Read the full transcript of American musician Aaron Lewis’ interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “Being Blacklisted from Radio & Why Record Labels Intentionally Promote Terrible Music”, August 22, 2025.
How Aaron Lewis Transitioned from Rock to Country Music
TUCKER CARLSON: How’d you wind up singing country music?
AARON LEWIS: Well, my childhood, the soundtrack to my childhood is all country music. That’s all I heard from the time I woke up in the morning until the time that the lights went out.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s funny, you’re from northern New England, which I think my people don’t associate with country music.
AARON LEWIS: Oh yeah, for sure. Country at out in the woods, everybody’s listening to country music for sure. But yeah, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house in Wallingford, Vermont. Spent a lot of time there. It was a safe place for me.
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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.
AARON LEWIS: And it was on all day long. 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 Gran Torino with the boat tied to the top of the car. And it was just 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 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 didn’t want it to be “Stained Light.” I wanted to do something different and reinvent what I was doing without reinventing myself. 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.
Country Music as America’s Genre
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s funny, I think people think of country music as a regional music. Southern Appalachian, Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, kind of the birthplace. They don’t think of it as the music of the country. So it’s like Central California. Bakersfield, of course.
AARON LEWIS: Bakersfield is a piece of Texas exactly in the middle of California.
TUCKER CARLSON: And you grew up in northern New England, which is very rural, one of the most rural places in New York City.
AARON LEWIS: And you get out of the cities in New England. And it’s as country as country gets. And it’s as red as red gets. Even the state of Massachusetts.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.
AARON LEWIS: If you look at the state of Massachusetts broken down county by county, the whole state’s red, except for Boston, Worcester, and Springfield.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: You get outside those three big cities in the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the worst. It is California, too. You get outside those big cities, it’s all red.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Not a lot of Kamala voters up near Mount Shasta.
AARON LEWIS: No, not at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: Music is such a window into attitudes and culture, and it’s just funny that country music is basically popular everywhere outside the cities.
AARON LEWIS: One hundred percent.
The Challenge of Changing Genres
TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. So how was it weird for you to go from one genre to a completely different one?
AARON LEWIS: Weird. I don’t know if it was weird. It was foolish by everybody else’s accounts, because I had already built something substantial in the rock industry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: 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.
How Country Music Has Changed
TUCKER CARLSON: How has country music changed itself as a genre?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t really recognize country music anymore. Really. What’s playing on the radio? How do you draw a line from what’s on the radio now and called country music to what was on the radio when we were kids called country music? There’s no line to be drawn.
TUCKER CARLSON: I listen to bluegrass junction. So this is all outside my world, but tell me how it’s changed.
AARON LEWIS: It’s been infiltrated by California, just like everything else. Really? 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 jobs.
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. 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. I mean, how does that correlate? How does that fall into the same category? Because it doesn’t in any way.
TUCKER CARLSON: Which is better?
AARON LEWIS: Country. Yeah, we have pop music. I think pop music with a country twang is a little weird.
TUCKER CARLSON: Did that happen organically or do you think it was on purpose?
AARON LEWIS: It’s the control mechanism. 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.
The Outlaw Spirit of Traditional Country
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s something a little radical or maybe more than a little radical about traditional country music. Johnny Cash doing a live show from the Folsom Prison. It’s pretty untamed in a lot of ways. There’s like a true outlaw, not a fake outlaw element, but like a real outlaw element.
AARON LEWIS: I think that country music is Americana. It’s the genre that we as the country of America are certainly responsible for. It came from here.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: It didn’t come from somewhere else where rock had a lot of English influence. All those English bands from back then and stuff. But country music is still American. Country music still isn’t worldwide. It’s big in Germany. It might have a listening audience in England and in Germany, but it doesn’t expand much further than that. Country music is an American genre.
TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s become less American and more international. More like Barcelona. It’s just everyone’s city.
AARON LEWIS: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s nobody’s city.
AARON LEWIS: 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 works. But it has no soul, if you will. It’s not pure to the genre.
Being Blacklisted from Radio
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that there’s still a demand for real country music? Could Merle Haggard make a living today?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t know. I mean, I would certainly hope so. But if you listen to the landscape that’s on country radio right now, I don’t see where he would fit in at all. I don’t see where I fit in at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: Are you on the radio?
AARON LEWIS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
AARON LEWIS: No, they won’t play me. They don’t like my thoughts on things.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really. How important is radio? Well, it’s obviously you. How many shows you do last year?
AARON LEWIS: Oh, probably 175, 180 shows last year.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So obviously you’re doing fine.
AARON LEWIS: Pretty much all of them sold out. Just fine. 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 ten dollar 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.
The Music Industry’s Control System
TUCKER CARLSON: Is that how it works?
AARON LEWIS: Oh, first you sell your soul to the record label, and then you sell everything else you’ve got to the machine, which is the radio that drives music.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really? Is it satellite or terrestrial radio?
AARON LEWIS: All of it. All of it. Satellite just took over.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but it’s the same idea, same concept. So how does it work? If you don’t mind revealing the sleazy underbelly of the business that you don’t participate in, apparently.
AARON LEWIS: We are the indentured servant. I mean, I think that indentured servitude laws are literally still on the books in California so that they can get away with what they do with us.
TUCKER CARLSON: The performer, the artist you’re talking about.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah. Everything. Every penny that we ever get paid from a record label is all a loan. It’s all a loan. To give you a conceptual breakdown. This is all just kind of a take a dollar.
So 25 cents of that dollar, let’s just say it’s probably more, goes to the record label just because they invested; the rest of it, business management takes their percentage, lawyer takes their percentage. Management takes their percentage, business manager takes their percentage. Then the government takes their percentage, and then the overhead.
And then what’s left, let’s call it ten cents. At the end of the day, that goes back to the record label to pay back the loan that they gave you of the money that they gave you up front. Actually, any money that I’ve actually made from the record label, I’ve made them 80 times as much.
