – she’s ready to stake her claim.
Everyday Girl (released in 2003 on DreamWorks Records) could be the guidebook to a real woman’s heart and soul. Roxie – whose mother was one of nine siblings, and who grew up in a house where everyone spoke French, and whose father was a shy military man who loved playing his daughter to sleep with his guitar – has always had an empathetic soul with an insightful take on the human drama. For Roxie, it’s all part of life’s banquet, and she has no intention of starving.
"I’m a 21st century, nothing ever gets to me Lipstick, modern chick, little bit of country hick Millennium mama, do anything I wanna do girl"
— from “Everyday Girl”
“I fall in love every day,” Roxie confesses. “That’s just how I am. My husband knows it, but he also knows I’d never stray. Still, I’m always honest with him; I could never be with someone I couldn’t be that honest with. For instance, one time I met this guy, who’s a great friend of mine now, but when I first met him, I loved him – I could’ve fallen in love with him. I immediately came home and told my husband, “I have a crush on so and so; I met him today and he’s awesome!’”
Honesty is one of Roxie’s strongest suits. She says her life is an open book. She’ll happily tell you that she’s named for one of her father’s ex-girlfriends, commenting, “You know Mama loved that! Though thankfully, she liked the name.” And she says her forthrightness brings her closer to people: “Every time I say something,” she observes, “there’s always some person or other who says, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ve done that, too!’ The power of a sincere song is that the majority of people have experienced the emotion or the moment you’re talking about, even if their facts are different.”
Part of her ease in sharing with people can be attributed to the fact that Roxie “doesn’t embarrass easily.” “I’m not sure why,” she says. “I probably should be more embarrassed over some things than I am! My record is a little bit ‘Sex And The City’-meets-country music. It’s kind of ‘been there, done that, and now I’m gonna tell you about it.’ I’m really not afraid to say anything in a song. And that’s so important because I wanted this album to show me the way I really am.”
Consistent with this candor is Roxie’s tendency to be “heard before she’s seen.” She explains: “Something I hear from people a lot is, ‘Oh, we knew you were here because we could hear you,’ or ‘I heard you laughing and knew you were here.’ It’s never, ‘Oh, I saw you from across the room’ – they always hear me coming!”
And Roxie will concede that she wouldn’t seem the best of confidantes. “Most people associate openness with not being able to keep a secret,” she affirms. “While that may be true 95 percent of the time [note the song “Hush”], the other five percent of me is pretty strong. So, okay, I’m an open book and I tell everything – but that five percent that doesn’t tell is holding onto some pretty juicy stuff!”
She recalls that her first real life lesson, which came in the eighth grade, resulted from the lip-flapping of others. “I had this boyfriend,” she remembers. “You know how that goes – his friend told him I liked him, and my friend told me he liked me.” And yet, when the cutest boy in the class wanted to make out at a party where Roxie’s beau was not in attendance, she jumped right in.
“Next thing you know, everybody’s talking about it!” she recounts in mock-horror. Turning serious, though, she mines the moment for some self-knowledge: “Lesson One: Momentary gratification isn’t necessarily a good thing! I wasn’t afraid of it at the time, and I’m not afraid of it now, but I did learn that there is always more to a moment than just the second it takes to occur.”
"I got gas in the tank, full coffee cup Hours and hours to think about us It’s not gonna change if I go back I just know it I’ve been there before That’s what keeps me going"
— from “What Keeps Me Going”
“I wasn’t emotionally mature enough when I was younger,” Roxie admits. “But the living I’ve done got me to where I am now, and that’s how I can write these songs. Any time you tell a story, you’re relying on an experience, good or bad. You have to fill yourself up to have life to draw on, even if you make mistakes along the way.”
Whether it’s the plucky Everyday Girl track “Women Know Women,” the resolute “Remind Me,” the frank surrender of “Hush” or the wounded loss of “Wrong Side Of Town,” these are songs that go beyond the façade of how women are supposed to live.
