Aaron Raitiere is a lyricist, performer, and visual artist from Danville, Kentucky

He shared a 2019 Grammy for co-writing “I’ll Never Love Again” with Lady Gaga, Hillary Lindsay, and Natalie Hemby for A Star Is Born. (He co-wrote it in about 30 minutes on his first-ever trip to Los Angeles.) He’s also placed cuts with Miranda Lambert, Ashley McBryde, Lori McKenna, the Oak Ridge Boys, Lone Bellow, Randy Rogers Band, Chris Shiflett, Midland, Brent Cobb, Shooter Jennings and more.

Raitiere’s debut single “Everybody Else ‘’ is produced by his college friend and longtime collaborator, Anderson East. Co-written with Grammy-winning writer/producer Femke Weidema, a listener can gather that Raitiere is going to have the most fun he possibly can in the meantime (“You can find me with everybody else / I don’t like bein’ all by myself / I won’t be lonely when I go to hell / You can find me with everybody else”).

“These are stories about me. It’s all true,” he says. “It sounds a little different, and I’m shooting more for the storyteller thing than the singer thing, because that’s more what I am.”

Raitiere and East first met in a songwriting class at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro about 15 years ago, and East held firm to his promise to record him someday. When East was discovered by esteemed producer Dave Cobb at a writer’s night in Nashville, Raitiere was enlisted to co-write some new material for East’s next album. Consistently satisfied with the results, Cobb then signed Raitiere, who was 30 at the time, to his first publishing deal.

An avid reader, Raitiere names Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Delia Owens as among his favorite authors, while musically he cites artists ranging from Raffi to Dave Van Ronk to Too $hort. Among his greatest influences is Shel Silverstein, a master of wordplay and storytelling who established himself as a Nashville songwriter, author, and visual artist. A talented illustrator himself, Raitiere often posts his original sketches to Instagram and hopes to mount an exhibit in Nashville sometime in the future.

“I’ve never been great at anything but I’ve always been pretty good at everything, I think,” he says. “I’m lucky as hell, too. Once you have some luck in anything, then you start taking it a little more seriously.”