Stain’d frontman has relaxed vibe on his solo tour

Published 12:26 pm Thursday, August 2, 2007

Aaron Lewis is a laid-back kind of guy. The Stain’d frontman can light it up on a stage with the largest and loudest of them. But on his current solo tour, it’s just Lewis, his acoustic guitar and no plan.

“I go out there with no set list, really no plan whatsoever as to what I’m going to do,” Lewis said in a recent phone interview from Grand Forks, N.D. “People tend to yell out requests and if I can play them, chances are I will. It’s really loose.”

The unconfined and intimate setting, such as the one he’ll have Sunday at The Moore Theatre in Seattle, allows Lewis to open up in a way he rarely does while playing a mix of Stain’d tunes and covers.

“I guess I allow more of myself to show through,” he said. “I’ve never been who anybody wanted me to be in the business, but at the same time, I wasn’t letting myself show through, either.

“It’s so relaxed and it’s so informal. I’m gonna (expletive) up at some point throughout the evening, and probably at more than one point. It’s just real organic, it’s like we’re just hanging out and I’m singing some songs.”

Lewis takes requests from the crowd and “if I even slightly think that I might kind of be able to play it, I’ll at least try to pull a verse and a chorus out of my (butt).”

It won’t be the first Lewis will find himself winging it while surrounded by a Seattle crowd. He has a pretty unique history in the area that involves 500-plus people in the SeaTac International Airport and a 6-by-4-foot wedding proposal. Lewis was in Bellevue, recording the first Stain’d album at Pearl Jam bassist Stone Goddard’s studio, when he went to pick his girlfriend up at the airport.

“This was while we were recording our first record, so there was no celebrity at all, nobody knew me,” Lewis said. “I had a big sign that said, ‘Vanessa, I love you. Will you marry me?’ written on it in huge letters and I was carrying this sign through the airport. By the time I got to the gate, there was a serious gathering of people waiting to see whether she was going to say yes or not.

“So she came walking out the turnstile, and saw me standing there and saw, like, hundreds of people on both sides, like in a receiving line. It was like the red carpet at an event, and there I was, on one knee in front of her. I was, like, ‘Sorry, but I carried this through the airport.’ Thank God she said yes.”

It’ll be nine years this month.

Another commitment Lewis intends to keep is the one he has with Stain’d, which is writing new material now and will head into the studio in November to begin recording its next album. “By no means do … these solo shows does mean that the band is done, in any way, shape or form,” Lewis said. “How could I do that? The three other guys that are in the band with me are three-quarters of why I’m here.”

Reporter Victor Balta: victr.a.balta@gmail.com.

Aaron Lewis of Stain’d performs Sunday in Seattle.