During a recent appearance on The Daily Wire‘s “Candace” show, STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis discussed his controversial new solo single, “Am I The Only One”. The track, which takes aim at liberals and touches on American flags burning and statues that have been removed in the country, was written by Lewis with Ira Dean and Jeffrey Steele.
Speaking about how the song was conceived, Lewis said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Me and my friend Jeffrey Steele and another friend, Ira Dean, had gotten together and sat down and decided that we were gonna write an honest song about what we all just had gone through in our own lives with the shutdown and with the craziness that we’ve watched on TV over the last 18 months. And I feel like you don’t have to stand on one side or the other to have, at one point during all of this, looked at your television and screamed some profanities at it, like, ‘What is happening to this country?’ We’re one nation under God indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Aaron went on to suggest that honesty is something that is very much lacking in today’s music, with many artists choosing to refrain from voicing their political views.
“They’re scared,” Lewis said. “Look what happens when you speak up these days. Look what happens when you try to speak truth and you try to speak fact. Because the truth and the facts don’t necessarily look good to one particular side.”
The “Am I The Only One” chorus sees Lewis singing: “I’m not the only one, willin’ to fight / For my love of the red and white / And the blue, burnin’ on the ground / Another statue comin’ down in a town near you.” Lewis also criticizes Bruce Springsteen at the end of the track, singing: “Am I the only one who quits singin’ along every time they play a Springsteen song.”
Asked why he chose to call out Springsteen in the song’s lyrics, Lewis said: “Because he’s always portrayed himself as the all-American middle-class guy. And during all of this craziness, he said that if one man is re-elected to the office of presidency that he was gonna move to Australia. How American is that? You’re gonna bail on America just because you don’t like the guy that may have gotten into office?”
This past July, Scott Borchetta, Big Machine Label Group‘s founder and president-CEO, defended the company’s decision to release “Am I The Only One”. Borchetta‘s comments came in response to industry blogger Bob Lefsetz, who slammed Lewis‘s song as “heinous.” Lefsetz went on to call Lewis a “middle-class, right-wing wanker” whose divisive track “should have been played at CPAC, in between speeches by nitwits like saying to refuse the ‘Fauci ouchie.'”
Lewis told “Candace” that there was initially some pushback from people about him wanting to record and release such a blatant conservative political protest song. “There might have been a little tinge of that in the beginning, but I think everyone successfully saw through that,” he said. “And I even got support from some places that I didn’t expect to get support from — like my record label. Come to find out Scott Borchetta is pretty big on the First Amendement, freedom of speech.”
Springsteen can best be described as Lewis‘s political polar opposite, having been a vocal opponent to former U.S. president Donald Trump on many occasions. In August 2020, Bruce went as far as to allow the use of his song “The Rising” in a video that aired during night one of the Democratic National Convention.
Lewis, who is widely considered to be one of the most politically conservative musicians in rock, made headlines last month when he urged his fans to chant “Fuck Joe Biden” during a STAIND concert in Pennsylvania.
Aaron told the Anchorage Press in a January 2020 interview that he considered the first Donald Trump impeachment by the House Of Representatives as the clearest representation of what’s wrong with America these days.
Lewis was a staunch critic of President Barack Obama, telling a crowd at one of his solo concerts in 2016: “Barack Obama should have been impeached a long fucking time ago. Every fucking decision he makes is against the Constitution, it’s against what’s good for our fucking country, and he is truly the worst fucking president that we have ever had in the history of this fucking country.”
That same year, Lewis told Billboard that he would support Trump in the U.S. presidential race, even though he was “disappointed” by the real estate mogul “with the bickering and the name-calling.” Lewis added that he voted for Senator Ted Cruz, Trump‘s closest competitor in the Republican nomination race, in the Massachusetts primary.
In June, Lewis made headlines when he accused the U.S. Democratic Party of fighting against every major civil rights initiative and of having a long history of discrimination.
