Biography

Aaron Burdett’s award-winning songwriting tells stories about life as reflected through the eyes of a Western North Carolina working man. Still, it’s rare for one of his songs to be as close to the autobiographical bone as “Dirt Poor,” his latest single from Organic Records. Recorded with a lean, yet irresistibly rhythmic acoustic sound, it’s an authentic, clear-eyed but loving look at the distance between yesterday and today.

“This song is in part about my parents and our family and my experience growing up in an old summer cabin in the woods in Saluda,” says Burdett. “But it's also about their friends and the community in the aggregate. The people we hung out with were cut from the same cloth for the most part. Everyone had some version of a shack in the woods they were slowly fixing up and raising a family in. They all gardened for food and sewed clothes and baked bread and somehow made whatever they needed instead of buying. That line about ‘spent most days helping somebody out’ is how I remember it.”

“It was a simpler time,” he continues, “Or at least I think it was. That's another element of this song I hope comes across: our perception and memory of times past. The nostalgia element, if you will. When I look at a picture of our life from 1979 it seems simpler, more relaxing, happier. I'm not sure that it was, but those old photos with the rounded corners and brownish tint make me feel that way. That day was exactly like today in at least one respect though — good-hearted people are doing the best they are able with what's in front of them. Hoping ‘it's gonna get better if we all live right.’”

Echoing the refrain of his previous single, “Rockefeller” — “I’ve been getting by with what is mine” — “Dirt Poor” offers a detailed portrait of friends and neighbors who make self-sufficiency a community, rather than individual virtue, all summed up in a resolute “we were dream rich/but we were dirt poor” chorus that rings no less true for being immediately memorable.