Content:
With new album ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’, Dan Campbell is set to expand the evocative and story-rich saga of Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties, blending heartfelt narratives with his signature musical ambition – but could it be the final chapter? Check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Alexander Bradley.
“The graffiti on the wall says ‘Fuck the Tories’ / Outside a takeaway, we’re eating on the street,” opens ‘Alone At St. Luke’s’, the new single from Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties. Urgent and alert, the track fizzes with the energy of a singer revelling in the opportunity to be back on the road with his band.
For Dan Campbell, the puppeteer behind Aaron West, this was one of those moments where fiction and reality blurred.
“That is literally what the graffiti said,” he smiles, but the opportunity to share the sentiment was an open goal he couldn’t pass up. Having first toured the UK with his band The Wonder Years back in 2007, the singer has witnessed in snapshots the growing disdain for conservatism at the same time as more active interests in politics amongst young British people. He’d still happily swap the US for a place with universal healthcare and gun control, but the similarities between politics on both sides of the pond are apparent to him.
“It seems like it is not dissimilar to American politics,” he reasons. “There is this Conservative Party that is racist and transphobic and regressive in every way, seems to be trying to cut the NHS which, I can tell you as someone that does not have single-payer healthcare, is a bad idea.”
Healthcare played a big part in the last Aaron West single, ‘Paying Bills At The End Of The World’, released last month. With Covid as its backdrop, the Americana-soaked tune finds Aaron navigating the pandemic with the anxiety of what getting sick without health insurance would look like.
Jump forward two songs on the spectacular third full-length instalment of the Aaron West saga, ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’, due in April, and the protagonist arrives alone at St. Luke’s in Glasgow. Reunited with his band following the events of the last album, he’s been touring the UK and enjoying the freedom of the post-lockdown world and being around his bandmates again. Raucous and joyful heading into the first chorus, Aaron West is riding high on a wave unlike anything we’ve seen before. “We’ve been thinking / As long as we’re still here / We might as well be drinking,” the chorus goes with gang vocals roaring on the final line.
In true Aaron West fashion, though, it comes crashing down. The band gets sick. This part is true.
“We woke up one morning, and Nick [Steinborn, drums] said, ‘I don’t feel great’, and so we tested him, and he tested positive,” Dan recalls. “And then we went and got tests for everybody else, and everyone took them, and everyone else was negative, and I had to make a decision then, and I said, ‘Okay, there’s no way to play full band without drums. It doesn’t really make sense.’ And the rest of the band, ‘You guys have families, you have jobs.’ It was during the time period where if you had Covid in the UK, you couldn’t get on a flight for at least 10 days.”
Dan sent the rest of the band home to protect them while he soldiered on alone. The rest of the band got home safely but tested positive one by one in the following week. Dan, however, tested twice a day and, thanks to a “minor miracle”, as he puts it, managed to dodge the virus and complete the tour.
As for Aaron, ‘Alone At St. Luke’s’ marks a pivotal moment in the upcoming album. The band get sick, and the fun, partying atmosphere turns sour. Dan likens this band to pro-wrestling a lot, where the real-world events that unfold impact the story. There is no greater example of that than in this song, where the real-life pandemic and the reality of his band getting sick impacted the fictional events that ultimately set up the whole story of this album.
The fork in the path where the reality and fiction split comes as Dan doesn’t drink, but Glasgow was the ideal setting for the character for whom he pulls the strings to spiral backwards in his alcoholism. In his vast experience of late nights in British cities, he has seen a lot, but, in his words, “I think that Glasgow is one of the cities where I have seen the most debaucherous behaviour after a certain hour,” he admits. It’s an unfortunate stereotype, but it is one that perfectly contrasts the spectacular venue of St. Luke’s in the heart of the city. The graffiti on the wall now says, “It’s a new low”, according to the song, as Aaron rolls into the cold and wet city. The chorus repeats. “I might as well keep drinking,” he sings in the final line. This time, it’s different, though. The drinking has changed from celebratory to lonely, sad drinking during the course of the song.