Of a dollar, let’s just say there’s 12 cents left. The 12 cents actually goes to pay back the record label for the money that they gave you. It’s insane. How does that still exist? Because of the laws on the books. It’s insane.
The Record Label Parasites
TUCKER CARLSON: Are the record label people adding a lot to the process? Are they creative geniuses?
AARON LEWIS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: I just love how all the people who are getting rich from creativity are the least creative people.
AARON LEWIS: They’re the ones that can’t create, but they are making the most money off of the creatives. We’re here because who wouldn’t want a record label? Who wouldn’t want to live this dream? Who wouldn’t want to make music if they’re a musician, who wouldn’t want to make music as their livelihood?
So we’re in a very fucked up situation where there’s a thousand people behind me that would kill me to have my job. So I got no leverage. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Television’s the same. How long did you participate in that system?
Breaking Free from the Machine
AARON LEWIS: It was 2012 or 13. That last Staind 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, and they didn’t like that very much.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so you attacked the distributors and then were surprised when they didn’t distribute it.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Super smart. But I admire your purity.
AARON LEWIS: Principled.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. But principled. So that didn’t work.
AARON LEWIS: It basically didn’t work to my advantage to be getting played on the radio, but it certainly freed me from being a servant to radio. So it is so freeing to not be under that thumb.
I can write songs that are over three and a half minutes long. I can put lyrics in songs that I want to put there. I’m no longer held to the industry standard because I’m not necessarily trying to participate in the industry game.
I go out there, I play successful shows. I have a fan base that seeks out my music and doesn’t just listen to what the radio stuffs down their throat. And I’m very blessed and very lucky that I don’t have to participate in the game anymore.
The Spotify Billion-Play Scam
TUCKER CARLSON: How has Spotify changed it?
AARON LEWIS: I’m a Spotify billionaire. I have over a billion spins on Spotify. If I only had a penny for every spin on Spotify, that would be fantastic. A dollar, a quarter, a penny from every spin. With over a billion spins on Spotify, all I have is a plaque.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you never got paid?
AARON LEWIS: By the time Spotify pays it, there’s so many people in the middle, I don’t even think a penny comes my way, to be honest with you.
TUCKER CARLSON: For a billion spins, you made no money?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t think so. That’s not how Spotify works.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how does it work?
AARON LEWIS: I’m not sure. I just know that it cuts a lot of people in on my financial stream. A lot of people who are not you.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. That once again aren’t the creatives and they’re the ones making all the money.
AARON LEWIS: So they were creative in how they came up with something to get into somebody else’s money stream.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s called creative accounting, which is a form of creativity long unrecognized in the West.
AARON LEWIS: I would call it being a leech.
TUCKER CARLSON: That is amazing to me. A billion plays and you don’t get paid.
AARON LEWIS: I mean, I might have. It certainly wasn’t enough for me to notice. Where the hell did all this money come from in my bank account? Oh, I got spun over a billion times on Spotify. That’s why. I mean, do I know for sure that no money came in? No, but it’s minuscule, comparatively speaking.
That’s basically the whole thing. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: So whenever I hear people talk about the…
AARON LEWIS: I’m not complaining.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you should.
AARON LEWIS: Well, I’m very blessed and I’m very lucky. 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. 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.
The Real Money: Live Performance
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just interesting. I mean, but I should just say Spotify has been such a huge blessing for us on this podcast. And it’s run by a guy I know who owns it and I think is a good guy and committed to speech. So I’m very pro Spotify, but I just didn’t understand that the creators on the music side were cut out of the benefits.
AARON LEWIS: Again, not cut out.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I mean, a billion. But that’s a lot.
AARON LEWIS: I mean, I should have seen a pretty significant deposit into my account for that many spins.
TUCKER CARLSON: But what’s interesting is they probably paid somebody, but not you.
AARON LEWIS: I’m sure my record label got paid.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you see the accounting of the U.S. economy. What’s our GDP? How much money is the United States economy generating? A lot. So the question is not, is the engine functioning? The question is, where’s the money going.
And my complaint about the US is not capitalism, which clearly works. It’s about who benefits from it. And it does seem like the least useful, least creative, least certainly least patriotic, but least decent people make all the money. And I think that’s another example of it. Like, how did Larry Fink get so rich? What did Larry Fink do for America?
AARON LEWIS: Figured out a way to completely leech off of everything that’s already there.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s certainly the way it seems to me. So how do you make money? By getting on the road.
AARON LEWIS: That is how. And that’s why I work as hard as I do, because that is where I make my money. I don’t make money on record sales, I don’t make money off of spins, I make money off of merch and actually playing shows.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. But that’s a much more direct transaction. Like you’re renting the venue, you’re performing for two and a half hours or whatever. You’re getting a cut of gate. Like there are fewer middlemen in that. Right.
AARON LEWIS: There seems to be less of a machine that puts itself in between.
The 360 Deal Trap
AARON LEWIS: But there is this thing that has taken place since I got my record deal 28 years ago, 27 years ago is called a 360 deal. Where now the younger artists, they’re sharing the profits for everything. The record label gets a cut of their merch. The record label gets a cut of their live performance pay. The record label gets a cut of 360, everything.
Why? Because they can. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re not only greedy and dishonest, ruthless, they’re also very political. Right.
AARON LEWIS: The record labels, and usually in the wrong direction. And I don’t understand how a record label that, I mean it certainly isn’t capitalism with a conscience, but it is 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 and dumped all this money into.
TUCKER CARLSON: I get it. Publishing’s the same way.
Industry-Wide Resentment
TUCKER CARLSON: So you know, you’ve been in it your whole life. You’ve toured with everybody. You were telling me last night about smoking weed with Willie Nelson on his bus many years ago. So you’ve toured with everybody. How many creators, artists, performers in your business in private, hate and resent the record companies? Most.
AARON LEWIS: Most, if not all. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Would it be possible for a decent person to start a record company and record label?
AARON LEWIS: I would think so. But the problem is that the operating system, it’s just not decent.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
AARON LEWIS: So a decent person could start a record label, but unless they change the entire formula and 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. It’s like getting elected to Congress.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah.
