Aaron Lewis traces his country music roots to rural Vermont, rejecting modern industry-driven pop-country in favor of authenticity, calling labels exploitative—artists recoup loans while labels pocket profits despite billions in streams. Blacklisted after criticizing the genre’s commercialization, he thrives through live shows and merchandise, avoiding predatory contracts. His opposition to Obama’s presidency and pandemic policies sparked backlash, including false racism accusations, while his geopolitical skepticism—like defending Putin’s perspective—further isolated him. Lewis contrasts his self-reliant upbringing with modern decay, warning of a fractured America where shared values erode, and slams the music industry as parasitic, prioritizing profits over artists’ lives, even as his uncompromising themes endure despite suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
And my grandmother would wake up in the morning, and the very first thing that happened before an egg hit the frying pan or anything was the country radio got turned on.
And the very last thing that got shut off before the light got shut off was the radio.
So, I mean, it didn't matter if I was going fishing with my grandfather or whether I was at the house.
If we were going fishing, I can still visualize the pile of eight tracks on the floor of his Grand Torino with the boat tied to the top of the car.
And it was just, it was permanent.
There was always country music, always.
And if we were in the boat, he was singing it.
So my whole childhood is just steeped in country music.
So when I decided, excuse me, when I decided to do something different because I had gotten to the end of my contract with Stained and I was now free to do whatever I wanted to do, I had always thought about putting out a solo record, if you will.
A lot of lead singers do that.
I didn't want it to be stained light.
I wanted to do something different and reinvent what I was doing without reinventing myself.
Yes.
And the only direction to go was country music because it was such a part of my being, part of my whole childhood memories and the landscape of it.
So when I decided that I was actually going to do something by myself, that was the direction that I went.
And I kind of walked away from that and went to a completely different genre that there might be some overlap of stained fans that also liked country music.
But I was certainly in that moment shooting myself in the foot and having to basically start over because my value in the industry was towards the rock industry and nobody knew who I was in the country industry unless they would listen to rock music too.
So it kind of in perfect me form, I took the hard road and decided I was going to change genres along with putting something out by myself, which would have been hard enough as it is.
It's been infiltrated by California, just like everything else.
Ooh.
Really?
When within my career, about halfway through it, everything changed in the industry and a lot of consolidation happened.
A lot of people lost their jobs at whatever record label they were at, or they were in the top 40 side of things and everything got condensed and they lost their, well, they all either went to Nashville or they went to country radio.
And I truly believe that that has something to do with why country has become so popified, where it's like the land of the misfit toys, where it's not really country.
It's not really pop.
It kind of rides right down the middle of it and becomes its own thing.
And they should call it its own thing.
Like it should have its own genre and classification.
And instead they call it country.
And I don't know how you can put George Jones and Merle Haggard in the same sentence as Morgan Wallen or the Rascal Flats.
It's the people in power calling the shots and being the tastemakers, if you will, and choosing for us what we want to hear and then stuffing it down our throat until we accept it.
Like it's like it's like the land of the misfit toys.
That's the best way to describe it, where it doesn't fit in pop, doesn't fit in country, just kind of, but you can push it in either direction and it would and it works, but it has no, it doesn't have its own soul, if you will.
It's nice to not have to bow down to the powers that be.
It's nice to not have to undermine my value in a market because the radio station wants to get as much out of my show as they can.
So they sell my ticket for a low-do $10 ticket, and they've just devalued my value in that market by selling such a cheap ticket when I can sell hard tickets.
I don't need to sell myself short by doing favors for a radio station.
I got no leverage with the industry because I'm easily chewed up and spit out because there's a thousand people behind me waiting to get chewed up and spit out.
That last stained record that we put out was the last record where I really had to do the dance and play the game with radio and not ruffle any feathers and not offend anybody and play the game.
And then once that contract was done, I tried to play the game with country music.
And then I released a song called That Ain't Country that was basically talking about the whole industry that has created this amalgamation of music that doesn't really fit in a genre.
And that was the end of it.
I put out a song trying to get country radio to play it about them.
The amount of money that we generate as the artist, what we get back for that is minuscule, comparatively speaking, to what everybody else with their hands in the cookie jar makes.
And, you know, obviously God has a plan for me because the way that all of this has just happened and I am just a passenger and I'm not driving this ship.
Yes.
But and I'm very lucky and very blessed, but I can still recognize the faults to the system and not necessarily be complaining about how amazing of a ride I've had doing this.
Because there's a thousand people behind every single person with a record label, with a record deal that wants it as badly as you did before you got it.
And they can give you the shittiest deal on the planet because if you don't take it, the guy behind you will.
And I don't understand how a record label that, I mean, it certainly isn't capitalism with a conscience, but it is, it's certainly capitalism where the record label is in it to make money.
