Bio

Sweating under the spotlights at a ritzy club in Hollywood, scrappy frontman Aaron West of  emo-Americana ensemble the Roaring Twenties, a bit out of his element, starts to slur his  words. He’s lost more than he can count. His face burns with mounting anger––at the label, at  his weary bandmates, at the sorry state of the world as it sputters back to life like a ’67  Mustang hot off cinder blocks, but above all at himself. The whiskey’s all he can do to quiet  the pain in his hand as he strums, busted from pouring concrete. Even surrounded by the  people who’ve taken him in when no one else would, this family he’s been given, he can’t  seem to get it right. “Fuck building a bridge, I’m burning it down,” he screams on high voltage rocker “Spitting in the Wind,” booze rough in his throat, “I’ll see you in the water.”  

But he’ll be okay. After all, he doesn’t really exist. 

The alcohol is iced tea, and the man in the Buffalo Bills shirt is an Eagles fan. Ten years ago,  Dan Campbell, frontman of the Philadelphia rock outfit The Wonder Years, masterminded a  new character as a tutorial for himself––could he achieve the pathos of his autobiographical  ballads in the world of fiction?––but also in the inviolability of the human spirit. Aaron’s story  centered on one impossible, perfect question: when we have nothing left, why keep going? It  started with just one song, an experiment with collaborator Ace Enders, of the Early  November, about a man whose wife loses a baby. But soon Campbell realized the story  couldn’t begin or end there, that there was an entire person he needed to know.  

So Campbell took Aaron across the country, Long Island to southern California to Savannah,  guided him through bar fights, a table of divorce papers, the church piano bench beside a  nephew he’s grown to love like a son, beaches and highways and couches and phone booths,  all in an attempt to understand what it is that allows a person to continue in the face of  catastrophe. When he has nothing else, he has his guitar, the stage, the lights. He has the  music.  

After ten years, two albums, an EP, and a single, the answer to Aaron’s brutal seeking comes  in the form of his triumphant third chapter, IN LIEU OF FLOWERS. Not a collection of  elegies so much as a concept opera, an ode to the underdog, à la the Mountain Goats’ All Hail  West Texas or the Weakerthans’ Reunion Tour, Campbell and the band take AW20’s signature  dynamics to new heights, marrying the crash of punk percussion and power chords with the  roots twang of banjo and pedal steel, tracing the imaginary heartbreak-nomad’s turbulent arc  toward healing, from the bottom of bottles in ashy motel rooms and desecrated basement  venues––“gig’s in an abandoned church in Glasgow, the irony’s a little on the nose,” he sneers  over plaintive fingerpicking on “Alone at St. Luke’s”––to the disorienting tarmac where he  staggers on and off tour, to the passenger seat of a car with an old friend and new love, and,  eventually, to the rehab facility where he gets his voice back.  

Longtime fans will recognize the bursts of Springsteenian horns, led by Chiemina Ukazim’s  bombastic, stirring saxophone, that keep the pulse and grit of the working class East Coast  close at hand. Louder and brasher than ever, and elsewhere even more intimate, more  devastating, with keepsakes and callbacks––shorebirds, the hue of a certain citrus fruit, the 

interpolation of past horn arrangements––for those who’ve accompanied him on his journey  from the beginning, Aaron West manages to stay as clear-eyed and wry as he’s ever been, the  acid-spit humor that comes only from tragedy. IN LIEU OF FLOWERS isn’t about perfect  choices, perfect endings, perfect people, it’s about fucking up, and learning how to be held  again.  

In the record’s shocking final moments, Aaron, wrung out and made new, returns to the  beginning of his story, a place he never fathomed he would ever go again. But if you know  how to look, every return to the past promises something previously unimaginable, something  new. Like Aaron says, “Ain’t that the fucked up thing about hope?”