Aaron Lane

Aaron Lane is a songwriter out of Waycross, Georgia, now living in Asheville.

He sat down for Salty's Live Music at the songwriters festival in Fernandina Beach, a town he first came to for gigs across the river and then lived in for a while before the move north. He and Brad Banyas turned out to share the same mountains, since Brad was born in Asheville with family around Brevard. Lane said Fernandina is the only place besides home where he cannot get ten feet down the street without somebody welcoming him back.

He grew up on gospel and bluegrass, going to festivals with his father, who sang in a gospel quartet that toured churches. He did not pick up a guitar until he was 17, and when he did he decided he hated country music and would never make any. What he actually came up on was everything at once: the Red Hot Chili Peppers out of his uncle's trunk at eight, Spoonman coming out of an off road racing game, then Led Zeppelin, Queen and Rush when he was working out how to sing, with his older brother telling him it was not perfect but he was right there. He writes without aiming at a sound. He also runs an Instagram account called Asheville Underground, where he films other players and posts it, no ads. What he wants off a stage is to make a room feel something, even when it turns out to be something different from what he felt writing it.

The four do not agree with each other. There is a heavy country one, a folk one, a rock and roll one, and one in a genre he made up and calls swamp blues. He was going to title the EP Which Way I Go, to find out what people would connect with and where he ought to lean. He moved to Asheville on a whim when somebody he had met was going, needing a change, and the mountain air produced a whole album. The EP is called Wayward. It came out April 20.