February 14, 2025 — You might think that a Valentine’s Day release titled “Paris”would, in one way or another, trade in romantic tropes — it is, after all, the City of Love — but singer and songwriter Aaron Burdett has, as usual, something beyond the predictable in mind on his latest release for Organic Records.
That distinctive flair starts with the song’s “cold open”:
I’ve got a feeling about Paris
I’ve always known I’m going to go
Like that city’s holding secrets for me I need to know
I don’t speak the language I don’t know the names
I’ve got a feeling about Paris and me, all the same
and continues through an intricately structured meditation on restlessness. And though he gets subtle, sympathetic backing from an ensemble that includes award-winning banjoist Kristin Scott Benson, Carley Arrowood (fiddle), mandolinist Tristan Scroggins (Missy Raines & Allegheny) and producer-bassist Jon Weisberger, Burdett — who balances solo work with his job as singer and guitarist for popular bluegrass-plus sextet, the Steep Canyon Rangers — keeps the focus on the song itself.
“I like shiny things, new things,” he confesses. “I always think that a new thing is going to make something different. It does, but just for a few moments, and then I’m the same, and everything around me is the same; there wasn’t any real change, I only distracted myself briefly.
“‘Paris’ is a song about yearning, and looking outside of oneself, and hoping there’s more out there in some exotic place. It might be the next town down the road or the big city two states over, or maybe even somewhere across the mountains and an ocean.
“I hear a longing in this song now, but I also hear hope. My band-mate, Barrett, said, ‘I’ve got a feeling about Paris’ a couple years ago during a sound check at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, and when I heard that, I did what I do and I wrote it down. That line grew into this tune.”
Listen to “Paris” 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.