In the story, you see it. In the music, you hear it. “We tried to make sure that we were musically expressing it in the same way. So, the chorus is the same three times throughout the song. It’s the same chords. It’s the same tempo. The first two are bombastic. It’s jubilant and fun and degenerate. The horns are playing. The third one, when the band has left, is, again, same chord, same tempo, just down in octave, and you can hear in the isolation the turn in the drinking,” Dan explains.
“I want to make sure I do justice to the heavier topics and even the lighter ones”
Dan Campbell
Narratively, the downward spiral started in ‘Alone At St. Luke’s’ is the set-up to Aaron’s journey on ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’, but facing up to alcoholism has been a long time coming from the character. It’s been 10 years since we first met Aaron West, in which he faced a series of tragedies through miscarriage, grief and divorce on the debut album ‘We Don’t Have Each Other’. The sum of each loss turns the character onto a destructive path that eventually lands him in jail following a bar fight on the second album, 2019’s ‘Routine Maintenance’. The wake-up call and the chance to start afresh on that album creates the illusion that his problems have been solved.
“The drinking becomes a less pronounced problem, which I think is a pattern that I’ve noticed in people close to me,” Dan says, having seen numerous friends and family suffer from the same affliction. He continues, “I’ve noticed that it can be more of a problem in times when you are not happier. That’s not true for everyone, but it is true for some people. How much of an issue it is can ebb and flow.
“I think at the beginning of this record, Aaron gets to a point where he stopped not because of any kind of rock bottom moment but just because of the pandemic, and it just didn’t feel like a thing he wanted to be doing, but there was never any attempt to actually confront it.”
The eagle-eyed will spot the crossover with an idea that has spilled out from Dan’s latest Wonder Years album, ‘The Hum Goes On Forever’. That album was all about facing up to your demons. He explains, “The idea is that until we actually deal with things, they’re ever-present, and sometimes they are louder, and sometimes they’re quieter, but they are there.”
So ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’ finds Aaron West confronting his alcoholism once and for all. Following the freedom to tour again post-pandemic to suddenly being isolated again, all within the three and a half minutes of ‘Alone At St. Luke’s’. And if you didn’t get that tonal shift from this single, it’ll hit like a tonne of bricks once the next track, ‘Whiplash’, kicks in. Doubling down on the stark contrast of the partying, it’s a track which Dan refers to as “The eye of the storm.”
Unable to draw on his own experience as someone who doesn’t drink, Dan reached out to those around him when it came to staying true to the story. “I don’t write about these things flippantly,” he says. “If I wanna write about Aaron and his alcoholism, I’m gonna speak to friends that have struggled with it, and I’m gonna speak to friends at different places in their life with that, and I’m going to interview them. I wanna make sure I get it right. I want to make sure I do justice to the heavier topics and even the lighter ones,” he adds.
On the last album, he interviewed friends who had experience of hopping freight trains, so when it was Aaron’s time to catch a ride out west, Dan had all the right phrases ready to go. “I try to do that for basically everything with the project so that it feels as visceral and real as possible,” he adds.
It’s a small glimpse into the time and dedication that has gone into making Aaron West multi-dimensional for the story that Dan Campbell has created. When you flip the mirror back around onto Dan and the 15 other musicians that incorporate The Roaring Twenties, you see the scale of dedication going into making Aaron West a reality.
‘In Lieu Of Flowers’ is a combined effort from Dan Campbell, recorded again with Ace Enders (of The Early November fame) and this time mixed by Vince Ratti, who first worked with The Wonder Years back in 08. On top of that, there are guitarists, accordion players, keys, banjo, pedal steel, trumpets, trombone, sax, cello and violin players that together make up the band. The result is a very clear labour of love.
The growing ensemble of bandmates is largely due to Dan wanting to include as many friends as possible.