The Obama Era and Political Awakening
TUCKER CARLSON: So when did you start having conflict with your corporate masters over politics?
AARON LEWIS: Obama getting elected, that was a moment, wasn’t it?
TUCKER CARLSON: And you weren’t fully on board.
AARON LEWIS: Hell no.
TUCKER CARLSON: You didn’t worship like Jesus.
AARON LEWIS: I immediately recognized it as a horrible blow to our country. Immediately. Not even knowing why yet. Like, I just knew. Instinct tells you instinctively in my gut, I knew that we had made a massive, massive mistake as a country.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that’s for sure.
AARON LEWIS: And so many balls got rolling during that time frame that we’re still trying to slow down.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know it.
AARON LEWIS: But yeah, 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.
TMZ Ambushes and Airport Encounters
TUCKER CARLSON: How they get you. Do you know the answer to this question? I found out I’ve been gotten a few times at LAX by TMZ and other airports. And I once asked, like, how did you know I was on that plane? Like, you know, because they knew. They know because they bribe the airline. The guy told me this. They bribed the airline to give them the manifest.
AARON LEWIS: Makes sense. Now that makes sense. Out of nowhere, they’re like, “Hey,” yeah, like, what? Where? What? How’d you even know I was here?
TUCKER CARLSON: Thanks, United. Bless you, American. You know, it’s pretty. Anyway, so they would. You’d roll off the flight at LAX. Someone come up to you and ask you a question? What did you say?
AARON LEWIS: Oh, I have. I had no issues then, nor do I have any issue now telling anybody exactly how I feel. And I was already talking about the unconstitutionalness of Obama’s actions and what he was doing. And I mean, mentioning that what he was doing was borderline treasonous. And that was how I started the ball rolling.
The “Racist” Label and Media Hit Pieces
TUCKER CARLSON: And what kind of response did you get? Because you weren’t allowed to criticize Obama there for a while or else you were. I can’t remember the word. Racist.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah, I know I’ve been labeled that racist. And then there was one time I was playing a show 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 the cord 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 stopped. I walk back around, I go to the microphone. I explained to everybody what I’m going to do again. I start again. Volume goes up. So I go back to the microphone, and I was like, “You know, listen, I don’t have to do this. I was trying to do something,” and a lady that was standing right there in the front row, like four people from the center, she’s like, “Tell them to shut the up in Spanish.”
And I said, close to the microphone. I wasn’t necessarily talking into the. I was talking to her, but it was close. And I said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t speak Spanish. I’m American.”
The world ended for like a week all over the. Like, broke the Internet. Aaron Lewis, a racist. Aaron Lewis, this a racist, right? Because I said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t speak Spanish. I am American.” That was what I. Beats me, but that’s what went around.
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 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it doesn’t matter.
AARON LEWIS: But it doesn’t matter because people wouldn’t actually. They just read Perez Hilton.
TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, I haven’t heard that name in a while. Is he still alive?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe the vax got him. I don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: Possible. That’s wild. So you’re a racist for saying that?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t speak Spanish. I’m American. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, you know, English is not a race. The United States is not a race. There’s nothing about race in that sentence or sentiment.
AARON LEWIS: I know, right? Yeah. Oh, boy.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you just brought me back to an earlier time. I don’t think that would happen now.
AARON LEWIS: I don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: People are so over that.
AARON LEWIS: People are over it. But I think that that side of things probably still would have tried.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, now they call you an anti-Semite.
AARON LEWIS: Probably I’m any of the ists.
Record Label Tensions
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re right. Oh, wow. That’s wild. So how did your manager and assorted handlers, record label feel about this?
AARON LEWIS: I mean, it was just one of those things where you just had to kind of let it go by.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: Just let it die out. Let it play its course and go away.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was the crowd mad when you said that?
AARON LEWIS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, right.
AARON LEWIS: No. And then I tried one more time to sing the song and they wouldn’t listen. And I put my guitar down on the stage and walked off stage.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, what’d you do?
AARON LEWIS: I was already two plus hours into a show. It’s not like they. They were like. It’s not like any of the show got taken away from them right. At all. I was done. I was just trying to do something special and they didn’t want it. So.
TUCKER CARLSON: So did you ever have direct conflict with an employer over politics?
AARON LEWIS: With an employer?
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, with the label.
AARON LEWIS: I mean, my record label president, we’ve had some pretty heated discussions about politics and he. I mean, when you do the whole breakdown and you start talking really bare bones, basics, there’s a lot of things that he agrees with me on. But when you bring all the rest of it in. We don’t see eye to eye on much anything.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. I get that a lot. Reasonable people, similar values actually, but they’re just, they see themselves so differently and they’re just committed to some weird partisan addiction.
The Victimhood Culture
AARON LEWIS: It’s almost like a feel good addiction. Like 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 things to virtue signal and then 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 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 were 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
AARON LEWIS: Like I don’t. That’s not what I was taught at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: At all.
AARON LEWIS: At all.
TUCKER CARLSON: You weren’t encouraged to whine as a child?
AARON LEWIS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: I wasn’t either.
AARON LEWIS: Honestly, if I was whining, I don’t think that my voice was even acknowledged.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not. As it shouldn’t be.
AARON LEWIS: Right.
Growing Up in Vermont
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel guilty about growing up as rich as you did, going to Hotchkiss and Yale and all the advantages that you had?
AARON LEWIS: I grew up very much like most in this country. We were lower middle class at best. The first memories that I have are living in a single wide trailer in a trailer park in Castleton, Vermont.
TUCKER CARLSON: Charming place.
AARON LEWIS: Super charming.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. It’s not the Vermont of weekend getaways, is it?
AARON LEWIS: Not so much. It’s Stowe, really. And my dad, back in the 60s, he bought a hunting camp up on the side of a mountain in Shrewsbury and he moved us from the trailer park to that hunting camp. It’s in the song “Country Boy.”
