Country music singer Aaron Pritchett has had quite the year, from having an item checked off his bucket list to reaching a musical milestone.
The Dirt Road in Em singer, although having not performed in Sidney, is very familiar with the west coast.
Pritchett is originally from Vancouver and was raised up north in Kitimat. He now lives on Gabriola Island.
Having passed through Sidney many times, he’s excited to perform here.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s two people or 20,000 people, it’s all the same to me,” he told the PNR in a phone interview.
When asked what the audience can expect from his performance, Pritchett had a different answer than most.
“Well it’s pretty boring. It starts off really boring and then gets more boring,” he said with a laugh.
But we all know that’s not true.
“Kidding. It starts off pretty big, we try and start it with a bang and end it off with an explosion.”
Pritchett said he’s always used his voice growing up but didn’t know anybody actually wanted to hear him.
“There’s a lot of people that probably still don’t,” he said.
He started singing when he was younger, singing along to songs and always appreciating music.
“I kind of got into it in the early ‘90s, started listening to country but I’d listened to pretty much everything but country was the thing that I gravitated towards mostly …”
He later went into talent searches, winning them, and later got a band together, eventually making a name for himself — in the Vancouver area especially.
It was in the early 2000s where he won another talent search and it exploded from there.
“I didn’t stop the momentum, I kept it going and most people, when they enter talent searches, they think that everybody else is going to do everything for them, and that wasn’t my thought process.”
“It was more of ‘well I gotta take this and run with it,’ so I did.”
And here he is in 2016, having another resurgence in his career and he said he’s enjoying every minute of it.
His most recent album, The Score, came about through a discussion with his girlfriend.
They then realized that ‘a Score’ refers to a 20-year period.
That quote resonated with Pritchett as it’s been 20 years since he released a single to radio and an album to the public.
“It was directly meant to represent the fact that it’s been 20 years that I’ve been in the industry. And I’m very proud of this record from start to finish.”
Every single song on it to me is releasable in my mind,” he said with a laugh.
Even though he only wrote two of the songs on the album, inspiration still comes into play when he chooses songs even that he didn’t write.
“They have to represent me and they have to represent what I think the fans would like to hear first and foremost… and secondly what I think radio would be happy to hear so that they could play it for those fans and introduce the songs to them.”
Sitting down listening to the songs, he said he needs to think ‘can I sing this song? Can I perform it? Can I record it and make it believable that I’m singing this story that somebody else wrote?’
When asked what one of his biggest memories of his musical career is, he said it happened this year on June 9 and 12 in Saskatoon when he opened two shows for country legend, Garth Brooks.
“It was just an unbelievable experience. The guy is an amazing guy …” he said, adding that it was great to be a part of the show and to be backstage to see how his hero made everything work.
Pritchett said Brooks was his hero in country music as he listened to him before he was even a singer.
“So for me to get the invite personally from Garth himself to come and open up a couple of shows was just an incredible thing for me. It was definitely the top of the bucket list checklist.”
Pritchett will continue touring all summer along with attending the Canadian Country Music Awards in London this September.