And it's not necessarily about what's the art that is being created by the creative.
It's about the money that that creative artist is going to generate for the record label to cover the 15 failures that they brought to the table.
I don't know that in a private setting, in a private conversation where things aren't going any further, I don't know of anybody that I know in the business that would have good things to say about it.
But the problem is, is that the operating system it's just it's not decent right so a decent person could start a record label but unless they change the entire formula and then the entire way that the whole business is ran the business itself
is lecherous.
So a good person could start it, but unless they change the whole thing, it's going to be the same.
It's pretty obvious now that this country is getting weaker than ever, meaning the population is unhealthier.
That's what Maha is about, trying to counteract this long-term trend that's culminated in a disaster.
Americans are so unhealthy, we can't staff the military.
And it's really, really sad.
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When TMZ would get me when I landed in Los Angeles and I was walking through the airport and they'd get me and ask me questions and that was when I started expressing my feelings and my opinions on politics.
And then there was, there was one time I was playing a show down by the, down by the border.
And I mean, I've played a lot of shows and I've played a lot of shows back before I had a record deal.
And this was the rudest crowd I had played to in, I don't know, 15 years.
I'm playing completely acoustic all by myself.
Not even any extra musicians on stage or anything, just me and my guitar.
I could not get them to shut up all night, just talking over me like I was the jukebox.
And I made the mistake of back then at the end of the show, I would do a song completely unplugged where I would pull a chord out of my guitar and I'd walk away from the microphone and I'd go stand right on the edge of the stage.
And I would acoustically play the last song with no microphone, with no nothing, just belting to the crowd.
And for some strange reason, after such a rude evening, I decided I was going to do that and try to prove everybody wrong.
They're going to listen to me whether they want to or not.
So I attempt to try to start the song.
I explained to them what I was going to do through the microphone before I stepped away from the microphone.
And I attempted to start the song.
As I got to where I started to sing, the volume had gone up and not down.
Now, mind you, there's no sound system anymore.
It's just me singing to the room.
So I stop.
I walk back around.
I go to the microphone.
I explain to everybody what I'm going to do again.
Perez Hilton did a hit piece on me about how much of a racist I am, put the video connected to it.
And if you watch the video, you see that the whole interview is, I mean, the whole piece is a complete bullshit and a complete fabrication of all of it.
And they would write these hit pieces and actually attach the video that completely contradicted the hit piece.
When America, it says clearly in the books, in the naturalization process, that you have to have a full working knowledge of the English language before you can become a citizen in this country.
Reasonable people, similar values, actually, but they're just, they see themselves so differently and they're just committed to some weird partisan addiction.
It's almost like a feel-good addiction, like a, like a, um, like it's a virtue signaling addiction that people seem to have that for some reason feel so guilty about their own life that they need to create these these things to to virtue signal and and make themselves feel like a better person because at the
end of the day, how they present themselves and behave in life is unfulfilling for them.
So they somehow have to virtue signal to make them feel better about their unfulfilled lives.
It's a very strange, strange thing.
I have found as a 53-year-old man, looking at the people that are younger than me that are going to take over this country when I'm gone, they just want to be a victim.
Like it's the craziest thing happening with our culture where all of our younger generation, there's more pride taken in being a victim than there is in getting over and getting through and moving past whatever it is that you are a victim of.
It's not pull your bootstraps up and stand up and keep moving forward anymore.
It's lavish in the victimhood as long as possible.
And that just doesn't compute with me.
Like I don't, that's not what I was taught at all.
So for people who don't, I mean, I'm sure we're going to lose an audience point here, but for people who don't know what New England grouse hunting is, can you describe it?
A grouse is a big woodland bird about the size of a chicken.
Miles, unless you have found a thick population, you will cover some ground and you will put in a lot of work.
It's probably why I like quail hunting because I'm 53.
I don't necessarily want to walk into a piece of woods that is up and down and the thickest.
Of course, they live in the thickest crap.
Oh, yeah.
So you're really, really, really, really putting in a lot of effort to possibly put up one bird.
Where with quail hunting, if you go to a plantation where that's their deal is quail hunting with a nice leisurely stroll, nice leisurely, gentlemanly stroll through the woods, you can put up 100 birds instead of possibly one.
Quail hunting is a rich man's sport because of the fact that the majority of the quail hunting that you can do at this point in our society and in our growth as a country, everything else, it's really hard to actually find wild quail to begin with.
Some places are insane and so exclusive and so private that even if you had the ridiculous amount of money to pay, you can't.
But yes, yes, it is a rich man sport in the sense that it's hard to go do it on your own time with no dime.
For sure.