My dad picked the place up for fifteen hundred bucks back in 1964. He bought this hunting camp on the side of a mountain for fifteen hundred dollars. And he moved us into that hunting camp and by the time we moved he sold that same place for 85 grand I think. And that was what put us in a regular middle class neighborhood at that point. That was the up that he turned that fifteen hundred dollar investment into eighty something.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve always wanted to live at my hunting camp. I think that’s the dream for a lot of people. I would just like to live in a hunting camp. What was that like?
AARON LEWIS: As good as, as a kid? Yeah, lonely. I bet lonely. I had to keep myself occupied for sure. I was out in the middle of the woods as a five-year-old kid.
Hunting Traditions and Family Heritage
TUCKER CARLSON: What’d your mom say? What does a woman say when her husband moves her to a hunting camp?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t think my mom minded. There was like she had the garden out front and they were always, I mean my parents were kind of hippie-ish. Yeah, it sounds, I mean my dad got arrested at the Yankee nuclear power plant for protesting back in the day. Before it was up and running.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was it. I mean what was deer season like if you already live in the hunting camp?
AARON LEWIS: It wasn’t there. We would go to Wallingford and to Danby and up where the family was. And the Lewis farm was in Danby and was, half of the Danby is almost like a volcano, like an inactive volcano where at the top of the mountain there’s a valley. So it’s like an old, like an ancient volcano that at some point blew off but you would never know.
But there’s a valley on the top of the mountain and that was the valley that Lewis, the Lewis farm was in. And it was like top 10 dairy farms in Vermont. And so the farm is where we would go and everybody would gather up and we would do the classic drives and pushes and all that stuff and it was always rifle. I didn’t get into bow hunting until later in life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well it didn’t. There wasn’t much of it.
AARON LEWIS: Not really. Not then.
TUCKER CARLSON: No. No.
AARON LEWIS: I mean bows have really come a long way since like the mid-80s to now.
TUCKER CARLSON: I remember the first time I heard it, I thought it was like one of the not, not bad. I wasn’t against it but I was like wow, you kill a deer with a bow like Hiawatha like that was wild, huh? Do you still hunting fish?
Discovering Quail Hunting
AARON LEWIS: I do all the time. I’m so completely ate up with upland bird hunting and I’m from New England, so I had never hunt quail before and I earlier this year went on my first quail hunt and oh my God, that was it for me.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
AARON LEWIS: That was it for me. Like I have gone. I went probably 15 times since I found quail hunting and I hunted all the way up until the last day of the season In Florida is April 15th or 20th maybe, or somewhere around there. And literally hunted all the way through to the last day.
TUCKER CARLSON: And what do you like about it?
AARON LEWIS: Everything. The tradition. The tradition is the biggest thing for me. Like I’m all about it. I’m hunting with a gun that should be in a museum or in somebody’s private collection. And those are my hunting guns.
TUCKER CARLSON: What do you hunt with?
AARON LEWIS: I’m a big 410 guy. I love the 410.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the smallest. The shotgun gauges.
AARON LEWIS: It is the smallest of the shotgun gauges. It is the most gentlemanly, if you will. And, but I’ll be out there in full Filson Regalia and looking like I just came out of a safari or something. And I’m all about it. I respect the tradition of it, the camaraderie, the dogs. Oh my God, I love watching the dogs work.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re unbelievable.
AARON LEWIS: Watching a dog slam into a point like that, like somebody just shot him with electricity. Just. It’s amazing.
TUCKER CARLSON: It is amazing.
AARON LEWIS: It is amazing. That’s almost as enjoyable as the actual flush. And the shot is actually watching the dogs.
TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree with that.
AARON LEWIS: That’s half, three quarters of the enjoyment is experiencing that whole thing with the dogs and how amazingly trained they are. I mean, just how does a dog know to do that?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know.
AARON LEWIS: It’s amazing.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s latent. I mean, I think it’s in the dog. And your job is to bring it out.
AARON LEWIS: It’s instinctual and then you got to bring it out. That’s it. It’s amazing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can you hit a quail with a 410 almost every time?
AARON LEWIS: Yes, sir.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
AARON LEWIS: Yes, sir.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re doing 180 shows a year. How’d you get to be such a good shot?
AARON LEWIS: I had a. I was hunting with my dad, bird hunting for ruffed grouse and woodcock just like you love so much at 7, 8.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.
AARON LEWIS: I think I got my first double for woodcocks at 10 or 11. Got my first double on grouse at like 12 or 13.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. I’ve never done that.
AARON LEWIS: The grouse one was like. It couldn’t have been more perfect. The three grouse all went up at the same time and they all flew straight away from me. I probably could have got a triple if I was using a semi auto and not.
TUCKER CARLSON: You had another barrel. 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? Grouse is a big woodland bird. About the size of a chicken.
The Challenge of Grouse Hunting
AARON LEWIS: About the size of a chicken. And they strut like a turkey does. And they’re one of the most beautiful birds and they’re one of the hardest.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
AARON LEWIS: They’re as fast as an F15 and you literally have, if you get two seconds as a window of opportunity for that shot.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a lot.
AARON LEWIS: That’s a lot. Yeah, that’s a lot. They go off and it’s like. And they’re gone. You literally have that much and they’re gone. And the noise I’m making is what it sounds like when they take off from their bird, from their wings hitting their body and it’ll stop your heart.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And there are no pen raised rough grouse. I mean they’re just all wild birds.
AARON LEWIS: 100% and they’re as wild as wild gets. And for you to go out and have a successful day of ruffed grouse hunting, or partridge as they’re also called. You’ve accomplished something, that’s for sure. You get a limit and you’re actually done for the day and can’t keep hunting for the day. With ruffed grouse. You are, you have accomplished something.
TUCKER CARLSON: If you’re doing it on foot. I’ve never done that, but never limited out on grouse. But like, how many, how far per bird do you think you walk in grouse?
AARON LEWIS: Miles. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Now you get older.