Even in writing the songs, Dan has a community of well-forged friendships in Spanish Love Songs, Origami Angel, Kississippi, Future Teens and John-Allison Weiss, all offering advice and willing the process forward. In fact, Noah Weinman of Runnner wrote on ‘Whiplash’ and recorded his own demo for the track at Dan’s request and attempt to avoid his own vocal idiosyncrasies.
Love is very much, palpably, at the heart of it all. The record shines with all those different musical components thanks to the instructions of “don’t tame anything” to Vince Ratti. More expansive in some respects, often more robust, the folk-punk sound on this record puts Aaron West shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Frank Turner, The Menzingers and Against Me! as Dan had envisioned. His reference for the “more is more” approach to bandmates, however, comes inspired by Springsteen.
“Have you ever seen ‘The Born To Run’ video?” he asks. “It’s just them playing live, and there is just a palpable feeling of this band that loves each other, and that is what I get when we play Aaron West shows,” he reveals.
With such a big operation, of course there are headaches, though. Never mind pulling together a schedule for the whole album; just taking a promo shot of them all was hard enough. Scheduling around people’s day-to-day jobs, living in different states, families and commitments, they managed to schedule one day in the planning of the record for all 16 members to be in one place at one time. LJ, the guitar player, was on tour teching for Turnstile, but he had a day off to fly in and record all his parts. The trumpet player flew in from Austin the day before to record all in one day and then stuck around until the next day. After the shoot, they both left immediately for the airport. Meanwhile, the string players had driven down from New York and left the shoot to go straight into the studio.
It takes a lot of work to get them all together, but Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties will re-unite all of them for the release of ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’. Scheduled for the night before the album’s release and due to be live-streamed, it is a labour of love meets logistical nightmare that Dan Campbell is throwing himself headfirst into for the sake of Aaron West.
“There are things about this project that are just about satisfying an itch in my brain to do something like this,” he concedes, sounding relaxed but looking slightly wild-eyed.
They need two sound desks for everyone to get a channel in the monitors. There is a separate desk for the live stream audio, plus there are people shooting and producing the video. And that’s not to mention the stage.
“We’re gonna bring in the stage,” he grins. “It’s not the original venue we were gonna play. The original venue flooded, so we moved it into a bigger room with a smaller stage. And so we had to go there and measure it out to the inch and then rent decking so that it can be tiers of people to fit everyone. We have to go vertical to get everyone into the stage space. It’s down to the foot.
“But it’s because I’ve had this dream of doing it for years. A thing that I was in love with as a kid was season and series finales and appointment television events because there was no DVR, no On-Demand, and no streaming. If you wanted to see the finale, you had to sit there with your family at seven o’clock. Everyone else’s family had to sit there, and everyone got to experience something at the same time, and I wanted that feeling back,” he stresses.
There is a question that hangs in the air. Does this point to the end of Aaron West? Such a monumental effort to pull off the “series finale” for what could nicely wrap up the trilogy of Aaron West? Dan admits he doesn’t know how the story of Aaron West ends.
“I want to make sure that every record ends in a way that you feel like you’ve gotten an ending. So that’s not to say that there definitely won’t be more Aaron West, but I also can’t say that there definitely will be more Aaron West,” he offers.
His reasoning is very practical. He doesn’t know what will happen tomorrow. Well, actually, he probably does, given how meticulously planned this project is. Okay, he doesn’t know what happens a year from now. He never intended for it to be 5 years between records in the first place. He points to Stefan Babcock from PUP, who was told by doctors that he’d never sing again – that might happen to him one day. His kids may need him to be home more. So, who’s to say if this is the end?
Regardless, ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’ has a journey that finds Aaron West once again rolling with the punches of the pandemic and then his alcohol addiction. This time, however, he is facing his problems; yes, the alcoholism but also the fear of intimacy, the fear of vulnerability that come in and out of focus throughout the last three albums. So, come the finale, in ‘Dead Leaves’ the (grape)fruit of his labour, Aaron’s healing journey, is laid bare. And, if there is one thing you can count on Dan Campbell for, it’s that he always sticks the landing. This time is no different.