You got to go to a place that, for the most part, you got to go to a place that it charges you because there's a massive overhead for the cost of the birds and the cost of everything.
So if, you know, musician, if you had to pair a musician with these two kinds of up on bird hunting, you'd say Bruce Springsteen, who's the representative of America's working man.
I think that he is a disgusting display of not appreciating what was handed to him in this country as being an American, the success that he has had.
The fact that he duped us all with one of the most anti-American songs ever and called it born in the USA as some sort of celebration of how great it is to be born in the USA.
I'm angry at myself for not seeing it for so long and actually giving him, in my mind, the credit of being a representation of blue-collar America.
I think that he has forgotten where he came from.
I think that if you're not careful doing this, this career that me and him have both been so blessed to have had, if you're not careful, it will consume you.
And it's obvious that it creates a situation where you've lost sight of the reality of the country that you live in because you've lived such a Kush, You've had so much
You have so much that it's really easy to take a stance that is so anti-everything.
That you were lucky enough to have, lucky enough to create, lucky enough to change your situation in life.
And he's just lost touch with the struggles.
He's lost touch with the struggle.
And it seems like most people who have lost touch with the true struggle of life, those are the people that vote for these fucking idiots.
Those are the people that feel like they have to virtue signal.
Those are the people that somewhere along the way, they feel guilty for the success that they have had.
So they somehow have to make it up with this nonsensical bullshit that like you grew up at the same time, Tream, I did.
It was the most unracially driven the verbal beating that we took over and over and over our whole childhood of you don't judge a man by the color of his skin.
You judge a man by the content of his character.
And like it was the best that our country has ever been.
And I think that that didn't work well for the Democrats and the communists.
They want us bickering internally so that we have no sense of shared country pride, that we have no sense of shared morality because they've created so many things artificially for us to fight about.
I mean, there is no doubt in my mind at this point.
It's not coincidental.
It's purposeful.
Like, there is definitely a power center in this world that definitely does not want to see us as the shining light on the hill.
As I got old enough to be carrying the weight of that responsibility on my shoulders.
Yes.
Like knowing full well that, okay, it's my turn now.
I have assumed the responsibility, which we are all supposed to do, that the country is in my hands.
It was in my father's hands before that.
It was in my grandfather's hands before that.
And as our generations grow and get older, each generation, it's now their turn to become and take over as the stewards of this amazing, beautiful country.
And we forgot about that for a little bit.
And we haven't been doing that over the probably the past 30 years.
And that's not okay with me.
Like, it is my responsibility now as a father and a proud patriot.
It's my responsibility now to make sure that what I hand over to the next generation behind me is better than I found it because that's what we're supposed to do.
That's what we were taught our whole lives.
You walk into the woods, you leave it cleaner than you found it.
You find one piece of trash.
It doesn't even matter.
One piece of trash and you pick it up and you put it in your pocket.
You have left that better than you found it.
And our generation, that's what was instilled in us, beaten into us.
We are knowingly and willingly flushing everything down the toilet out of convenience.
It's so convenient to have this fully operating computer in my hand at all times.
It's so convenient.
Every important piece of thread that makes up the fabric of this country is being picked out one at a time.
And it's going to leave us with this empty shell that nobody knows what to do with it now because we've already discarded and thrown away everything that kept us on a path, on a good path in life.
If we hand this country off as the stewards of today, if we hand this country off to the younger generation without fixing it first and they're able to do what they've been taught to do, this country will cease to exist.
Certainly will not be the shining light on the hill anymore.
I don't know that it is already.
I mean, the love and want and desire for this country to go back to where it was for a lot of people is still strong.
But I don't know if we have the wherewithal as a society, as an entire country, to pull our heads out of our asses long enough to fix it.
It's scary.
I'm scared.
I'm scared for my kids.
I lose sleep over what this country is going to be for, good Lord, my grandkids.
I never, every U.S. senator I know, I know all the Republicans, I mean, they're very upset about Iran or Ukraine, but I don't ever hear them mention their own states outside the cities.
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So here's one of my favorite quotes, my favorite Aaron Lewis quotes.
My book of Aaron Lewis quotes.
You know, everyone want, you know, everyone in music is like an outlaw, I'm a rebel.
And they all say the same thing and they all mouth the same pieties, read the same stupid bumper stickers, kiss ass to the same powerful people.
So this, this actually is kind of an outlaw thing to say.
And here's what you said in 2022.
And I'm quoting you.
You know, as fucked up as it sounds, maybe we should listen to what Vladimir Putin is saying.
Maybe when Klaus Schwab and George Soros and every other earth-destroying MF are all jump on the same bandwagon, maybe just maybe we should take a good look at that.
Why are they trying to protect Ukraine so much?