AARON LEWIS: Because I’m 53. I don’t necessarily want to walk into a piece of woods that is up and down and the thickest. They, of course, they live in the thickest crap. Oh yeah. So you’re 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: In that sense the hot and heavy action is what kind of keeps makes the quail hunting thing kind of at the top. Yeah. If you will.
Rich Man’s Sport vs. Poor Man’s Sport
TUCKER CARLSON: Quail hunting is a rich man sport. Rough grouse hunting in New England is a poor man sport.
AARON LEWIS: Quail hunting is a rich man 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
AARON LEWIS: So what you’re hunting is a put and take situation. So there’s an overhead to it. And you’re paying anywhere from a thousand to astronomical prices to go and hunt this place.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.
AARON LEWIS: 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, it is a rich man sport in the sense that it’s hard to go do it on your own time with no dimensions.
TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.
AARON LEWIS: 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: 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.
AARON LEWIS: Oh yeah, totally.
TUCKER CARLSON: He would be a grouse. Such a.
AARON LEWIS: Like I would put him as my representation any day.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know Bruce Springsteen?
AARON LEWIS: No. Thankfully.
TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think of him?
On Bruce Springsteen and Lost Touch with America
AARON LEWIS: I think that he is a disgusting display of not appreciating what was handed to him. For as 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 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 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 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 that like you grew up at the same time frame 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 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. Why? Because they thrive in the chaos. They want us at each other’s throats. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, at all. They’re against peace and prosperity and because.
AARON LEWIS: There’s no money in it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Self sufficiency in God. Yeah. No, I couldn’t.
AARON LEWIS: There’s no money in it. If we’re all, how can they exploit us? If we’re all united and getting along when we’re all looking out for each other as human beings, how can they exploit us? They can’t. So they have to keep us in a constant state of conflict.
TUCKER CARLSON: When did you start to realize this?
The Weight of Generational Responsibility
AARON LEWIS: As I got old enough to be carrying the weight of that responsibility on my shoulders.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
AARON LEWIS: 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s for sure.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah, that’s.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the moral.
The Last Generation of “Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard”
AARON LEWIS: I come from the generation of still, it’s probably the last generation of as a kid now, did it mess me up and make me feel like my voice doesn’t get heard. And I like, an incessant thing for me is to be heard because I didn’t feel like my voice was heard as a kid at all.
Because I was like the last generation of kids that are kids are to speak when they’re spoken to. And that’s it. Like, that’s I got that from my grandparents. Like, children are only to speak when they’re spoken to.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s fair.
AARON LEWIS: And children are to be seen and not heard.
TUCKER CARLSON: Also fair. Unless they have something interesting to say.
AARON LEWIS: Sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. But if you don’t, I think in general, if you don’t have something interesting to say, I think that all should probably be quiet.
AARON LEWIS: All right. Supports the whole thing of “because I said so.” It doesn’t. I don’t have to give you a reason as my child as to why, like, because I said so. There’s a huge lesson with that in life. Your boss isn’t going to explain to you why you have to do something. He’s going to tell you to do something, and you need to just do it.
There’s going to be situations in life where if somebody tells you to do something and you hesitate and don’t do it, your life could be in danger. There’s. There. It’s just a lost art form. It’s a lost art form. Parenting is a lost art form. I said that all the way back in 2001 on the cover of Rolling Stone. Parents have forgotten how to be parents. Like, I realized that all the way back then, and it’s only gotten worse.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: The average kid these days, the biggest parental figure in their life is their computer or their phone. It’s not their parent.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. It’s the Internet.
Technology and the Erosion of American Values
AARON LEWIS: It’s insane. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Feels like new people will rebuild it. New and different society in place of the Americans who were here when you and I were born.
AARON LEWIS: And that’s scary. Oh, I know that’s scary. 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. It’s bad enough for my kids, yes. But another generation. My grandkids. If this doesn’t. If this ship doesn’t get righted, what are they even going to have?
Is their life going to even have the slightest semblance of what our lives were? Do our kids now? Is their life even the slightest semblance of what me and you had as kids? No fucking way.
TUCKER CARLSON: How’s it different? You’ve got three kids.
The Loss of Trust and Safety
AARON LEWIS: We were latchkey kids. You didn’t even have to lock your door. Like, you came home and so many parents weren’t even there, and there was no worry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like, I never had a key to my house. I don’t have a key to my house now, actually.
AARON LEWIS: Because of where you live. Yeah, well.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. No, that’s right.
AARON LEWIS: And I love it out here. This is like.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I agree. No, but you’re.
AARON LEWIS: You’re right.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, the feeling of safety.
AARON LEWIS: What.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was kind of unquestioned, the feeling of trust, just overall trust of your fellow man.
AARON LEWIS: There’s. That’s instinct. It’s extinct. It doesn’t really exist anymore.
Witnessing America’s Decline from the Road
TUCKER CARLSON: So you travel by vehicle, by bus, through America.
AARON LEWIS: I don’t like to fly. I literally have not flown on a commercial plane since everything shut down for Covid.
TUCKER CARLSON: Good for you.
AARON LEWIS: I will. I drive everywhere. Unless I absolutely have to fly, and then I am guilty. I won’t fly commercial. But once, maybe twice a year, when I absolutely have to fly, I will be bougie and get a plane.
TUCKER CARLSON: But because you’re traveling overland the majority of the year.
AARON LEWIS: I see what this country.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. So that’s. What do you see? And you’ve been doing this for, what, 30 years? You’ve been on the road across America.
AARON LEWIS: I have watched the flyover states just crumble. You go into a small town, half the businesses are boarded up. You know, those small, classic. What you would think of as Americana, those Norman Rockwell towns, they’re all boarded up. There’s nobody downtown. There’s no commerce.
There’s a Dollar General down the street.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.
AARON LEWIS: There’s a Walmart 10 minutes away. But every mom and pop shop is all gone. Family businesses that have provided for that family and provided for the town with the business that they provide. It’s all gone everywhere? Pretty much. Pretty much.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are the. You play in every region of the country.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are the toughest parts of the country right now?
