(October 25, 2024) — “You might say ‘Second Best’ was a song 30 years in the making,” says Aaron Burdett of his new single for Organic Records — and the first since 2022’s “Denver Plane” was released, just after he joined the award-winning Steep Canyon Rangers. Listeners with good memories will recall that the Rangerswere name-checked in the good-humored song, recorded scant months before he was offered the gig, but after the life-imitates-art moment, Burdett set his solo work on the back burner and devoted the next two years to finding his place in the high-powered sextet.
Still, the singer/songwriter/guitarist had no intention of wholly subsuming his distinctive creative voice in the Rangers’ equally unique approach to their sound. When the opportunity came early in 2024 to participate in Mountain Home Music Company’s Bluegrass Sings Paxton, a multi-artist tribute to the Lifetime GRAMMY-winning songwriter, Tom Paxton, Burdett seized it with a compelling take on “The Same River Twice,” and just a few months later, returned to the studio with a fresh batch of songs. Producer and bassist Jon Weisberger assembled a group of backing musicians that included Mountain Home’s award-winning Kristin Scott Benson on banjo and Carley Arrowood on fiddle; ace mandolinist Tristan Scroggins (Missy Raines & Alleghany); and harmony vocalists Wendy Hickmanand Travis Book (Infamous Stringdusters), and in short order, the team had knocked out a clutch of well-crafted originals.
“Second Best,” the first fruits of that effort, reminds listeners of Burdett’s way with words from the moment he launches into its first line. “I took the fifth,” it begins, and there’s a long pause before he delivers the rest: “she took the furniture.” From there, the story unreels in a characteristically literate yet down-to-earth manner, as its narrator wryly contemplates a long-time marriage’s break-up and his uncertain future. After a bridge that fills in the relationship’s back story and recontextualizes the song’s irresistibly catchy chorus, Benson and Scroggins dive into energetically rhythmic solos before the singer returns to take the song to its gloomy yet resigned conclusion:
She’s busted out gonna get what she wanted all along
You can get what’s second best,
You can get what’s second best,
You can get what’s second best
But it’s hard to get enough
“I’ve had this line from an old David Wilcox song rattling around in my head since the 90’s,” recalls Burdett. “It always struck me as a phrase that could be interpreted in many different ways. So I eventually started playing with that idea and bouncing it off various scenes and situations. And a year or so ago I landed on the one (or two) that ended up in the recording, along with the original Wilcox line that inspired the chorus. Some songs arrive quickly, and some arrive much more slowly!”
Listen to “Second Best” 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.