What do they all have to lose?
So I would think like in a country with creative people, a free country, that you'd be one of many people asking the single most obvious questions.
Why can't we listen to what the other side is saying?
And why are all these people who were pretty obviously bad all so vested in this one faraway country?
People that not direct employees in my like in my knit circle, but external employees, people that worked for me in different areas that wouldn't, that wanted nothing to do with it anymore.
It's a funny story, and you're part of it.
The reason I said that is because I had literally just watched your show.
I'm a guy who gives his opinions on YouTube, but I appreciate artists, which is to say people whose whole job is to pursue the truth, you know, whether they get there or not.
But I mean, that's their job.
And every society carves out room for them to do that.
But a healthy society does kind of listen sometimes to what they say because they're saying unconventional things, challenge you to think a little more deeply about things you assume are true.
Are they actually true?
You pay artists to say things like that.
So it's just wild to live in a society where artists are leading the charge for conformity.
There was an outward call within the industry for me to be canceled and to lose my record deal.
And my record label president, who we don't see eye to eye on politics at all, stood up for my right to free speech and my right and my right to creativity and as an artist, my right to express myself however I want.
That it was a patriotic, country-loving point out the what the fuck is going on right now point of view.
And they didn't like that.
They didn't like that I was pointing out the obvious in a time where every single one of us was sitting there scratching our heads going, what in the fuck is going on in this country?
I'm 49 or 50 at the time or whatever it was.
And I've never seen anything even remotely close to what's going on right now in this country.
Like, where did our sense of free people go where all of a sudden we're just conforming to these rules that just don't make any sense?
It seems like they're just taking handfuls of shit and throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks.
And I was like, what the fuck?
Am I the only one who's seeing this?
Who's recognizing how completely how completely absurd the whole concept was of shutting everything down?
How do we survive that as an economy, the wheels that need to keep moving at all times just screeched to a freaking halt?
And, you know, me and Jeff Steele and Ira Dean got together and everybody was wearing masks at the time.
Everybody was distancing themselves from everybody.
That moment in time was one of the most destructive moments in time that we've ever experienced.
It destroyed our close-knitness.
It destroyed human beings are social people.
They want to be in groups.
They want to be together.
We want to, we're, you know, we want to come together instinctively.
And to do that, like there's a whole lot of people that are responsible for that that should be held accountable for what they did.
I still feel like the words to that song are just as relevant to this moment that we are sitting in right now as it was five years ago when we were locked up and told that we had to wear masks and that we couldn't.
I had a mask in my car just to put on if I went into Dunkin' Donuts or if I and that didn't even last for very long.
A month into it, I was like, this is fucking bullshit.
I'm not, I got thrown out of Dunkin' Donuts one day for walking in without my mask on.
They are all these people that feel the need to virtue signal every time they turn around are some of the most miserable people you've ever met in your life.
I mean, as you know, as so many people are fully aware, the Ukraine is one of the dirtiest and most corrupt places in the world, aside from the United States.
But that's what that does is it puts the fear of God into all the other freaks in Congress, all of whom have some, not all, but many of whom have something to hide, including people we've just mentioned.
And they're like, whoa, you know, I better stay way away from the boundaries because I could get hurt.
Yeah, I could, I can, if I live that long, I could still be the country thing, I could still be doing that.
The stained thing, that's a little bit more taxing to my voice.
It's a lot of yelling.
It's a lot of screaming.
It's a lot more taxing to where if I'm being completely honest, there's probably more of a shelf life to my country thing than there is to the stained thing.
There's probably going to come a point where I'm going to have to be like, you know what?
It's too taxing on me and it takes too long for me to recover from being on tour with Stained for a month.
And there's probably going to come a point where I'm going to be like, for longevity's purposes, I need to either do less shows or not so many in a row or the country thing, man, I could do three shows a day every single day and never blow myself out.
Speaking of like creating a moral hierarchy, the people who make and profit from porn, I mean, I don't know why they're not in prison, but I talk about exploitation.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
But it's the cigarette smokers and the people who doubt Zelensky who really should lose their jobs.
Okay, let me end on a happy note.
So you've said a lot of tough things about the music business and the people who profit from it.
You described them as leeches.
I don't know that to be true because I've never been in your business, but we all know that to all know that.
I don't want to be that negative or like hateful about it.
I'm very grateful to my president, the record label president for standing up for me.
But, you know, it's a it's a it's a it's a business in a in a situation that you stop paying attention for a half a second and you're ate up and spit out already and you're gone.
I interviewed him in the 90s, Brian, and I thought he was smart in maybe 1999 at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. Brian is one of the most intelligent, profound conversations I have ever had with somebody.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking with everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now.
Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
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