— THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Canadian country music star Dean Brody is burning up the charts with his new single, “Paint the Town Redneck”, and he recently sat down with ET Canada’s Carlos Bustamante.
At the time, he’d just been forced to evacuate from Kelowna, right before several “big shows,” admitting he’s feeling “a little bit discombobulated right now.”
During the conversation, Brody looked noted that for those who knew him way back when, his success has been surprising.
“I was the least likely kid to make it, you know, in music,” he said. “So they’re really proud and they can’t believe it, because I’m quiet. You know, I’m I’m pretty reserved. I’m an introvert by nature.”
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He also touched on how much he was shaped by growing up in a small town. “I think I really didn’t notice how much it shaped me until I moved to the city and moved to the big city and moved to Nashville and spent some time in Toronto… you know, I’m definitely a type of person that grew up in a small town with, you know, holes in my jeans, hand-me-down jeans, stuff like that, and things that I might be embarrassed of now… It wasn’t an affluent upbringing… Then I come to the big city and it’s like, ‘Whoa, whoa, all all these homes have foundations. All this is amazing.’”
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In addition, Brody opened up about his philanthropic efforts, and how he first became involved with charity work.
“It’s sometimes not really easy to to boil it down, but yeah, I guess in 2011, I read a book about girls being exploited in South America, and I just called up the author and, ah, looked him up and said, ‘Hey, is there anything I can do?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I lived there seven years. I’m back in the U.K.,’ was writing for a couple of the newspapers there. And he said, ‘Let’s go back. I’ll take you, let you meet all these people, you know, people that are working on the ground in Brazil with these girls, it was a heartbreaking trip,” he said.
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“And then we just kept making trips and he wrote two books. And along the way we started yeah, we’re under the fifth safe house for these girls now. It’s a pretty rough area in central Brazil. And yeah, it’s called the B.R. 116. It’s like a highway. It’s like a thousand miles long, but it’s got a lot of these little poor towns and a lot of the income that happens in this in these towns is from, you know, truckers passing through and exploiting these girls. So kind of a dark, you know, little corner, but seeing some light and that makes it worth it,” he continued.
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“And letting people know and informing them what they can do. We’re working with a partner right now called IJM Canada, the International Justice Mission. They’re the the largest anti-slavery team in the world. So we’re particularly partnering with them for the exploitation online. So that kind of grew exponentially during the lockdowns, unfortunately. So yeah, we’re targeting that.”
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He concluded by looking back at his career, where he’s been and where it’s taking him.
“When you have a career that’s over a decade, you start to realize that some people are coming to the shows for nostalgic reasons,” he said. “You know, it’s awesome. And I just hope that, you know, at some point in their life, one of my songs is something that they have a good memory attached to. You know, music is kind of the soundtrack of our years, and it’s our marker in time. And I hope that somewhere along the way I’ve encouraged somebody or they’ve gotten something from me to share in my heart.”
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