The name Aaron Lewis is familiar to fans of country and hard-rock music. With a career spanning almost three decades, Aaron has successfully released several studio albums, and toured the US uncountable times with his band Staind, and in soloist projects.
While Aaron Lewis’ music speaks for itself, his controversial political views, and other eyebrow-raising aspects of his personal life have also put his name in headlines over the past years, making him hardly ignorable to his fans and detractors.
So what’s the truth about Aaron Lewis? What’s going on with his wife, and how rich is he? What about controversies and personal struggles? Keep watching to find out more about him!
Who Is Aaron Lewis?
Aaron Lewis rose to fame in the mid-1990s when his band Staind started taking to the local stages in their hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Although they started as a cover band, their first album, “Tormented” opened many doors for Staind, including touring alongside Limp Bizkit and other popular metal bands.
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As Staind’s vocalist, Aaron successfully released other six studio albums between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. Nonetheless, the band’s hiatus in 2012 gave a start to Aaron’s soloist career, which saw him taking a step away from making nu and alternative metal to focus on country music, receiving a warm welcome from well-known names in the genre such as George Jones and Charlie Daniels.
The following years saw him gain fame not only for his renewed career as a musician, but also for his right-leaning political opinions, and takes on vaccination and war, often talking about these topics in his creative work and social media.
Discography
Following the independent release of Staind’s debut album “Tormented” in 1996, Aaron became known for his ‘scream-sing’ style, accompanied by his aggressive yet poignant lyrics. That’s why it didn’t take long for his band to be signed under Flip Records, after attracting the attention of Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst.
In 1999, Staind’s “Dysfunction” was released as the band’s second and its first major album. It became the band’s first charting work, gaining them enough popularity to headline Korn’s popular Family Values Tour in 1999.
Staind’s 2001 “Break the Cycle” was their first album to chart the Billboard 200, followed by “14 Shades of Grey” in 2003 and “Chapter V” in 2005. The band released the albums “The Illusion of Progress” and the self-titled “Staind” in 2008 and 2011 respectively, before taking a long-lasting hiatus which Aaron described as ‘a little break for a second’. The band reunited several times in the next decade, eventually releasing their eighth album “Confessions of the Fallen” in 2023.
On his part, Aaron’s first solo album, “The Road” was released in 2012, successfully putting him on the map for country music fans. The second one entitled “Sinner” in 2016 reached number one on Billboard’s Country Albums Charts, preceding 2019’s “State I’m In” and 2022’s “Frayed at Both Ends”, all of which achieved moderate commercial success.
Wife & Family
Aaron has been married to Vanessa Lewis since the early 2000s, though not much about their story together is known. In 2002 the pair welcomed their first daughter Zoe Jane, who was followed by the birth of Nyla Rae in 2005, and their third daughter Indie Shay was born in November 2007.
Not much is known about Vanessa, except that she’s aa dedicated mom and active philanthropist. In 2010, she and Aaron started the It Takes a Community Foundation, after the school of their community in Worthington, Massachusetts, was closed due to budget cuts. The issue did hit Aaron and Vanessa close to home, as not only their daughters attended said school, but they also were very involved with improving their community.
Through fund-raising events and concerts, Aaron and Vanessa alongside other members of their community, opened the private R.H. Conwell Community Education Center in 2010, to save the previous school. Their foundation’s mission didn’t stop there though, as in the following years It Takes A Community kept raising funds to help rural children, and turned their neighborhood’s school public again.
Not much is known about the whereabouts of Aaron and Vanessa’s daughters these days, except that Zoe Jane is now a singer. In 2020, the family put their Worthington’s house on sale to move to Nashville, Tennessee.
Personal Struggles
Ever since rising to fame, Aaron Lewis has opened up about his struggles through his music and in rare interviews. He was born in Rutland, Vermont, where he spent his early childhood living in a cabin before his parents moved to New Hampshire. The divorce of his parents in the 1980s saw him moving to Massachusetts with his father.
In 2008, Aaron described his family as ‘dysfunctional’ as he very rarely talked with them by then. Instead, he ‘replaced’ them with his wife’s family.
As Aaron once told MTV, the lyrics of Staind’s album “Dysfunction” were about his negative experiences so far, again describing it as ‘dysfunctional’. He also reportedly had a hard time in his teens, given his sense of ‘uncomfortableness’ which led him to consume drugs. However, in a later interview in 2023, he also denied being addicted to drugs.
Controversies
Aaron Lewis has been open about his political views since the 2000s, though his commentaries haven’t been safe from criticism.
Initially, in a 2009 interview with the website IndyWeek, he compared Barack Obama’s “Change” campaign to Germany’s Third Reich. The following years saw him increasingly voicing his opinion on political matters, openly showing his support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. In late 2023, he was criticized for writing ‘Trump 24’ with dead coyotes on the floor.
Aaron’s political views have also increasingly been included in his music, such as the song “Am I the Only One”, in which he criticized ‘woke-ism’ and COVID-19 regulations in the US.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Aaron expressed his disregard for Bruce Springsteen as a ‘perfect representation of America’ due to his stance against Donald Trump. As well, he questioned the war in Ukraine and affirmed that people should ‘listen to what Vladimir Putin is saying’, attracting more criticism because of that.
Still at work. | pic.twitter.com/oowaodfWrP
— Aaron Lewis (@Aaronlewismusic) March 14, 2014
Net Worth
Aaron Lewis has an estimated net worth of $6 million, which has resulted from his career as a musician with his solo project and Staind. His fortune doesn’t come from record sales alone though, as Aaron has actively toured the US since the late 1990s, and also promotes his music merchandise on his website.
