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.
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.

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! I am 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 my music to show 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, 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. Well, I went to a party where there was a cute boy I didn't know and we started kissing - the current boyfriend was not there of course! Next thing you know, everybody's talking about it and of course he finds out about it and nobody likes me for weeks!" 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 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 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."

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 Montgomery Gentry's "If You Ever Stop Loving 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 one of her projects.
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 record deal - and that's when Ginny Johnson over at Hamstein [Productions] called. I knew she understood my songs and me as a performer. 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. But with the coming of a merger, Roxie and Dreamworks parted ways in 2003. "It hurt and was quite a blow at first when I left Dreamworks. But I knew I always had songwriting. So, that's what I turned to. That's how "A Soldier's Wife" came into my life. It is a song taken from a woman's perspective on the war, " states Ms. Dean. "I wrote it after seeing two news stories. One was a woman having to go AWOL to fight for custody of her children because she and her husband were both in Iraq. The other was a woman facing the reality of losing the family business because she couldn't run the house, raise the kids, and run the business successfully."

Roxie partnered with Valhalla Music Group to release "A Soldier's Wife" to the public (produced by Herb Tassin).

Wives, mothers and children of soldiers in Iraq have sent thank you emails and letters of confirmation after seeing Roxie's performance debut of her single on "Talk of the Town." A portion of all of the proceeds will be donated to the Armed Forces Relief Trust/Operation Helping Hand.

"If you don't have anything to say, you don't have anything to write about either," she reiterates. 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." 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!"

Music Samples • Official Website