So once ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’ is released, Aaron West and Dan Campbell will have walked off stage having played their story in full. Dan Campbell will go back to working on some poetry and planning the next Wonder Years album. As for Aaron West, who knows? When he leaves, he leaves as a better person, and though it may look like a door closing, it could well be a new beginning. ■
Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties’ album ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’ is out 12th April. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
PINNING DOWN THE NARRATIVES
Dan Campbell has often referred to Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties as a project akin to pro-wrestling. The character exists, the events run concurrent to our world, and what happens on stage impacts the story. So, no one is being powerbombed through a table at an Aaron West show, but in a similar fashion to wrestling, they are trying to tell a story.
Thankfully, Dan has friends in the business to back up the comparison. He first met Mark Andrews in 2015 at the Pro Wrestling Guerrilla event Battle of Los Angeles tournament. It was the Welsh wrestler’s PWG debut, and with no air conditioning in the crammed legion hall, it felt closer to a punk show than a wrestling event. During the interval, Dan approached the wrestler to share his admiration only for Mark Andrews to also be a huge fan of The Wonder Years. And so a friendship quickly formed. In recent years, Mark and Flash Morgan Webster became the first Welsh WWE champions when they won the NXT UK Tag Team Championship, and he released a debut album with his pop-punk band, Junior. So, when it comes to discussing the overlaps between Aaron West and wrestling, there is no better duo to explain it.
Dan, have you always been a wrestling fan?
Dan: Yeah. My journey with it was that I loved wrestling growing up. I loved it. The first big injury of my life was spraining my neck by taking a Pearl River Plunge in the fifth grade. My friend was a big Ahmed… actually, Ahmed Johnson was my favourite wrestler at the time, too, and I took a Pearl River Plunge the wrong way and sprained my neck, so yes, I loved wrestling.
What’s been your relationship with wrestling as an adult?
Dan: We were on Warped Tour in 2011 and I just had a bad day. I think maybe I had a bad show. I didn’t like how an interview went just, and I was having this kind of crisis where I was like, “Oh my God, there’s nowhere to go inside my brain.” The place I would normally go is the place causing me unhappiness right now. And I have no hobbies at all, and that night on the bus serendipitously was the night of the CM Punk ‘Pipe Bomb’ promo.
Mark: Amazing.
Dan: And it was just on TV, and I was like, “Oh my God! I forgot how much I loved wrestling.” And that was it. I was back in.
Mark: What you just described is the complete opposite of me. So, when I was 13, I remember being like, “Fuck, I love wrestling, and I love playing guitar. Oh, I’ll go for wrestling.” And then the same thing where I’d have a bad day in wrestling, and I was like, “Okay, I’ve got the guitar here”, but do you know what I mean? It’s like, I chose that path instead. That’s really funny to hear.
Mark, going from performing stunners on your friends in a field to becoming a professional wrestler, at what point did getting into wrestling start becoming about telling a story?
Mark: Well, for me, I’d actually say it potentially happened a lot later in my kind of career than it should have. I started wrestling; well, I started training when I was about 12 years old. So I very quickly went from messing around with my friends backyard wrestling, to being like professional wrestling training. And then, obviously, the standard of training in the UK back then was not great. So, I think for a good five or six years, I was just a kid focusing on the moves and the gear and not really thinking about that story arc. It’s only then, later in my career, from 18 years old onwards, that it became more prevalent to learn the beats of a match, the structure, learning to actually tell a story with every moment you have in the match to make the most outta your minutes in the ring.
But, on top of that, I guess around the age of 20 or 21, I started running my own shows, and that is where you really learn it because it’s easy to sometimes give other people better advice than you can give yourself, you know? And I think from being able to almost produce and plan story acts for other people, I could then look at myself and be like, “Hold on, I’m not doing that myself, so I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here.” I’m telling these guys, “Big heel turn at the end of the show,” or “Make sure you really sell it with your face on your entrance,” and then I’m looking at my own matches like, “I don’t even do that myself.” So, for me, I think from promoting my own shows and writing my own storylines, that’s when the creative process and the story arc storytelling really went up a notch.
