Dean Friedman
in Carcassonne: Songs in the Air
By Marc d’Etremont Carcassonne, France
“The sooner I know what the song is about the clearer the task to get there becomes.” Dean
encourages everyone to “get over fear.” He usually has a rough outline for the first stanza,
and then starts asking a lot of internal questions that will help define the song’s tone, style,
lyrical voice (the voice of the song) and rhyme scheme. “If I’m (asks the lyrical voice) in this
scene, what am I seeing, doing, thinking and sensing at this moment.”
Then again, “A song doesn’t have to be about anything,” but needs to create a balance
between the obvious and what “makes the listener lean in to hear the difference.” Dean
expresses the freedom songwriting provides in that all poetic devices are game – alliteration,
puns, internal rhymes. “At the end of the day you have to trust your own ear,” Dean
concludes, yet, still, “rejection letters cover my walls.”
Born in Paramus, NJ, into a family that appreciated music – Dean's mom is a singer – the
pop music of the 1960s with jazz underpinnings played on his transistor radio as a kid.
Story telling songwriters were major influences: Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Stevie
Wonder. As a teenager he started getting local paid gigs, then attended City College of New
York as a jazz major.
Success came early in his 20s with his first hit, “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” especially in the
UK and Europe. “Ariel” followed reaching the Top 20 in USA. Then just like in a good
ballad, disaster fell. England banned the delightful “I’m in Love With a McDonald’s Girl” in
the 1980s because it mentioned a brand name and therefore was deemed akin to an
advertorial. Dean was dropped by his recording label. In an ironic twist, “I’m in Love With a
McDonald’s Girl” remains a huge cult hit. The current West End musical, "The
Commitments," licensed a cut of the song. Yet at the time, the record label drop resulted in
a major recording slump.
Undaunted, Dean turned to other creative ventures, and in the late 1980s he wrote his first
Regine Thuillet, chef at The French House Party
“A song doesn’t
have to be about
anything.”
~ Dean Friedman