AARON LEWIS: Rural. Yeah, Rural.
TUCKER CARLSON: Second, you leave the cities. And that was.
AARON LEWIS: And it’s undeniable visually, right there in front of your face. You have to close your eyes to not see it.
Politicians Ignoring Their Own States
TUCKER CARLSON: So why does no one ever mention that? I never, I. 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.
AARON LEWIS: I know, it’s disgusting. And these are supposed to be the people that are the representatives of that area.
TUCKER CARLSON: You wonder, has Tom Cotton ever been to the Delta in Arkansas? Like when was the last, Seriously, when was the last time he was in El Dorado, Arkansas?
AARON LEWIS: Right. And I’ve been through all of Arkansas and it’s poverty stricken and falling apart.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I know.
AARON LEWIS: And that’s anywhere. Tennessee.
TUCKER CARLSON: I know.
AARON LEWIS: Like anywhere.
TUCKER CARLSON: I know. 30 years ago, 40 years ago, Pine Bluff, Arkansas was a real town. And now, you know, it’s one of the most dangerous places in the country. I just wonder, like, what do they think?
AARON LEWIS: I don’t know. And I don’t understand why their policies never work. No, like they never ever work. I don’t know of a single communist policy that has actually done good for whoever it was that the policy was designed for. None of them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. It’s only about destruction.
AARON LEWIS: It is. It’s only about destruction.
The Putin Quote That Got Him in Trouble
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, 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.
AARON LEWIS: I’m a rebel.
TUCKER CARLSON: 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 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.”
AARON LEWIS: I got in so much trouble for that.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I will continue to quote you back to you. “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, also vested in this one faraway country? Like, what do they have to lose? I mean, first of all, bless you for saying that. Second, did anyone ever answer your question?
AARON LEWIS: Nope.
TUCKER CARLSON: Nope.
AARON LEWIS: I lost employees.
TUCKER CARLSON: Employees.
AARON LEWIS: Oh, yeah, people. People that. Not direct employees in my knit circle. Yeah. 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, gosh.
AARON LEWIS: And you were the one to say, maybe we should have. Maybe we should listen to Putin and see what he has to say. And I was like, well, if Tucker has said it on Fox, how’d that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Work out for me?
AARON LEWIS: It worked out for both of us the same way. And I agree. It worked out for both of us the same way. It took weeks for that one to go away. Really? Oh, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: But I just. I am not an artist.
AARON LEWIS: I’m.
The Role of Artists in Society
TUCKER CARLSON: 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.
And a healthy society isn’t run by artists. Don’t want them. They’re not in charge of the power grid. Okay. 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. They’re like, “no, no. Obey that.”
AARON LEWIS: When did that happen?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. But it’s very weird.
AARON LEWIS: It seems like what once was like on that edge is now so blunted and everybody is just a spokesperson person for the machine.
TUCKER CARLSON: It does feel that way.
Building Independence Before Speaking Out
AARON LEWIS: Because they’re all afraid of losing their position in the machine. Yeah. When all of the higher ups think the opposite that you do most of the time in this industry, those people don’t have the wiggle room that I do.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: So they have to conform or they lose their spot. I was lucky enough to have built and created my spot before I chose to not conform.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
AARON LEWIS: So that matters. I didn’t necessarily lose my spot just because I didn’t conform because I had already built it and they couldn’t take that away from me at that point. Like they’ve already tried to cancel me. They’ve already done everything that they can do to talk shit about me. So now they just ignore my existence. Now they don’t even say bad things. They just don’t say anything at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t seem to have affected your sales.
AARON LEWIS: Doesn’t seem to.
TUCKER CARLSON: You had one of the biggest songs in the country a couple years ago. Everybody hated it. Everybody in charge hated it.
AARON LEWIS: “Am I the Only One?”
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
Standing Up for Free Speech
AARON LEWIS: Yeah. There was a 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: What didn’t they like about the song?
AARON LEWIS: That it was a patriotic, country loving “point out the what the hell 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 the hell 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 hell? Am I the only one who’s seeing this? Who’s recognizing how completely absurd the whole concept was of shutting everything down?”
The Destructive Impact of Lockdowns
AARON LEWIS: How do we survive that? As an economy, as a… 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. 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 come together 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more.
AARON LEWIS: I’m still blown away by it. 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 then 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… I’m not.” I got thrown out of Dunkin’ Donuts one day for walking in without my mask on.
TUCKER CARLSON: Get thrown at Dunkin’ Donuts.
AARON LEWIS: And like rudely, really like, “you are putting everybody in this place’s life in danger and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, Dunkin’… Notice the place where homeless junkies shoot up in the back, right?
AARON LEWIS: Yeah, yeah, same place.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. But what you were doing was unclean, right?
AARON LEWIS: Yeah. So I… Yeah.
The Obedience Revelation
TUCKER CARLSON: I never knew that people were that easy to train. I never knew they were that obedient. I never knew there were that many people with no self respect at all at the time.
AARON LEWIS: I was living in a very, very left town which… Massachusetts. Northampton, Massachusetts.
TUCKER CARLSON: Lesbian capital of the world.
AARON LEWIS: It’s where Smith College is. Yes, it’s a… it is a festering cesspool of anti-American everything.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the happiness level, would you say, in Northampton?
AARON LEWIS: Misery? I don’t see anybody smiling ever. Ever. They are all… 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’ve noticed.
AARON LEWIS: Oh, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are they mad about?
AARON LEWIS: Their own failures? I don’t know. I don’t know why it’s such an incessant need these days to do it, like, just live a good life. All this virtue signaling, all this fake outrage. Just live a good life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: Treat people good, you’ll get treated good in return.
Staying Under the Radar
TUCKER CARLSON: How they… How they treat you in Northampton?
AARON LEWIS: If they knew who I was, probably not very good.
TUCKER CARLSON: Country music’s not that big in Northampton.