In terms of what you do with Aaron West, Dan, what are the moments you use to progress the story?
Dan: The first real big event where I was like, “I’m gonna use this to my advantage,” that’s in canon / in story, was at the end of ‘Routine Maintenance’. Aaron leaves the band to go take care of his sister and his nephew, and then it becomes the situation where because the record came out and, there’s like an expectation that you’re gonna tour and promote it. Aaron went on tour to promote the record and was playing solo because Aaron had left the band and, at those shows, I started setting up how much it sucked to play without the band after doing it with them for so long, how lonely it felt, how exposed I felt. And then we got to this show in Asbury Park, where I played and invited Aaron’s sister, Catherine, out to play a song. And so Aaron and Catherine play a song together, and then Aaron expects to play the rest of the show, but the lights come up, and the whole Roaring Twenties band surprises Aaron on stage and comes back. It wasn’t a thing that the fans knew was gonna happen. It wasn’t a thing that, in character, Aaron knew was gonna happen, and it was the first opportunity to advance the story where the band rejoins Aaron. The Roaring Twenties are back, and it happened in front of a crowd. From there, I started using that tool more.
How do you sell that moment? Have you ever acted before?
Dan: I have not, and I would say that in the same way that I think that maybe wrestlers aren’t always actors; sometimes, you just gotta be like, “I’m going to accept that they’re doing their best.” Accept that I’m trying my best. My friend Charlie Saxton is an actor, and he came to see an Aaron West show, and he gave me a bunch of notes and things to work on. And I do my best with it. We use the crowd and the lights to our advantage to try to signal in the same way that wrestling events do. You try to signal the crowd that you want them to do something. Sometimes, you want them to chant something, so you say it in a certain cadence, or you leave a word unfinished, and they start doing it.
Mark: You bait them in.
Dan: Right. And so, with that [the band’s return at Asbury Park], we wanted the crowd to pop real big, and so we used the lights coming up as a way to cue them that something important was happening, and then the longer the crowd is cheering, the less I have to act.
Mark, did you have any training on how to sell a moment?
Mark: Prior to wrestling, [I had] zero acting experience, and I always considered myself a terrible actor, and therefore, I’d almost shy off from doing that kind of stuff in wrestling, like promos and stuff. And to go back to what Dan was saying, I can relate to that so much, and my theory on it is almost like when it comes to this form of entertainment, the crux of what we do and the art of what we do as wrestlers is in the ring and that’s what gets everybody invested and the storytelling is what gets everybody invested. So actually, as long as the storytelling and the wrestling are good, the acting, obviously, it’s important, but it can not be as high level as the storytelling and the performing in the ring because that’s kind of just there to assist what they’re really there to see. And if a story’s great, they’re invested, and they don’t really care so much about “Okay, that guy didn’t act it too well.”
I’m not sure if you can relate to that, Dan, but almost like your show, your songwriting and your performance are incredible, and that’s why everyone’s there. So they’re gonna forgive you if you’re not, you know, an Oscar-worthy actor because it’s the storytelling. It’s the props you use. It’s the lighting. I don’t even know what you’d call that, really, but I guess it is just kind of live storytelling, right?
Dan: Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to build stakes, right? We’re trying to build stakes and make people invest in the outcome of the event. You want the payoff, right? So, with you guys, you want the babyface to go over eventually, and in order for that to happen, there has to be struggle, and there has to be tension. Everyone admits that John Cena, obviously, no matter what you’re gonna say, is one of the great stewards of the sport, but when he was invincible, the stakes are lowered. When you don’t fear him losing, the stakes come down, and so you kind of need the heel to win. You need the heel to be dominant sometimes because that makes the journey for the babyface all that much more important. And so, like for Aaron West, you need there to be tension. You need him to slide into darker spaces in his life in order for there to be any payoff if he figures it out.
