WILMINGTON — Aaron Lewis is no stranger to hard work, the singer has been touring almost non-stop since 2016 when “Sinner,” an album that reached the coveted number one spot on Billboard’s Top 100 County Albums, was released. Now, he is heading to play Wilmington on Aug. 9.
Rock ‘n’ roll fans will recognize Lewis as the frontman for the group Staind, but don’t be surprised when the steel guitar starts playing, Lewis’s solo career has taken his music into the realm of country music.
While Lewis spent much of the early 2000s with the rock band, his passion has always been in country music.
“If we’re going to call a spade a spade, then I really switched from country to the road that I went down to end up in a rock band. I was brought up on country music it was the first music I ever heard – I ran away from country music to end up in a rock and roll band,” Lewis said about his transition from rock to country.
One of the opportunities Lewis has had, that many other artists never get the chance to do is to introduce fans to a new genre. Lewis has had fans of his music with Staind, who might not have been fans of country music in the past follow him into the genre.
“I hear it every single day, every time I get the opportunity to communicate with a group of fans,” Lewis said when asked about fans following him across genres.
Lewis has spent a significant portion of the past year on the road touring and has scheduled tour dates all the way into November. For Lewis, hard work is all part of the job, something that he thinks has been lost in today’s world.
“It’s called work ethic, it’s this lost art form that everyone seems to have forgotten about somehow. It’s called being willing to work and go out there and earn a dollar,” Lewis said.
Lewis recently released a single titled “Folded Flag,” a song written by a bandmate and one of the few songs in Lewis’s career he did not write himself. When he heard the song one day before a show, he knew it had to be recorded.
“My guitar player and a couple of his friends wrote the song and I didn’t even know it existed. We were all sitting in the loading dock area behind the venue and hanging out with three or four decorated veterans and I guess Luke just felt like taking the opportunity and asked those guys if he could play a song for them, I was hearing it for the first time just like they were,” Lewis said.
At the end of the song, the soldiers were crying and Lewis knew that the band needed to record that song, “It was a pretty big no brainer,” he said.
The state of country music today is something on which Lewis has his own opinions. He believes that country music is in the middle of an identity crisis.
“It (country music) has just lost its identity, the state of country radio and country music today is in the middle of an identity crisis – and it’s not a good identity crisis to be in … the way country radio is being programmed these days it is alienating the core country audience, and focusing on a demographic that is a very small part of country’s overall demographic,” Lewis said.
While Lewis has had conversations with the members of Staind, his solo career is the road he is on at the moment and says we will just see where things go from here.
Lewis will perform at The Shell in Wilmington Aug. 9.
Michael Praats can be contacted via email at Michael.p@localvoicemedia.com.
