STAIND's AARON LEWIS Awarded PANDORA Billionaires Plaque

STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis was awarded with Pandora's coveted Billionaires Plaque on August 2, during a sold-out tour stop in Pelham, Tennessee at The Caverns.

On Aaron's tour bus, Lewis's publicist surprised him with the plaque, recognizing over one billion Pandora streams for the country rocker. His music will now be played on Pandora's Country Billionaires station.

Lewis's 2024 "American Patriot" tour marches onward with more than 30 dates scheduled throughout the remainder of the year. He also continues to perform regularly with STAIND as the band's longtime frontman.

Aaron's latest solo album, "The Hill", debuted at No. 175 on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 8,133 equivalent units, a combination of pure album sales and on-demand streams. It marked the lowest-charting record on the Billboard 200 of Lewis's solo career so far.

Notably, "The Hill" had 6,826 pure album sales in its first week, enough to land the LP at No. 5 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart, which ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales.

According to Forbes, Lewis previously reached the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 twice as a solo artist, with his "Town Line" EP, which reached No. 7 in 2011, and with "Sinner", which peaked at No. 4 in 2016. He also landed in the Top 40 of the Billboard 200 with "The Road" (No. 30 peak),"State I'm In" (No. 19) and "Frayed At Both Ends" (No. 39).

One of the songs on "The Hill" is "Made In China" — written by Lewis and Bobby Pinson — which offers the loud-and-proud declaration that some things are still made in the USA. The song features such lyrics as "I ain't made in China / From all the cheapest parts / I ain't one for driving them imported foreign cars / I'm more like American muscle from 1966 / I ain't made in China / I'm American as it gets / I ain't made by Uyghur kids for pennies on the dollar / I'm made in the USA / It says so on my collar / Tried and true, red, white and blue / My roots run way too thick / yeah, I ain't made in China / 'Cause I'm American as it gets."

"The best songs come from a place of authenticity," explained Lewis. "This one started as a conversation with friends as we picked up items around the room with 'Made In China' stamped on the bottom. And we put pen to paper."

The "Let's Go Fishing" lyrics find the 52-year-old Lewis — an outspoken conservative rocker who reinvented himself as a solo country artist in the last decade — singing about "making America great again", "turning off CNN" and using the "Let's Go, Brandon!" catchphrase, which was coined by American conservatives to criticize President Joe Biden.

Lewis made headlines in September 2021 when he urged his fans to chant "Fuck Joe Biden" during a STAIND concert in Pennsylvania.

In March 2022, Lewis told the Los Angeles Times that he doesn't blindly listen to information that is delivered by the mainstream media.

"I'm not uneducated; I'm actually really smart, and I look for myself. I seek other options of information," he said. "I refuse to believe that a huge, gigantic corporation has our best interest in mind."

Asked where he gets his news, Lewis said: "I have news feeds and people that I follow on Telegram. Dan Ball. Andrew Wilkow. Mark Levin. If I'm gonna watch any sort of news source on television, it's Tucker Carlson."

At some of his solo concerts, Lewis has been taking the stage while wearing a black hat with white mesh and white lettering on the front clearly stating "FUJOE," an expletive directed toward Biden.

Photo courtesy of Absolute Publicity