Lewis feelin’ all right
MAKING MUSIC THAT CONNECTS IN TIKTOK WORLD
It’s always the weird things you notice when you’re a globally successful Australian pop artist returning to the new normal of touring after the long pandemic pause. Dean Lewis says hand sanitising is still a big thing in America. But so is a certain vitamin supplement – and not the ubiquitous B shots that have been fuelling touring musicians for decades.
“I feel like everyone is taking a lot of vitamin D when they’re on the road,” he says from his hotel outside San Francisco. “Vitamin D is a thing now.”
While many artists are attempting to reduce the possibility of contracting Covid on the road – and consequently jeopardising shows
– by limiting interactions with anyone outside their tour bubbles, Lewis is conducting his fan business as normal.
After most shows he will hang out with fans outside the venue for about an hour, playing songs, signing autographs, posing for photos.
The Be Alright singer has always been an old-school kind of pop star, the grateful artist who appreciates that behind a song’s billion streams are thousands of humans choosing to press play.
“It does feel normal to be out meeting fans; I’m out there after the show and I’ll play for everyone and get photos with everyone out front because I feel like this is the time to rebuild after I’ve been so silent for so long, with only like a couple of songs out in the last twoand-a-half years,” Lewis says.
“It really energises me; they’re so excited, and spending that 45 minutes with them after a 90minute show … you just know they’re going to come back the next time I’m there.”
Hand sanitising and daily vitamin D aren’t the only shifts in the life of a musician since Covid so dramatically disrupted the music business. The past two years has seen the rise and rise of TikTok as both a music discovery platform and a powerful marketing tool. Lewis is aware of the current artist-led protest against the increasing demands of their record label overlords to feed the social media beast to promote their music. He prefers his online presence to be fan-focused rather than always pointing the camera lens on himself.
The award-winning songwriter has cultivated a devoted online following – his TikTok audience is more than 1.5 million – with both his quintessentially Australian selfdeprecation and emotionallycharged clips of fans in the front rows reacting to his heartbreak anthems.
Lewis was keeping one eye on the numbers game as he released Hurtless, his first single for the year, in early April.
“I had a meeting with my American record label as we were releasing Hurtless and they say it’s all about pre-saves (the streaming equivalent of pre-ordering a song or album) and going viral on TikTok,” Lewis says.
“And here’s a real time example. We posted a video yesterday of two fans in the crowd singing along to Be Alright and it hasn’t been up for 24 hours but already has 10 million views and I’ve gotten about 100,000 (extra) followers on TikTok.
“To put that into perspective, I’ve been posting on Instagram for five years, almost every day, but I got 25 per cent of my Instagram following on TikTok in one day.
“The (music) world has changed so much and I guess I was lucky I started on TikTok two years ago.
“I mean my hits happened well before TikTok happened, so what I’ve tried to do is be an artist who is on TikTok, not a TikTokker who is an artist.”
Lewis’s trajectory is one of the success stories for the ages. He was a television sound recorder studying the craft of songwriting by watching every Oasis video clip he could unearth on YouTube before finally landing his own label deal about six years ago.
His debut single Waves swept the globe in late 2016 and 2017, with Lewis one of the first Australian artists to ride the new streaming wave. It has generated more than half a billion streams, with the 2018 hit Be Alright at more than 1.5 billion plays. Last year’s Falling Up reached platinum status in Australia.
While the stats may serve as the industry’s measure of success, Lewis has an entirely different barometer. Just look at the emotion writ large on the faces of the front rows singing his songs at the American shows, a picture worth way more than thousands of streams, and one that will be repeated when he returns home to tour in November.
“There is a fundamental truth that I have followed my whole life, and which I think is more true now than ever, and that’s if I make great songs they will connect somehow, some way, because that’s what art does,” he says.
“I just want to write great songs and I want to go and play shows, and I’m really trying to let go of all the gatekeeper stuff.”
The Australian leg of Dean Lewis’s Sad Boi Winter Summer tour kicks off at The Tivoli in Brisbane on November 8, with all dates via