AARON LEWIS: I’m not… I’m not the artist… Celebrity. I hate… I don’t even like using that word. It makes me feel weird. I’m not the artist that wants to get noticed. I try my best to stay under the radar. A successful day for me of going out and about is not getting noticed. So I doesn’t… I don’t even remember where I was sometimes. I get on a roll and I lose track.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you just picked the right town for anonymity. I mean, if you were, say, the Indigo Girls or the Dixie… wouldn’t be able to walk down the street. No.
TUCKER CARLSON: But you really did… You choose Northampton because, you know, not a single person there has ever heard of your music.
AARON LEWIS: At the time, it was out of convenience, but I certainly would not choose, nor do I, now that I don’t live in downtown Northampton. I don’t choose to go there. I will go into Northampton for pretty much one reason and one reason only. And his name is Sam, and he is the sushi chef at Moshi Moshi. And I will go and I will sit down at the sushi bar with Sam, drink sake with him, and eat sushi.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ll make the sushi pilgrimage, but you would… But no more residential time there.
AARON LEWIS: No.
Personal Choices and Moral Hierarchies
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s your… Let me ask you a couple questions about what you like.
AARON LEWIS: I want to try that flavor.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it’s the best. This is sweet nectar. We just came out with it, and I got, like, a case of it. So I’ve been… I’ve been on it, and I really…
AARON LEWIS: What are the other two? New flavor. The other couple flavors. I know that… I heard you.
TUCKER CARLSON: We have a bunch. We’ve got fruit and mint and wintergreen and all that, but this is… And we’ve got a bunch of other flavors we’re working on, but that… The government makes it hard to introduce new flavors. It’s crazy.
AARON LEWIS: Well, because you’re… You’re trying to get the kids. That’s what it is.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I can’t… I’m not even allowed to talk about that topic. Nicotine for the children. It’s totally verboten. I started really young. I’ll just say that. And I’m glad I did. But anyway, I know everyone disagrees with me, but that’s how I actually feel. So I’m just going to say it.
AARON LEWIS: I had my first cigarette at eight and I’ve… pretty young and I’ve actually been smoking. Like have a pack of cigarettes. I’ve been smoking since I was like 13.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, me too. But I quit at 45. And what brand do you smoke?
AARON LEWIS: American Spirits.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a good cigarette.
AARON LEWIS: It is. As far as a cigarette goes, it’s still…
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s delicious.
AARON LEWIS: It’s delicious. It doesn’t have all the extra 1600 chemicals that they put in there to make it more addictive, to make it burn faster, to make it burn slower.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
AARON LEWIS: They even put chemicals in there that are contradictory to themselves.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. For fire… Fireproofing their cigarettes. I mean, it’s all…
AARON LEWIS: Yeah. And then an American Spirit will go out on its own.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know. If you… I smoked American Spirit Blues, the light blue, and I always took the filters off and I thought, “wow, that’s like… That’s the strongest cigarette in America if you do that.” It’s incredible. Cigarette. I don’t smoke anymore anyway. Sorry. So I’m not promoting smoking, though it is delicious. Very delicious. More delicious than anything I’ve ever done before, since I’m just… That’s why people do it. By the way, the piety around smoking. Obviously smoking is not good for you.
AARON LEWIS: I don’t want my… not good for you. It smells, it looks gross, all of those.
TUCKER CARLSON: I disagree.
AARON LEWIS: And it’s such a satisfying five minutes removed off your life.
TUCKER CARLSON: When you think about people who kind of openly, brazenly, publicly send young men off to die in pointless wars on behalf of some other country… Like, that’s just par in the US Congress. They all can’t wait to do that and they face no moral sanction whatsoever. But if you were to light a cigarette and someone saw you, you’d be like a monster.
Look, I’m not arguing for smoking. I’m just saying it’s good to have a sensible moral hierarchy in mind when you assess other people’s behavior. Like some things are bad, but some things are worse than that. Right?
AARON LEWIS: Right. And make your choices accordingly.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, kind of. And make your judgments accordingly. I mean, I do think violence is bad.
AARON LEWIS: Sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: And sending off other people’s kids to die is one of the worst things I can imagine. And yet that’s celebrated.
The Truth About War Decisions
AARON LEWIS: You would think that that would be like a really hard decision.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not. It’s not.
AARON LEWIS: No. It’s like the easiest decision for them to make.
TUCKER CARLSON: Lindsey Graham literally can’t wait. And I do think all of them should be forced to go to the front lines in Ukraine and worry about getting droned. Not because I wish them harm, but because they’re should be some skin in the game.
AARON LEWIS: I just want some truth.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I agree.
AARON LEWIS: I want to know why Lindsey Graham is such a Ukraine… Like, what were you doing over there, Lindsay, in 2014?
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s fair to ask.
Political Corruption and Control
AARON LEWIS: What were you doing? Why are you so vested in Ukraine? Why? Why would you put Ukraine over everything else? Like, what is going on? I mean, as so many people are fully aware, Ukraine is one of the dirtiest and most corrupt places in the world, aside from the United States, run by a…
TUCKER CARLSON: Stalinist, by the way, who canceled elections, closed the biggest Christian denomination in the country, put the priests and nuns in prison, like murdering his political enemies. I can’t go to Ukraine. I’d get killed if I went to Ukraine. A country that my tax dollars support. And Lindsey Graham is like, “no, that’s great.” I don’t know. I mean, let’s just wake up a second. This is bonkers. It’s degrading us. It’s beyond immoral. It’s like self harm at scale. It’s crushing the United States.
AARON LEWIS: It just makes me wonder how many of these politicians that make these decisions that we’re like, “what the hell are you even thinking?” Did you get caught in a honey pot? Did you do something and they caught you doing it and now they have you under their thumb?
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.
AARON LEWIS: Like, Madison Cawthorn got ran out because he started mentioning stuff like that, started talking about the parties that happen and start. They got rid of him as fast as they could. He’s a good dude.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Matt Gaetz, same thing.
