Arden, North Carolina (November 1, 2022) — Organic Records recently congratulated Aaron Burdett on the radio success of his single, “The Mountains You Carry,” which has topped Bluegrass Today’s weekly Grassicana chart three times and been in the top 15 of the chart for 15 total weeks since its release. The single has also been in the top 20 of the Bluegrass chart three times.
“It’s really encouraging to see ‘The Mountains You Carry’ at the top of the chart!” says Burdett.
“Thanks to all the DJs for playing it and the fans for listening and requesting it — it helps me keep going to have these little ego boosts now and then!”
Weighing in at a tightly-constructed three minutes, with Burdett’s gritty vocal intertwined with deft banjo and mandolin picking, “The Mountains You Carry” is emblematic of his winning combination of a powerfully distinctive voice, down-home bluegrass flavors and thoughtful, sophisticated songwriting.
“‘The Mountains You Carry’ grew out of a Najwa Zebian quote I stumbled across a couple of years back that I wrote down and kept thinking about,” Burdett recalls. “I believe the original version I read was ‘These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.’”
“I think that often our greatest personal assets can also be our greatest liabilities when played out to extremes. And I think as adults we’re often really only children grown larger and we have many of the same feelings and emotions that we did when we were children. I’ve noticed that when I’m angry or agitated it’s almost never the actual thing in front of me today, it’s me reacting to the thing as I would have as a little kid, and bringing my own 40 years of baggage to the situation.
“Those old feelings get dredged up and set in front of me, like lessons I need to re-learn again and again. These are the ‘mountains’ I carry with me and likely always will. Do I choose to learn from them when they pop up? Not always. But sometimes I can remember that while I’m still the same person, I’m not quite the same kid I was back then. I can do better than I could then. I can take a painful lesson from the past and make my day better today when I’m reminded of it, reminded of the difference between then and now. I can be kind to myself and let it go and move forward without letting that old baggage weigh me down quite as much.
“And I see this in others too, I’m not only speaking about myself. I think we all do this to one degree or another, as ‘grown-up kids’. Maybe this song will remind someone to lighten up and give themselves some grace when they listen to it. Like it says in the first verse: ‘You’re too hard on yourself, you can let it roll by!’”
Listen to “The Mountains You Carry” HERE.
About Aaron Burdett
Aaron Burdett’s lyrics are soul-touching, intelligent, witty, and poetic all at once, while his music style is a seamless blend of Americana, country, blues, bluegrass, and folk.
Aaron is listed as one of the Top 10 most important musicians of western North Carolina by WNC Magazine, alongside such greats as Doc Watson, Steep Canyon Rangers, and The Avett Brothers. He has also received critical acclaim as a songwriter, most recently winning the Chris Austin Songwriting contest at MerleFest for the bluegrass category for his song Rockefeller. His latest album “Dream Rich, Dirt Poor” (2021) debuted at #8 on the Billboard bluegrass charts and has had 4 top 10 radio songs to date.
Burdett took home the grand prize in the folk category of the USA Songwriting Contest with “A Couple Broken Windows” in 2018 and was also the winner of Our State Magazine’s Carolina Songs Competition in 2012 with “Going Home to Carolina.” Aaron’s song “Magpie” won third place bluegrass song in Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at Merlefest in 2013. Over the years Aaron has been a finalist in numerous other songwriting competitions, including The Mountain Stage Songwriting Contest, The NC Songwriter’s Cooperative Songwriting Contest, and the Hank Williams Songwriting Contest.
As a child, Aaron discovered John Hiatt, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, The Band, and Rickie Lee Jones on vinyl records in his parents’ living room in the mountains of North Carolina. As a budding guitarist and songwriter, he was drawn to powerful communicators of the time like David Wilcox and Tracy Chapman and John Gorka. In his late teens, he discovered John Prine on a cassette tape dug out of a workshop drawer filled with rusty sixteen penny nails on a Wyoming ranch. He re-discovered the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on that same trip in a second-hand store in Riverton, Wyoming
In his 20s he was introduced to Doc Watson when he heard him play in the living room of an old farmhouse near Boone, North Carolina. That experience led him to Norman Blake, Tony Rice, David Grier, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, and Gillian Welch.
Mix all those influences up, add time and pressure, seven full-album releases, thousands of live performances, and you get Aaron Burdett, the songwriter and artist you hear today.
Drawing heavily on both the traditions of Appalachian folk music as well as nationally known songwriters, Aaron’s music gives voice to the small rural areas of the Blue Ridge Mountains while also speaking to the working men and women throughout the country.