In November 1978, The Pointer Sisters arrived on the Billboard Hot 100 with a bit of an outlier record that ultimately became the first top 10 single of their career.
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The vocal group had been notably eclectic previously – they even won a country Grammy award and played the Grand Ole Opry behind their 1974 single “Fairytale.” But in ’78, they took a Bruce Springsteen song originally intended for Elvis Presley and, with the guidance of producer Richard Perry (Carly Simon, Randy Travis), turned “Fire” into a comparatively spare pop single with an undeniable bass hook. The lyric captured a protagonist who keeps turning down a partner’s romantic advances, even though she wants to continue their encounters, and the pop/R&B mix took them all the way to No. 2 at the height of the disco era.
Decades later, Jackson Dean has the opportunity to turn a song with similar contours, new single “Make a Liar,” into an outlier hit in its own right in country music. It’s more extreme than “Fire” – its instrumental hook is more barren, Dean’s vocal is more raw and the Stax/Muscle Shoals vibe is a bigger surprise in the context of modern country than “Fire” was in then-current top 40 radio. But it’s likely to establish its own place in the format, just as it’s already created its own lane in Dean’s canon.
“This was out of the territory that we have been in before,” he says. “We didn’t really have anything like this in the arsenal, but we were looking for new places to go.”
Indeed, Dean and producer Luke Dick (Miranda Lambert, Kip Moore) had discussed old-school R&B as a possible shade to throw on his gritty core of country, fueled by blues and Southern rock.
“Jack and I had explored that kind of sound and vision for a song where it was almost soul-based in the way that the bass works,” Dick says. “I was fascinated with that.”
Near the end of 2024, songwriter Randy Montana (“Beer Never Broke My Heart,” “This is My Dirt”) brought in the “Make a Liar” title – part of the bigger payoff line, “Make a liar outta me” – when he and Dick were writing on their own. Montana had a concept to go with it, too, a singer repeatedly announcing his unwillingness to take part in a series of romantic suggestions, only to slyly reverse himself: “Make a liar outta me.”
“Luke was like, ‘Yeah, that’s it’ and wrote it down,” Montana recalls, “and we were off to the races.” Dick eased into the signature bassline – a slinky, funky, slow-cookin’ come-on – and it gave them a project for the two-hour window they had in their schedules. Knowing where the payoff would land, they found a device fairly quickly in the opening lines, the singer insisting “I ain’t comin’ to your house,” followed by a stream of “I don’t want to…” ideas. It wasn’t clear if it was an audible conversation, thoughts in the singer’s head, or even a mix of those two things. It didn’t really matter.
“A lot of my favorite songs were like that Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ stuff,” Montana notes. “There wasn’t this exact specific thing that you knew he was doing in the moment. It was more or less like a feeling or [it was] up to the listener to decide.”
They logged the entire first verse with the vocal melody playing off the bass hook, and they got a portion of the chorus, too, until Dick brought it to a stop.
“I really thought that this was something that Jackson should come in on,” he says. “He could inform this song in a way that would be specific to him, and I thought it’s something that would really speak to him. I wanted him in the room so that, creatively, he could have a stamp on it.”
Dick pulled together a bare-bones work tape of what they had to date, then sent it to Dean with an invite to help them finish it. Unlike the song’s character, Dean immediately said “yes,” and a couple days later, they completed “Make a Liar” with the singer supplying some of the images that would seal the deal while fashioning some of the chorus melody in a way that fit his range and tone. The “I don’t wanna…” device continued in the chorus, but they lifted the range and shifted the phrasing from conversational to aggressive. And Dean broke into a pleading request – “Baby, plea-ea-ease…” – before it all came to a halt with the hook, “Make a liar outta me.”
In the first verse, he had protested going to her house. In verse two, he announced that she was not invited to his home. When they got to the bridge, the protagonist casually insists, “I ain’t wanting you to stay.” It’s a subtle way to let the listener understand that all of his “no’s” led to a “yes.”
“She took the dare,” Dean says. “It’s all about daring somebody.”
Dick developed a demo that provided a template for a half-dozen musicians when they recorded it last spring at the Southern Ground Studios in Nashville. Electric guitarist Rob McNelley, acoustic guitarist Bryan Sutton and bassist Craig Young blended tones on the signature riff, and the finger noise from those instruments – combined with light percussion from drummer Jerry Roe – created a scratch that makes it feel as if the musicians are in the room with the listener.
“That was kind of the idea about the record is that I wanted the vocal to feel more intimate, I wanted the guitars to feel more intimate,” Dick notes. “It’s just less things turned up louder.”
That aspect of the production spoke volumes to Dean. “That’ll make the change in your truck door rattle,” he says. “It’s four-dimensional, and you can feel it.”
He also embraced the space in the arrangement. The results are so unusual for the current fill-in-every-spot approach to production that it’s almost subversive. “It’s not when to play, but where not to play,” Dean says. “That’s all building tension and building payoff and creating moments.”
Dean hung some Navajo blankets to give the studio a little atmosphere when he sang the final vocal, and though the piece was fairly easy, he did find it challenging when he needed to bring the fire. “The only thing that gave me any trouble was the big note at the end of the chorus, the ‘please…’” he says. “It’s quite a tricky little line to do. It’s full volume after you’ve been full voice singing the chorus.”
Big Machine released “Make a Liar” to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 8, two months in advance of the official Jan. 20 add date. “Liar” is a bit of an outlier, but here’s a Pointer: it’s a ligter outlier in his personal creative development, too. That was the intention. “We had been in an intense world a little bit with On the Back of my Dreams,” he says. “It was a cool place to go.”