AARON LEWIS: Matt Gaetz, same thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re like, “oh, you know,” I don’t…
AARON LEWIS: I don’t know how Marjorie Taylor Greene has somehow made it this far aside from being a woman.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t think they have anything on her. I think she’s like a decent person.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah, I think she’s incredible.
TUCKER CARLSON: But it was so funny with Gaetz. They’re like, he starts making unauthorized noises about this or that, and all of a sudden they’re like, “well, you had sex with children.” Okay, where’s the evidence? And by the way, where’s the indictment? They never indicted him for it.
AARON LEWIS: Oh, I know.
TUCKER CARLSON: So how can you accuse somebody of a crime and then not… The government is accusing him of a crime and then not indicting him for it? Why is that not a crime in itself? If Matt Gaetz had sex with children, indict them, arrest him, put him on trial and prove it, or you’re in…
AARON LEWIS: Trouble yourself for destroying his character.
TUCKER CARLSON: Using my tax dollars to commit slander against your political opponents. Yeah, that’s a crime. Right, but no one’s ever prosecuted. And 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.”
AARON LEWIS: Sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: It just casts a pall over everybody of fear. You obviously don’t feel that.
AARON LEWIS: No.
The Longevity of Performance
TUCKER CARLSON: How long can you do 180 shows a year?
AARON LEWIS: If I’m doing the country thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: Forever.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really? Well, Willie Nelson does it. He’s 90.
AARON LEWIS: Yeah, I could. If I live that long, I could still be doing the country thing. The Staind thing, that’s a little bit more taxing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: 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 Staind thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: 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 Staind 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 and enjoy it. You have to be pretty damn blessed in life to be able to continue enjoying a job.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: It is a job. At the end of the day, I’m blessed that I was able to create my job around something that I love and that I’m driven to do. But as a job, there’s parts of that that kind of ruin the experience of it all. It’s the music business. The music part I love.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: The business part can ruin the part that I love so much.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why no one enjoys porn. Sorry, I should have said that. No, but it’s true. I mean, anytime you take a good thing and make it a business, it diminishes it.
AARON LEWIS: Of course. Oh God, our poor kids these days, they’re sex addicts and porn addicts before they even had sex.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I know, it’s depressing.
AARON LEWIS: They’re learning about sex through porn.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: And yeah, that’s a healthy sex life.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s… Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: You.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. 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.
The Music Industry Reality
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 describe them as leeches. I don’t know that to be true because I’ve never been in your business.
AARON LEWIS: But we all know, we all know that calling them a leech, it’s a pretty negative connotation.
TUCKER CARLSON: But just a blood sucking parasite in general.
AARON LEWIS: What a leech does is it parasites off of a living organism and that leech isn’t the one that’s responsible for the life that it’s leeching off.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
AARON LEWIS: And so it’s an analogy. I don’t want to be that negative or hateful about it. I’m very grateful to my president, the record label president, for standing up for me. But it’s a business 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I believe that. So who are… So here’s the question I want to end on. Because it is a positive question, having been in it for 30 years. Who are the good guys? Who are the artists who you know, personally, who are actually in the green room? Good guys? Oh, long sigh there.
AARON LEWIS: I keep my circle pretty small. You know, Bob’s my friend.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’d be Kid Rock.
AARON LEWIS: You know, I don’t interact very much with the rest of the industry, really. I mean, I don’t find myself in Nashville very often. I don’t go to the gatherings and the parties. I live out in the corn and soybeans and the tobacco, and there’s miles in every direction around my house of just agriculture.
So I don’t really interact with the business very much. I’m very particular about my inner circle and who I consider a friend. And I don’t have a lot of those, so I don’t have a lot.
TUCKER CARLSON: Big picture here. Aaron Lewis, I gave you a chance. I was like, “all right, who are the good guys?” And you’re like…
AARON LEWIS: Well, you know, this business is tough.
TUCKER CARLSON: Would you want your kids to go into it?
The Cost of Success
AARON LEWIS: No. And they’ve had my… My oldest daughter Zoe is on one of my records singing “Traveling Soldier” by the Dixie Chicks, actually. And I don’t know, so many people approached me, like, “your daughter, I’ll give her a record deal. Let’s…” She doesn’t want nothing to do with it.
My kids have been on the receiving end of all the stuff that comes with this industry and all the sacrifice and all the disappointment. I’m a slave to the grind. You know, the grind has taken precedent over important things in my life that I can never get back. You know, monumental things. My kids’ first steps, my kids’ first words. My kids’ first days of school, my kids’ last days of school, my kids’ graduations. I haven’t been able to be there for a lot of them. The sacrifice is real.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AARON LEWIS: But it’s created a situation where I just don’t let very many people in. So to, in a big, roundabout circle, to answer your question, I have a lot of acquaintances in the industry. Like, there’s people that I have huge love and respect for. I’m like pen pals. Like me and you text all the time. Me and Marilyn Manson text all the time.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I haven’t seen…
AARON LEWIS: He’d actually surprise you.
TUCKER CARLSON: I interviewed him in the 90s, Brian, and I thought he was smart. In maybe 1999 at the Chateau Marmont in L.A.
AARON LEWIS: Brian is one of the most intelligent, profound conversations I have ever had with somebody. He’s like an evil genius. He is fully aware of every single button he is purposely pushing. It’s all been… He’s a genius. Like it’s all been calculated. He knows exactly what he’s doing, he knows exactly what buttons he’s pushing and he’s pushing them on purpose.
TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting.
AARON LEWIS: He’s amazing. Jonathan Davis from Korn. One of my favorite people.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t believe you text with Marilyn Manson.
AARON LEWIS: He’s like my modern day pen pal. We never actually talk on the phone, we just text.
TUCKER CARLSON: Give him my best.
AARON LEWIS: I will.
TUCKER CARLSON: Aaron Lewis. Thank you.
AARON LEWIS: Thank you.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m going to go bird shooting with you.
AARON LEWIS: I look forward to it.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t wait.
AARON LEWIS: I can’t wait to watch you use your new hammer gun.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know if I’ll be able to use it correctly, but we’ll find out. Thank you.
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