Aaron West & the Roaring Twenties

Aaron West & the Roaring Twenties is a folk rock project created by Dan Campbell, frontman of The Wonder Years, in which he adopts the persona of a fictional character named Aaron West to tell a continuous story of grief, divorce, and loss across multiple releases. The debut album, We Don’t Have Each Other, arrived in July 2014, following Aaron through the collapse of his marriage and the death of his father, and was praised for its raw, narrative songwriting rooted in Americana and folk-punk traditions.

The story continued with the Bittersweet EP in 2016 and the single «Orchard Park» in 2017, before the second full-length album, Routine Maintenance, was released in May 2019, moving the character’s arc toward a fragile sense of healing. The project stands apart from Campbell’s work with The Wonder Years through its acoustic-driven, storytelling approach, closer to singer-songwriter and alt-country traditions than pop punk.

Aaron West & the Roaring Twenties have also released covers of The Mountain Goats’ «Going to Georgia» and The Weakerthans’ «My Favourite Chords», nodding to influences in confessional, narrative-driven songwriting. The project is notable for treating its albums as chapters of a single ongoing character study rather than standalone song collections.