Atlantic City Weekly

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Aaron Lewis, the singer-songwriter and frontman for the alt-metal band Staind, which hit the mainstream like a hammer with the album Break The Cycle and single “It’s Been a While” in 1999, has also enjoyed a solo career in between Staind albums and tours. While his acoustic style has been very much in keeping with his Staind persona of a man who expresses his emotions forcefully and with a healthy dose of introspection and anger, his new direction might surprise some of his longtime Staind fans.

He’s gone country, following a path that has been traveled in recent years by Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish and Kid Rock. His five-song EP Town Line will be released March 1, and features the new track “Country Boy,” whose lyrics underscore exactly why Lewis doesn’t feel his foray into country music is even a stretch:

And I like my jeans and my old T-shirts  / And a couple extra pounds never really hurt / ‘cause a country boy is all I’ll ever be  / ‘cause Hank taught me just how to stay alive /
You’ll never catch me out the house without my 9 or .45. / I got a big orange tractor and a diesel truck / and my idea of heaven is chasing white tail bucks / and as a country boy I know can survive

Still, Lewis understands that Staind fans might be a little confused about his career turn. In an interview with Atlantic City Weekly, he points out that Staind is planning a new album and that this is not a move away from the band, but simply his own need to express himself, including an acoustic take on the Staind hit “Tangled Up In You” on the new release.

Lewis, who headlines this Friday and Saturday (Feb. 18 & 19) at Borgata, chatted with Atlantic City Weekly from his snow covered rural Massachusetts home about where his music is taking him these days. Here are some excerpts.

What was the motivation for this move to country music?
Why not? If you take all the songs that I sat down with an acoustic guitar by myself and brought to the band, songs like “Outside,” “It’s Been a While,” “Everything Changes,” “Tangled Up In You” — you could take all of those songs just the way that I wrote them and apply the same background music from my new record and there would be perfect continuity there.

So it really isn’t that radical a step away from what you’ve been doing all along?
I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel or anything. I wrote the [new] songs in the same fashion that I had written songs over the years and just decided I wanted to put a different flavor over the top of it. I’m not trying to say I’m familiar with the entire catalogue of country music, but I’m saying I’m country. I live in the sticks. I hunt. I fish. I’ve got a tractor. I’ve got a garden. I’ve got animals. I prefer the woods to the city.

Which country artists did you listen to growing up?
My grandfather was a huge country music fan and that music was the soundtrack to my childhood. Sitting in the kitchen, it was the classics, George Jones, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings, and Mel Tillis. When we first went out on a tour as a signed band it was with Kid Rock. I rode on Bob’s bus a lot and he reintroduced me to the soundtrack of my childhood. We listened to these old country songs and I recognized a lot of them.

And now Kid Rock has been doing some country music lately —
His love of country music has always been there so its makes sense to me.

The music business is so dominated by downloading and the Internet that the era of multi-platinum albums is dying. As someone who began when album sales still mattered, how do you feel about the changes in the music business?
It really destroyed the music business. It’s just as easy now to go on a computer and download [music] illegally as it is to download it legally. Everyone seems to forget that nothing in life is free. You might be able to get a song because somebody put it up there, but it wasn’t free for us to record. We spend our own money given to us by the record label, but it is our money. Business is an exchange of goods for services and there is no exchange happening. And then people wonder why their new favorite band doesn’t put out a second record. They didn’t sell enough records for the record company to make their money back and feel good about reinvesting in that band.

To get back to the music, how cool was it to work with Charlie Daniels and George Jones?
Oh man. How it happened was so surreal and crazy. After I finished putting down the vocals, my producer asked me if I had anybody in mind to guest on the song. I shot for the stars and said it would be pretty cool to get Charlie Daniels to lay down a fiddle track. He calls him, sets it up and I sat there in utter amazement and he asked me, ‘Who else?’ And I said, ‘You made that look awful easy, George Jones would be perfect to sing the lines of the devil.’ He dials again and it went down the same way. They came into the studio, they loved the song and they did what they did.

Are you worried that your Staind fans will feel uncomfortable about this detour you are taking?
Well, I’m the biggest self-doubter out there, so of course there is that concern, but at the same time I’m not going to let that concern dictate what I do. In the music business if you attain any sort of success you will hear that, ‘You’re a sellout.’ I couldn’t be further from a sellout if I tried. I’ve written every song that I’ve ever sung. I’ve written the words, we’ve written the songs. We always wrote the songs we wanted to write. The only thing that ever sold out was venues.

How has the reaction been on tour to the new songs?
I’ve been performing them long before I recorded them. The reaction has always been strong, which led me to record them in the first place. I’m the guy that will write a song while I’m in the dressing room waiting to go onstage and bring the piece of paper with the lyrics and play it. I’ve done that many times.

What’s next for Staind?
We’re in the studio right now. We’re right in the thick of it. It’s a very heavy record, heavier than the last few we’ve put out sonically and musically. I don’t know if I’ll ever write lyrics as heavy as the first couple records. I already wrote about the first 26 years of my life before I got a record deal. You can’t keep rehashing the same thoughts. You have to move on.