Today we’d like to introduce you to Caleb Dean
Hi Caleb, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started off singing in school and at church. I was not a performer, if I got the feeling someone was listening to me sing I stopped singing. But one day my friend asked me to sing with him at one of the monthly chapels we did at our school, and for reasons I still I don’t know to this day, I said yes. From there I just kept on saying yes, singing more and more at church to eventually leading the youth band at my church. It slowly built from there, I learned guitar and started writing my own songs and then I got this crazy idea I might want to be a songwriter. And that feeling lingered in the back of my mind for a long time before I really started taking it seriously.
I grew up in DFW but I officially moved out to Dallas myself about 5 years ago. I started taking voice lessons with Damon Clark and doing open mics around Dallas, as I went to these open mics I got really involved with one in particular at The Creatives Factory. I’ve always loved the storytelling aspect of songwriting and there’s so many ways you can approach telling a story in a song and the way I did it seemed to be different from most of the friends that I had made at these open mics. It made me really insecure about my writing for a while I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but people still seemed to like my songs, so I kept writing. It made me wonder if there was another way I could better tell my stories.
I had been toying with the idea of writing a musical for a while but I wasn’t sure what to write about and I remember one day I showed one of my more personal songs to my vocal coach he looked at me and said with a scary confidence “this is your musical”. And thus began my journey into musical theater. Since then I’ve been apart of two musicals, “Urinetown” and “SpongeBob the Musical”. I absolutely loved it but shortly after SpongeBob I got vocal nodules and had to step away to recover. Now having recovered from that I learned a lot about how to take care of my voice and I’m looking forward to continue performing both as a Solo-Artist, Actor, and Writer. As I continue working on my own individual projects I’m actively looking for audition opportunities and I’m excited to be a part of Dallas Sounds Amplified a curated busking program through the Dallas Music Office.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ha no. The road has been a lot of things and smooth is not one of them. A huge struggle along the way has been my voice. My voice has always been a huge part of my identity as a storyteller and songwriter but I always seemed to lose it so easily. It actually wasn’t until I got nodules that I slowed down long enough to figure out what was actually going on with my voice. Now I’m able to and am still working on making the lifestyle changes necessary to keep my voice in consistent good health.
However losing my voice for a while came with a lot of identity issues. Especially as a writer. I always wrote songs and writing songs without being able to sing felt weird. So much of the joy in music was in being able to sing and without that it didn’t feel the same. This forced me to experiment with different ways of writing songs but it also pushed me express myself in other ways. I started writing poetry, skits, scripts and finding other ways of expressing myself. Which opened up a whole other can of worms, like what do I do with these? I’m a songwriter and a singer. Acting, screenwriting, playwriting… that’s a whole different world. It took me a long time to stop resisting and allow myself to tell the stories on my heart in whatever way they came to me. I’m still not sure how all of the pieces fit together most days I have no idea what I’m doing but I know I’m writing something that means something to me and at the end of the day I think that’s the goal.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
What I’m most proud of are probably the projects that I’m working on right now. I’ve never worked on anything like them before and it’s been an absolutely infuriating and exciting learning experience so far. I know that’s vague but hopefully I’ll be able to share more about those projects here soon.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I think the juries still out on that one. I’ve come a long way but I’ve still got a long way to go. That being said, I want to say my intuition and the trust I’ve developed with that inner voice.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calebdeanmusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/18TdVdhQ46/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Image Credits
Sarah Margaux (the 3 headshots)
Christian Chavarria (the shots with my guitar and the tie dye sweater)
