Nashville, Tenn. – When Aaron Lewis, who’d already had two #1 Billboard Country Album debuts, decided to slash everything back to the bare essence, he wasn’t sure what the response would be. But having dedicated a decade of his life to country music, he wanted to make a record that cut to the core of what the music meant to him. Always a go-your-own-way guy, he worked with Nashville’s best musicians, wrote with his friends and found a place to sing from that made Frayed At Both Ends perhaps the most honest work of his career.
Then the man who is known for his rowdy country shows decided to match Frayed At Both Ends’ lean aesthetic with an Acoustic Tour that put the focus solidly on two acoustic guitars and his voice. Nothing between him, the songs and the people, it was the perfect bookend to what may be Lewis’ most aesthetic project.
“When we listened to what these songs were,” explains the man hailed from “his mournful baritone” by The Los Angeles Times, “less was really more. Let the best players do their thing, then bring everything the songs contained to the mic. People are living these situations; it’s not a party. So after all these years, I wanted to be stripped down and out with the fans, the people who’ve been buying these records since Town Line and Sinner. But rather than giving them a show, I truly wanted to give them a piece of my heart and possibly their life.”
With Frayed At Both Ends landing at #1 on iTunes Country Album Chart – and #4 for the Video Album all weekend, he celebrated the much anticipated project’s release with a string of dates in the heartland, playing Pensacola, FL., El Dorado, AK, Shreveport, LA, Effingham, IL, Wabash, IN and a two night stand in Wisconsin Dells, WI. With a Monday morning wake-up call on FOX & Friends today, a brief interview was followed by a performance of “Everybody Talks To God” – taped at Fort Campbell with a trio of string players – was shared with the morning show’s audience.
Having talked about the fact that “Everybody Talks To God” had been around Nashville for 20 years – and no one had cut Chris Wallin’s song about how one way or another faith is inevitable – the performance spurred multiple postings of the lyric video and the song shooting to #2 on the iTunes all-genre Songs chart and #5 on Amazon’s physical sales chart.
“It’s amazing to me that this song hadn’t been scooped up earlier,” Lewis marvels. “It says so much about the way in our darkest times, there’s an intercession of faith. It’s such a well-painted story song; you can see the diner and the people in it. Then it pays off in a tragic, but powerful way. To me, and it’s the reason I love being in Nashville and writing songs with folks like Chris Wallin, Dan Tyminski, Jeffrey Steele, David Lee Murphy and Ira Dean is how much life can be distilled down into 3 and 4-minute books and movies.”
More stripped down, Frayed At Both Ends offers a deeper look at Lewis’ classic Haggard-esque take on working people’s music. Having recorded with Willie Nelson, George Jones, Charlie Daniels, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Mickey Raphael, the Cox Family, Ben Haggard and Tyminski. Lewis has become a purist essentially by channeling his grandfather’s 8-tracks.
Mixed by Chris Lord-Algae, the 5-time Grammy-winning engineer created a sonic palette that has the warmth of what is becoming Lewis’ most successful tour – and left room for the performances to let the splinters and reckonings that once made country such a good place to drown one’s sorrows and figure out how to move on from the wreckage one creates stand out.
Stream / download Frayed At Both Ends here.