Aaron Lewis reflected on his place — or lack thereof — on country music radio in a new appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show over the weekend.
He says he stopped catering to the industry powers that be around halfway through his career and started speaking his mind on politics.
That decision cost him his spot on radio, Lewis says.
“They won’t play me. They don’t like my thoughts on things,” the singer told host Tucker Carlson.
He traces that break with the mainstream back to the late-2000s. At that point, Lewis had been a prominent figure in the music industry for more than a decade as the frontman for hard rock group Staind.
He was also beginning a solo country career, though he wouldn’t release his first true country radio single — a collaboration with George Jones, Charlie Daniels and Chris Young called “Country Boy” — until 2011.
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That song barely cracked the Top 50 at country radio, though it did better on the Mainstream Rock and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts.
But in 2008, U.S. president Barack Obama had just been elected, and Lewis felt that he couldn’t keep quiet about a political turn that he saw as a massive downward shift for the country’s wellbeing.
“Obama getting elected. I immediately recognized it as a horrible blow to our country, immediately, not even knowing why yet,” Lewis remembers.
“I just knew instinctively in my gut that we had made a massive, massive mistake as a country,” he continues.
“… TMZ would get me when I landed in L.A., and they’d get me and ask me questions and that was when I started expressing my feelings and opinions on politics.”
Aaron Lewis Explains How He Got Labeled as “Racist”
Lewis has been called racist, too.
He elaborated on that in his conversation with Tucker Carlson, pointing in particular to one incident at a 2019 show in South Texas.
The singer’s crowd was rowdy that evening — or as he put it, it was “the rudest crowd I had played to in 15 years.”
“I could not get them to shut up all night. Just talking over me like I was the jukebox,” he recalls.
Still, at the end of the night, he attempted to end his set with a completely unplugged song performance, something he often does at shows. He couldn’t get the audience to quiet down enough to hear him, and one fan in front suggested he “tell them to shut the f–k up in Spanish.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to speak Spanish. I’m American,” Lewis responded to her.
Video of the moment reveals some cheers, but louder boos, in response to that statement.
“Welcome to Texas!” one fan yelled.
Though several in the crowd seemed intent on staying quiet for his performance, others were still yelling, booing and cheering — and Lewis wound up walking offstage without the ending he’d planned for his set.
After the fact, Lewis said, he received quite a bit of blowback.
“The world ended for, like, a week. Broke the internet,” he says. “‘Aaron Lewis a racist.’ Perez Hilton did a hit piece on me.”
“They would write these hit pieces, and actually attach the video that completely contradicted the hit piece,” he continues.
Today, Lewis still stands by what he said.
“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 of this country,” he tells Carlson.
A Successful Career Without Country Radio
Lewis tells Carlson that even without the support of the mainstream country music industry, he’s doing just fine through his live shows.
“[I play] probably 175, 180 shows [per year]. Pretty much all of them sold out,” he relates.
He also says there’s an upside to not being tied to the industry for his success.
“It’s nice not to 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-dough $10 ticket and I’ve just devalued my value in that market by selling such a cheap ticket,” he continues.
“I don’t need to sell myself short by doing favors for a radio station,” the singer adds.
More recently, Lewis has enjoyed some radio success without compromising his commitment to speaking his mind.
Read More: Is Aaron Lewis’ “Am I the Only One” Making a Change at Country Radio?
His 2021 song “Am I the Only One,” which spoke out against the dismantling of Confederate soldier monuments and disparaged Bruce Springsteen’s relatively left-leaning politics, was a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
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