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It’s 7:00 p.m. in Thousand Oaks, Calif.—69 degrees, with a slight breeze rolling in from the southwest. The sun is leaning toward the horizon, casting final warm rays on a suburban Southern California home. Inside, the father watches Fox News on the living-room television, the mother has left to get groceries, and two platinum-locked and beach-bronzed daughters laugh as they make margaritas and homemade guacamole in the kitchen. The backyard palm trees sway in the breeze, as do their reflections in the solar-heated swimming pool. Looking into this ranch-style home—it’s all windows; an airy, suburban aquarium—the world seems balanced. But for genre-hopping, blue-eyed soulster Aaron Bruno—aka AWOLNATION—this seemingly perfect world wasn’t exactly paradise. “I crashed here for a year. It was a really tough time in my life,” he says, slouching in a patio chair (this suburban idyll is actually his girlfriend Tara’s family home). “I was embarrassed, thinking of the success I had, and I had no place of my own. I hit rock bottom.”

Bruno’s success and turmoil came in the early 2000s, before his recent (re-)debut, “Megalithic Symphony,” cracked the top 10

on Billboard’s alternative charts, and before sold-out shows in the states and abroad. Back then, he was fronting the band Home Town Hero with his high school friends from nearby Westlake Village, Calif. The grungy rockers caught the final crest of the big music-industry wave, and were signed by Madonna’s label Maverick, which was distributed by Warner Bros. Records.

After the band was dropped before releasing their second album—because Bruno didn’t want Limp Bizkit’s frontman Fred Durst directing their video—they re-formed as Under the Influence of Giants. Picked up by Island Records, the pop-rock outfit’s self-titled debut earned some commercial success, only to have the band fall apart a little later.

“We always had glimmers of hope with those bands, but never hit any tipping point,” he says. “It’s that game so many bands play and get their hearts ripped out.”

With memories of arena tours and sold-out venues, Bruno was back in Thousand Oaks, where gas stations close at 10 p.m., a Lutheran university is the town’s social epicenter, and plastic cups stuck in a chain-linked fence over the freeway spell out “WHY?”

Why, indeed. It was out of this moment of listlessness that Bruno began dreaming up his solo project, AWOLNATION. “I had

it takes anation

Sometimes, it takes more than once to get something right. Aaron Bruno’s had three tries

in the fickle music industry before finally feeling like he’s arrived with AWOLNATION.

Words: Drew Tewksbury Photography: Brigitte Sire

Aaron Bruno at Huntington Beach,

Los Angeles, summer 2011.

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SXSW show at the venerable Stubb’s venue, and a supporting slot with MGMT. When he came to record “Megalithic Symphony” earlier this year, Bruno steered AWOLNATION himself, playing almost all of the instruments and embracing a jaggedness that brings color to the album’s digital side. “There is a human element to it, a little jankiness to it,” he says. “Some of the vocals aren’t totally in tune. Obviously, I didn’t [auto]tune any of it too—actually, maybe that’s not obvious these days—because I wanted to leave them flat or sharp because they had emotion.”

When the sun has set over Thousand Oaks and the margarita glasses are empty, Bruno gets ready to head to his own apartment around the corner. But he hesitates, then gets serious. He knows AWOLNATION is his third chance to make it, and after a summer of incessant touring behind him and international shows in the near future, this momentum can’t be squandered. AWOLNATION will continue their first headline tour throughout the U.S. in the fall, play a few shows in the U.K., and even deliver their first performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in September.

“You can sell your soul to the devil, you know?” says Bruno. “I really believe that. I want to do it right this time. This is the path that I’ve been on since I was a little kid. It has all led up to this.”News, video clips, and tour dates at www.redbullrecords.com

my heart broken by music,” he says. “I had two huge shots, and not many people even get one.” He thought back to his high school days and his nickname AWOL—earned from his uncanny ability to wander off course—and so, AWOLNATION was born. “It was time to cause a ruckus and do it on my own,” he explains.

Bruno began to cull together pieces of songs he wrote that just wouldn’t fit in with his other bands. He took glitch-hop beats, electro-disco bass grooves, and pop-y piano hooks, and tied it all up with his hallucinating bluesman’s voice. After years of struggling with identity, AWOLNATION brought Bruno’s scattered sounds and ideas into focus. “Blame it on my A.D.D., baby,” he sings on “Sail,” AWOLNATION’s woozy, fuzzed-out single from “Megalithic Symphony,” which reveals Bruno’s multi-angled approach to songwriting. He wields musical hooks like a warrior, and isn’t afraid to take a trip to the pop side.

“Some of these ideas I’ve had forever, that I didn’t have the courage to pull off before,” he says. “ ‘All I Need’ was a song I wrote in the last band, but didn’t think it was right. It’s the most straight-ahead pop song—I think that most moms would like it.” Although most of “Megalithic Symphony” is “heavy, dirty, and pop-y,” as Bruno describes it, there is an undeniable accessibility—indeed, a mom-worthiness—to the album.

His first experiments with AWOLNATION were recorded with Venice, Calif.-based producer Jimmy Messer, who has worked with “American Idol” winner Kelly Clarkson. Bruno says he felt weird mentioning that he was working with an “Idol” maker, but he respected Messer’s band Goudie, a cult favorite.

With those first couple AWOLNATION songs compiled into the “Back From Earth” EP, Bruno’s reinvention began to take hold, earning him an opening spot for Weezer in Brooklyn, a sweet

“i had two huge shots, and not many people even get one.”

AN EP FOR FREEAhead of his chart-charging debut, AWOLNATION released the EP “Back from Earth.” Previously only downloadable for a short time on radio station Web sites, the EP is now available exclusively to Red Bulletin readers. Head to www.redbullrecords.com/redbulletin to get your free download—don’t say we never gave you anything.