Hey, I'm Aaron. I'm a solo acoustic singer based in Dorking, Surrey, and I've been doing this full-time for years now. Hundreds of weddings, BBC and Capital Radio appearances, over a million streams, and roughly 200 pub and venue gigs a year. But all of it started with a battered LP and a guitar I could barely hold.
This is the long version, in case you ever wondered.
1996 — the Everly Brothers and a borrowed guitar
I was a kid when I first heard the Everly Brothers. My dad had an old LP knocking around the house and one afternoon I put it on, and that was it — that was the moment. There's something about those harmonies that just gets you in the chest before your brain has caught up. I remember standing in the living room thinking I had to learn how to do that.
I borrowed a guitar from somewhere — I genuinely cannot remember whose it was — and started teaching myself chords from a book. It was awful for months. I had no idea what I was doing. But I kept showing up, kept practising, kept trying to work out how the songs I loved actually fit together.
That guitar never went back, by the way. Sorry.
2001 — the first solo gig
I played my first proper solo gig in 2001. I won't pretend I was any good at it. I was nervous, I forgot half the words to a song I'd played a hundred times in my bedroom, and I think the entire audience was three of my mates and one bloke who was clearly there for the chips.
But something happened that night that I keep coming back to. After the set, the bloke who had come for the chips walked over and said one of my songs had reminded him of his late wife. He was almost in tears. And I realised — properly realised, for the first time — that this thing I was doing wasn't really about me. It was about what was happening in the room.
That's the bit nobody tells you when you start gigging. The music is just the vehicle. The thing that actually matters is the moment.
The decade in between
I'm not going to pretend the years between then and now were a straight line. They weren't. There were stretches where I wondered if I should pack it in, weeks where the diary was empty and the doubt was loud, gigs where the room didn't care, and a couple of times when I genuinely thought about getting "a proper job". Most musicians I know have had the same wobble at some point.
But every time I came close to packing it in, something would happen that pulled me back. A bride telling me her dad had cried during the first dance because of the song I'd played. A regular at a pub gig waiting until the end of the set to tell me one of my songs had got him through a really hard year. A voice note from a stranger online saying my music had helped them. These are the moments you don't put on your CV but they're the only ones that matter.
Where I am now
I'm full-time. I gig four to six nights a week across Surrey, Berkshire, London and the rest of the south-east. I've played hundreds of weddings. I've had songs on BBC Radio and Capital Radio. I'm a patron of Anstee Bridge, a youth programme that does brilliant work for young people who need a bit of extra support. I write a weekly newsletter called The Soundcheck where I talk about gigs and life and whatever song is stuck in my head. And I share it all online, even when it's a bit messy, because I think that's where the honest version of this job actually lives.
Most of all — and I cannot say this often enough — I'm grateful to the people who keep showing up. The couples who book me for their weddings. The pubs that ask me back. The strangers who comment on a video and the regulars who become friends. Your support honestly blows me away every single week.
Every gig I play has a little piece of you in it. That's not a line — that's just true.
See you out there ❤️