Mark: Yeah. That’s totally it. The biggest babyfaces in wrestling are the ones that are most vulnerable but have the most heart, and that’s the definition of Aaron West as a character, in my opinion. He’s incredibly vulnerable, and he has so much heart, and when you’re listening to those songs, you’re like, “Fuck, I’m rooting for this guy.” Like, I’ve seen people comment on social media, “I just wanna hug him,” and that’s the feeling you get when you listen to Aaron West. And that’s the feeling that a lot of wrestlers, a babyface like myself, would want to get. You want the crowd to feel sympathy and empathise with you and have those relatable moments.
So, it’s not necessarily about the character but the writing behind it?
Mark: There’s a saying that I always think of when it comes to wrestling, and I feel like this applies to Aaron West as well, which is, “It’s not about making people think that it’s real; it’s about making them forget that it’s fake.”
Dan: If you can work a crowd into questioning whether or not it actually is a work… if you get the crowd going like, “Damn, is that actually a shoot?” you win. That’s it. That’s kind of a lot of the pinnacle of wrestling moments. I said it before in like a fucking Instagram reel, but the mass suspension of disbelief is where the magic is. When you get an arena full of people who are happy to suspend disbelief because they’re so awed by what’s happening in the ring, you made the magic happen.
That must be so hard to set out to try and write?
Dan: It’s such a special and singular art form. The other thing that I think is interesting that probably happens in wrestling more than I think is things that you don’t intend to happen, but that happen anyway have to become part of it. Maybe an easy example is the Daniel Bryan run in like 2016 or whatever that was. They didn’t have this expectation that Bryan was gonna get so over, but he got so undeniably over that the crowd was so loudly cheering for him that they had to change the trajectory of the show moving forward. They had no other choice.
And so, with a song like ‘Alone At St. Luke’s’, now I have to do the character work, think through this narrative and change what I was going to write to fit what happened in real life that wasn’t up to me and I think that’s another thing that’s really singular about these art forms that they don’t… that doesn’t happen in a television show, right? You write the script, you film the script.
Mark: Do you know what’s great about it too is, I dunno if you find the same with Aaron West, but like, those real moments quite often tend to be the strongest parts of the art form ’cause nothing’s more real than real, right? If somebody gets injured in a match, then that’s it. We’re trying to persuade the fans that it’s real or that it’s not fake, but that’s as real as it is. They broke their leg. Your band got Covid. Nothing’s changing that, you know? So you’re completely right. I think there’s nothing else in the world that does it like that other than pro wrestling and what you are achieving with Aaron West.
What would the story have been without that real-world moment?
Dan: I had this loose sketch, and I knew that I needed to get from point A to point B, but the plan that I had for it got blown up because of what happened in real life, and so now we have to use that, and it ended up better for which is exactly what Mark’s saying. Sometimes, you end up with an event that happens that you can’t control, and because of the nature of the art form, your hand is forced. You have to make that work. You just kind of roll with it and something magic can happen.
Mark, you have a much smaller timeframe to react when something goes wrong, though.
Mark: Yeah. Sometimes, you just gotta let Jesus take the wheel…I wouldn’t say that I love the chaos but I definitely sometimes love the chaos. Sometimes, when stuff goes a bit wrong, that’s when it gets exciting and fun. Don’t get me wrong, I think when it comes to companies like WWE, they do it to way too much of a degree; you hear about them writing shows half an hour before they go live on TV, and that seems extreme. That seems way too much.
But, in a way, that’s kind of what makes it so special because, like Dan was saying, that real aspect of one event happens, and it directly changes the next event and that directly changes the next event. You rely on those events to make it interesting. So, in a way, you’d never wish injuries on people, but there’s always a way in wrestling to work around, and sometimes the workaround is almost like you couldn’t see the woods through the trees before, and now you’re like, “Oh my God, we’ll do this instead.” It ends up being better for whatever reason. So yeah, as I said, I thrive in the chaos a little bit.
==============================
Image
==============================
URL
==============================
Source
Dork
==============================
Full content
[#item_full_content]