Rob Baird & Aaron Raitiere – Austin, TX

Aaron Raitiere is a lyricist, performer, and visual artist from Central Kentucky. He is highly sought after in the Nashville songwriting community for his unique ability to coax coherent and focused creative output from his co-writers. His debut album Single Wide Dreamer is a long-awaited dream realized by Raitiere with producers Miranda Lambert and Anderson East. Raitiere is a Grammy winner for his song “I’ll Never Love Again” performed by Lady Gaga in the movie “A Star Is Born.” He has also successfully collaborated with artists such as Anderson East, The Oak Ridge Boys, Robert Randolph, Whiskey Myers, Montgomery Gentry, Miranda Lambert, Brent Cobb, Ashley Monroe, Randy Rogers, Ashley McBryde, Lori McKenna, Shooter Jennings, Natalie Hemby, Ed Sheeran, Avicii, and many others. Paintings done by Aaron are currently hanging in businesses and homes all over the country. Raitiere graduated from Cornell University with a BA in American Studies and subsequently received an MFA in Recording Arts from MTSU.

Rob Baird was born and raised in Memphis, TN, he began his career sneaking into juke joints and landing between-set gigs at local clubs before he was old enough to drink. By his early twenties, he’d scored a Nashville publishing deal, but an insatiable desire for creative independence eventually led him to Austin, TX, where he spent the better part of the next decade grinding it out on the road, releasing six critically acclaimed studio albums on his own label and sharing dates with the likes of Jason Isbell, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Billy Joe Shaver. Along the way, he would earn praise everywhere from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal, land songs in TV shows including Yellowstone and Nashville, and rack up nearly 100 million streams across platforms.

Baird’s latest album, Burning In The Stars, is undoubtedly his finest, laying it all on the line with raw, vulnerable reflections on hope and loss, faith and resilience, heartbreak and redemption. The songs are lean and compact, cutting to the quick with surgical precision, and the performances are similarly direct, fueled by earnest, melodic arrangements that call to mind everything from Tom Petty and Bob Seger to Lucinda Williams. The result is a cinematic mix of alt-country intimacy and rock and roll ecstasy that refuses to shy away from pain in its pursuit of growth, a masterfully mature work of lyrical and sonic craftsmanship built around the promise that it’s never too late to become who we’re meant to be.