March 1, 2024
Aaron West And The Roaring Twenties new song out today
No great character is without their flaws, and on Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties’ new song out today, “Alone at St. Luke’s,” primary songwriter Dan Campbell brings Aaron’s into full focus with a boisterous barnburner of a track.
Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties will release the third chapter in their saga, a new album called In Lieu Of Flowers, on April 12. It’s both a band and a story–everything that happens live on stage is narrative canon.
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“I think sometimes constriction can be a catalyst for something special,” Dan explains. “When everyone else in the band got Covid during our UK tour in 2022, it became an indelible part of the story. Our best laid plans were immediately dashed again on the rocks of the pandemic, but this new narrative constriction forced a shift in my approach to the story that sent the record spinning in a new and better direction.”
The music mirrors the stark change in the story, seeing Aaron leave his band behind in a sudden and jarring way to finish the tour solo. It takes what was initially a celebratory chorus, with huge drums and horn lines, and shifts the mood entirely without changing the melody or lyrics.
“What makes the storytelling come alive is the buy-in,” Dan explains, comparing the project to pro-wrestling. “There’s this arena full of people and they know that person in the ring isn’t an undead zombie mortician. It’s a guy, his name is Mark, but they buy into it because that mass suspension of disbelief is where the magic is.
To understand the story of In Lieu Of Flowers is to know where Aaron’s path has taken him so far. It all begins with the worst year of his life, marked by profound loss–grief, divorce and miscarriage–detailed on his 2014 debut, We Don’t Have Each Other, and 2016’s Bittersweet (EP).
2019’s Routine Maintenance begins a new chapter for Aaron, albeit short-lived. After a bar fight lands him in jail and he has no one to call, Aaron heads to Los Angeles for a fresh start where he occupies his time between crappy jobs and open mic nights. On the road playing gigs, he forms a band and they start to gain some traction before another blow hits his family––the loss of his brother-in-law.
He finds a new purpose in the aftermath; “I’m going to be someone you can count on for a change,” he sings on the album’s closing title track.
The new album picks up where Routine Maintenance left off, starting from the solo tours that Dan went on shortly after its release–on stage, he talked about leaving the band to care for his grieving sister Catherine and nephew Colin, but that solo touring felt like shit. The band soon got back together––as documented on their Live From Asbury Park album recorded over the course of two December 2019 shows.
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In the interceding years, Aaron is forced to finally tend to the wounds he’s ignored for over a decade, and that brings us to In Lieu of Flowers.
It’s a triumphant kind of melancholy that colors this entire record message is driven home thanks to the 16-piece band that helped bring it to life with guitar, accordion, keys, banjo, pedal steel, trumpets, trombone, saxophone, cello, and violin.
