I’ve thought for a long time why I like Aaron Raitiere so much. It’s not because I love everything he’s released—I don’t. It’s because it is easy to see where he’s coming from, and he’s not the type of songwriter to tell a lie. There is little that’s annoyingly cryptic in any of Raitiere’s records, whether he’s earnestly fingerplucking with Julie Stein on Strange Angel or drunk as hell at 8 a.m. and making up songs on the spot on Rocks Out (it doesn’t). The beauty is that they’re not all masterpieces—some are even purposely not masterpieces—but they’re real whether Raitiere writes a beautiful song, a stupid one or doesn’t even seem like he really tried to write a song.
Raitiere joins friend/cowriter Rodney Golden on Forty Different Me’s, which is, once again for Raitiere, a great record for what it is. Both musicians are Southern-born, and what struck me as interesting is that a century ago in the South, nobody would have thought their music was extraordinary because it was everywhere. Unrecorded, but everywhere. As we all know, though some never had the means to be heard, everymen like Raitiere and Golden commonly used music as a means for figuring out how to tell a story.
Forty Different Me’s is composed of nine stories that came streaming out of their writers like the Buffalo River, which was where Raitiere and Golden nested in early March 2011 in a riverside cabin to write the record.
“By the Buffalo” opens the record on the scene appropriately at the Buffalo River; Raitiere sings a tale of a murder and riverside burial like it’s no big thing. The record has its share of weepers about inner demons, divorce and domestic abuse as well as hillbilly odes in the name of hard labor and living off the land (“Keep On,” “Hillbilly Revival”). The title track brings the record full circle in telling all the colors of its writers’ personalities, which appropriately reflect the diversity of Raitiere’s records too.
If someone was to ask who in the Nashville area can spin a decent yarn into a song, exaggerate it or keep it exactly as it happened, Aaron Raitiere would come to mind. As songwriters, Raitiere and Golden couldn’t do anything better than this because they wrote what they know. It’s simple stuff, but it’s often the simple ones that stick.
