Track is latest from forthcoming album
Aaron Lewis has released “Get What You Get” as the latest track from his forthcoming Frayed At Both Ends album. A song of reckoning and facing consequences is another taste of the album that’s due January 28th via Valory Music Co.
With an acoustic guitar forward, a few mandolin flourishes and a dobro threading through slow midtempo, “Get What You Get” manifests Lewis’ Haggard-esque hard scrabble post-Dust Bowl Country. Sitting in a room full of reckoning that considers that notion of actions and response, the song stands as a hymn of understanding the cost of choices.
“In some ways, it’s such a simple song,” Lewis explains. “It’s a basic truth, one you can’t deny, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to ignore or forget. Right from the first line – ‘You can’t strike a match, then dance in the fire/ Cry every time you get burned….’ – it’s all laid out there, just flipping the cards over one by one.”
Written with friends Ira Dean and Dan Tyminski, “Get What You Get” could be a simple after the love has been wrecked song, or it could speak to a larger crisis of the soul inside oneself. Rife with the impact and after-effects, it is world weary yet clear-eyed. A song of someone who’s survived, who understands and is willing to stand in the ashes of understanding to get on with their life where they are.
Having spent the past decade in Nashville, making records and friends, Frayed at Both Ends merges Lewis’ deeply introspective work with Staind, the 15-million-selling post-grunge/alternative metal band he co-founded, and the rambling sense of tough lonesome in the country of Haggard and Waylon Jennings. Even more rooted in the genre than his No. 1 Billboard Country Album debuts Town Line and Sinner, “Get What You Get” builds on the stark sound that propelled “Am I The Only One” to a No. 1 Billboard Hot Country Songs debut; only the ninth time since the charts’ inception in 1958.
Working with some of Nashville’s finest musicians — guitarists Tom Bukovac, Biff Watson and Seth Taylor, dobroist Ben Kitterman, acoustic slide and baritone guitar from Sturgill Simpson veteran Laur Joamets, keyboards from Jim Moose Brown, acoustic guitar and mandolin from Dan Tyminski – the playing is an equal part of what makes these performances so enduring.
“I think people want to hear fingers on the guitar strings, to sense it’s one person to another making this music,” says the man born in Springfield, Vermont. “The idea these performances came out of real life, these songs are pieces of life means something. So ‘Pull Me Under,’ ‘Goodbye Town’ and the rest of this album came from the notion people want to feel the music.
“I did an acoustic show at the Ryman, and stripping things back really let the songs speak in a different way. I grew up listening to country music, listening to records with a lot of dobro and steel,” he continues. “After the show, Scott Borchetta came back to the dressing room and said, ‘You know, you oughta make an unplugged album,’ which got me thinking.”
Mixed by Chris Lord-Algae, the 5x GRAMMY-winning engineer made the warmth of the playing and depth in the room undeniable on the album available January 28th via The Valory Music Co.
