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Aaron Lewis at Dr Pepper Park

Category:  Event Calendar

Date and Time for this Past Event

Location

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Details

ALL SHOWS ARE RAIN OR SHINE
Schedule subject to change without notice
Gates Open at 6:30pm
The box office opens on site at 6:15pm.
Will call is located where tickets are sold at the entrance.
All food and beverage sales are CASH ONLY. We do have an ATM machine on site.
Outside food and beverages are NOT permitted.
Our beverages for the concert will include Pepsi products, beer and wine from Blue Ridge Beverage.
We do have an enforced designated smoking area at the venue.

PARKING: Please park at the Carilion Riverwalk Garage (beside Honeytree) and ride the FREE shuttle. It's a very short ride that delivers you right to the front gate! You will see directional signage on South Jefferson when you get close.

Seating-Bring your own or rent one of our chairs at the event.


Throughout his more than two-decade career, whether topping the charts as frontman of hard Rock heroes Staind, or his second act as a No. 1 artist on the Country charts as a solo artist, Aaron Lewis has always been painfully honest in his music.

"That's all I've ever done. My songs have always been me wearing my heart on my sleeve, and my emotions on my sleeve, and my misfortunes on my sleeve, my sins on my sleeve," Lewis says. "I don't feel like it would be genuine nor worthy of this crazy ride I've been on if it wasn't."

He is 100 percent open, as he has to be, about his stunning new collection, STATE I'M IN (The Valory Music Co.).

"The songs I wrote on this record, they were some dark times," he says. "The state I'm in is not Mississippi, or Texas, or Massachusetts, it's more about the emotional state I'm in and everything I've surprisingly talked about in this interview. I'm always surprised by what comes out of me. I'm always surprised by the overall content of a record. It is a flow of consciousness."

One of the most poignant songs is the touching ballad "Love Me." Lewis says that song is a cornerstone of the album. "That was a really heartbreaking song for me to write," he says. "The tears were rolling down my face and blurring the words on the page, I was writing as fast as I could with a pen. The flow of emotion that went into that song was pretty overwhelming."

For Lewis, who remains on the road year-round, new songs are the most exciting way to spice up the live set and, as he puts it, "Hit the refresh button." So, he's been playing several songs off STATE I'M IN and has been very excited by the response.

"It's always nice to put some new stuff in there and even better when people react to it the way people have been reacting to these new songs," he says. "They're hearing them for the first time and reacting to them like they've known them. And the reaction to the songs was like they were a song off their favorite record. That's always motivating and hopeful."

"It's absolutely been my saving grace. I don't know how I made it through high school. I don't know how many times I should've died in high school. I don't know how I could've channeled that self-destructive energy away from me in any other way than to have writing as an outlet," he says.

Through that outlet, he has helped many others over the years. Something he says makes it all worthwhile. "It makes it make some sort of sense," he says of every time a fan shares a story of how his music has helped them. "It gives me some sort of peace to know that everything I went through in my childhood, and that I've gone through in my life, had some sort of purpose."