Roxie’s range as a songwriter can also be heard in “Surprise Me,” which offers men a clue about how to set a mood, and “A Woman Might,” about how things could work if people dropped the romantic games, let go of their fears and told each other what they really needed. The title track is a virtual manifesto of freewheeling femininity, and a marked contrast to the vulnerable “Do I Still Do It For You?” Other moods are captured in “Perfume,” which evokes the power of sensual recall, and “What I’m Sayin’ … What I’m Thinkin’,” a tentative expression of hope.
Roxie stored up material for her songs during a two-year, softball-scholarship stint at Iowa’s Graceland College and while back in Louisiana completing a journalism degree. Upon graduation, she decided to pursue a career as a singer. And so she arrived in Nashville, promptly landing a break … in a boot store.
Not long afterward, life called again, and Roxie answered, finding herself in Huntington Beach, Calif., where she worked for Toyota coordinating their corporate events. She eventually discovered, however, that while some dreams lie dormant for a time, they do not die. All it took was a screening of George Strait’s “Pure Country” to re-spark the pilot light of her Nashville fire.
So she packed up her things and headed back east. A singer to the bone, she never intended to be a songwriter, but she fell in with a friend from Louisiana who’d made the journey before her and was running with a crowd of “creatives.” It was this friend, along with Rivers Rutherford (author of Brooks & Dunn’s “Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You,” Chely Wright’s “Shut Up And Drive” and Gary Allan’s “Man Of Me,” among others), who opened up a whole new set of possibilities for Roxie.
“I remember one night after I’d first arrived from California,” Roxie reminisces. “We had no money; we were dirt poor – scrubbing toilets if necessary to make money. And Rivers said, ‘These are the days we’ll look back on as having shaped us.’ And he was right. We were figuring out our lives and our dreams, and it was so sweet.”
Also sweet was when legendary producer Chips Moman offered to let Roxie run his farm. While tackling this new experience, she focused on her songwriting, committing herself to creating only the most personal songs, and working with Moman on “A Woman Might.”
Evidence that she was on the right track came when Jamie O’Neal posted a #1 hit with Roxie’s “When I Think About Angels,” Lee Ann Womack recorded “Why They Call It Falling” and Tracy Lawrence shouldered the staunchly country “Lonely.”
In the meantime, Roxie cast her fate with renowned producer/label exec Harold Shedd. “He got K.T. Oslin, so I knew he’d understand what I was trying to do.” Next to give Roxie a leg up was publisher Lionel Conway, then with Maverick Music. When the company closed its doors, however, Roxie found herself a free agent once more.
“I was getting cuts as a writer. I had a fabulous husband. I had a farm with chickens. It was pretty much perfect,” she comments. “So I said, ‘Whatever,’ about getting a deal – and that’s when Ginny Johnson over at Hamstein [Productions] called. I knew she understood my songs. It was an amazing thing.”
Roxie then began working with producer Buddy Cannon (Kenney Chesney, Shania Twain, George Jones). James Stroud came on board in 2001, when she signed with DreamWorks Records, over which Stroud presides.
From these collaborations flowed Everyday Girl, the ultimate forum for Roxie’s straight-talking ways. “If you don’t have anything to say, you don’t have anything to write about either,” she reiterates. “Sometimes you wish you hadn’t opened your mouth, but writing songs is about finding the sweetness among the mistakes, reminding yourself not to put your hand in the fire and knowing in your heart that storms do pass.” Somehow, she manages to find the sweetness with a grace that makes the stumbles, the jagged aches, the raw places all seem okay. “I hurt, but I also laugh and you have to be prepared for both if you wanna get out there and live. As long as I can write it all down and share it with people through my music, I’m on my true path.”
"Well, I’ve never been good at keeping secrets And I sure ain’t one for playing games I know what I want when I see it And you’re right in front of my face"
— from “Hush”
Roxie Dean has come a long way since her public debut – singing “Bye, Bye Love” at a school talent show. “And who knows where I’m going,” she wonders. “It’s all a big adventure, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out!”
Source: http://www.roxiedean.com/
