Cover Story: The Darkness Within

And then, just a few months ago, Lewis says, a boy in Peoria, Illinois, felt that Lewis' words so perfectly summed up his misery that he hanged himself as a tape of his voice singing Staind's "Outside" ran on a continuous loop. "It's a heavy weight on my shoulders," Lewis says. "It's strange to be put on a pedestal."

However reluctantly, Staind - Lewis, Mushok, Wysocki and bassist Johnny April - have landed prime pedestal real estate among disaffected teens, for whom the band's melancholy hard rock says all the things they're aching to hear. Lewis' songs draw from a traumatic childhood during which he felt ignored by his parents and alienated from his peers, and the lyrics often convey feelings of self-loathing and deep loneliness. "If you want to call our music dark, that's fine," Lewis says. "I'm calling it reality-based. I'm not making anything darker than it is already." He sees his songs as mutual therapy for the fans and for himself. His lyrics tell kids that they're not the only ones who feel like losers: "It's been a while since I could hold my head up high" (from "It's Been Awhile"); "I'm on the outside, I'm looking in" (from "Outside"). "Saying what I feel is true and talking about it," he says, "that's the only difference between me and them."

Except for an eight-week hiatus last fall to record Break the Cycle, Lewis and his band mates have spent the past two years on the road. Outings with Limp Bizkit, Korn, Kid Rock and Godsmack have helped them slowly push sales of the two-year-old Dysfunction to more than 1 million. And in the weeks before Break the Cycle was released, the band had not one but two songs in the Top Forty: a live, acoustic version of "Outside," from the Family Values Tour 1999 album (a duet with Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst), and a new single, "It's Been Awhile." Within two weeks of its release, Break the Cycle had also gone platinum.

Staind got their first break in 1998 when Durst signed the band to his Flip Records. That association has linked the group with "new metal," though Break the Cycle's sound is neither particularly new nor metal. The band doesn't rap, and though Mushok has adopted new-metal's minor-key guitar riffs, Lewis' dramatic voice and the anthemic quality of such songs as "Open Your Eyes" and "Fade" are more akin to Alice in Chains than to Korn. Aggressive yet reflective, Break the Cycle doesn't require a poisonous abundance of testosterone to be appreciated and is better suited to solitary listening than to the mosh pit. It's this vulnerable, contemplative mood that gives the band's live show its power. In Columbus, Staind perform in front of a simple white backdrop, illuminated by purple and green lights. Though Mushok, April and Wysocki do their share of thrashing around, Lewis trudges back and forth on the stage at an almost glacial pace. He keeps his head down, his eyes half-shut and one arm folded across his stomach, his body language communicating anguish. Between songs, he rarely speaks. "The way I look at it," he says, "I say every possible thing I could want or need to say in the songs."

Strange but true: Aaron Lewis enjoys fishing and hunting. "If there was no hunting season, deer would overpopulate and starve," he opines. "It would just cause a collapse of the ecosystem." Lewis, who first went hunting with his father and grandfather in Vermont when he was seven, says he has never killed anything he didn't eat. Smiling slyly, he declares, "Like Ted [Nugent] says, 'If you're gonna kill it, grill it.'" Lewis owns an assortment of rifles - more than ten, between him and his dad - and he's a member of the National Rifle Association. "I don't think the key to wiping out inner-city violence is to ban guns," he says, taking an uncharacteristically authoritative tone. "Criminals are always gonna be able to get guns; it's gonna be the law-abiding citizens who can't. That's the most ass-backward way to fix a problem I've ever heard." In his lyrics, Lewis bares his soul with unmitigated honesty, calling himself "ugly," "pathetic" and "fucked up." But when a conversation turns personal, he keeps his guard up. "All the things that I've talked about in our songs are very personal and real," he says. "It helps just to actually have people listen."

The singer was born in Springfield, Vermont, to hippie parents, Ted and Sondra. Their house, a log cabin whose front yard was littered with pot plants, sat on the side of a mountain adjacent to a dirt road too precarious to drive on during winter months. "They would have to drag me and the groceries up the hill on a sled," Lewis recalls. "And then we would sled down to the Volkswagen bus when it was time to leave." When he was very young, Lewis' parents played in a folk band, and he quickly became a fan of artists such as James Taylor, Harry Chapin, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.