STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis has once again railed against the U.S. government, saying that “we can’t just sit on our asses and watch them do shit anymore.”
The outspoken conservative rocker, who reinvented himself as a solo country artist in the last decade, voiced his views before performing a new song called “Am I The Only One” during his May 27 concert at at Sharkey’s Event Center in Liverpool, New York.
He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Before I start this next song, I’m gonna try to somewhat quote Einstein. I’m not gonna quote it exactly, but he said that this country will not be destroyed by evil men. This country will be destroyed by good men that stand idly by while evil men do what they do. So how long are we gonna stand by and watch these people destroy our fucking country right out from underneath our feet?
“We inherited this,” he continued. “We’re supposed to take care of it and value it like it’s ours, because it is. Because the people in control certainly don’t value it; that’s obvious. So, people, this is our country, and it’s time to wake the fuck up. We can’t just sit on our asses and watch them do shit anymore — we can’t do it. It’s gonna be gone. All the blood that was shed for this amazing thing that is in our hands right now, we are responsible for what happens to this country. We can’t just sit here and do nothing anymore; we can’t do it. That’s why we’re as far down the fucking shithole as we are already — is because we just sit here and let them fucking do it. So — wake up.”
Lewis originally performed “Am I The Only One” in March at another solo concert in Texas — a state which removed all pandemic restrictions that same month.
The as-yet-unreleased track, which finds Aaron asking if he is the only one fed up with the state of the country right now, features such lyrics as: “Am I the only one, who can’t take no more, screaming if you don’t like it there’s the fucking door, this ain’t the freedom we’ve been fighting for, it was something more, yeah, it was something more.”
Apparently addressing the removal of Confederate statues, Lewis sings in the song: “Am I the only one willing to fight for my love of the red and white, and the blue, burning on the ground as the statues coming down in a town near you, watching the threads of Old Glory come undone, Am I the only one. I can’t be the only one.”
Lewis also criticizes Bruce Springsteen at the end of the track, singing: “Am I the only one, who quit singing along every time they play a Springsteen song.”
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. Last August, 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, told the Anchorage Press in a January 2020 interview that he considered the first 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 Donald 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.
