AVETT BROTHERS TALKS ABOUT THEIR NEW RELEASE “CLOSER THAN TOGETHER”

Most bands make an album, then head out on tour, bringing the new songs to the fans along with their old favorites.

Not the Avett Brothers — America’s finest roots music band — who didn’t release “Closer Than Together” until Oct. 4 – well after the start of a current tour that runs well into November.

And while the North Carolina band has released five songs since October 2018, only “High Steppin” a galloping country number underlain with synth that came out in June is on the new record.

That said, the new songs paint a near perfect picture of the Avett Brothers musical approach.

There’s a harmony-drenched folk ballad, “Roses and Sacrifice,” a swinging ‘60s poppish number “Trouble Letting Go” and the gentle country rocking “Neopolitan Sky” — evidence that the band led by guitarist/singer Seth Avett and his older brother, banjoist/singer Scott, are again working their distinctive amalgamation of country, bluegrass, punk, folk and rock ‘n’ roll.

“Genre-wise, we didn’t give a lot of consideration to a push,” Seth Avett said of the new songs, including those for the new album. “I hear those first four songs and they’re all from the same place. Definitely, part of it (is) like that. I can’t really speak of it with a lot of certainty. It is an accurate portrait of where we are at this particular moment, which is what I most want out of a record of ours.”

That has been the case since Scott and Seth began playing acoustic shows at night while working in a band called Nemo. When Nemo broke up in 2001, bassist Bob Crawford joined the duo and the Avett Brothers was born.

The Avett Brothers had their mainstream coming out in 2009 with “I and Love and You,” their critically lauded major label debut. They first hit the top 10 with 2012’s “The Carpenter” and have now released nine studio records along with four live recordings that capture the band as it should be heard.

The Avett Brothers will be working some new songs into their set this fall. An early show on the tour saw two new numbers, with more likely to be added as the tour rolls on.

“We’re going to start peppering in some of the new ones,” Avett said. “It’s really necessary for me to start doing them on the road, in the live show. It’s not right if a record comes out and we haven’t experienced them live.

“The studio and the road are very different places,” he elaborated. “In the studio, you work on this will all the care and love and then you step away from it. The farther we get from that, the more the record becomes a specific event. In the process of showing it to the world, we need to step back into it and experience the songs again live.”

The new album is the band’s follow-up to 2016’s Rick Rubin-produced “True Sadness,” criticized by some for being too “experimental” (they dared to use synthesizers then, too). But it became the first Avett Brothers album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and garnered a pair of Grammy Award nominations.

The making of that album and the lives of the band members when it was being recorded three years ago were captured in “May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers,” an acclaimed HBO documentary by directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio that debuted at South By Southwest in 2017.

So what was it like, seeing yourself on the screen like that, presented for real, not playing a character?

“It is a little weird,” Avett said. “Filming it was definitely a little surreal and, watching it, we’re not used to seeing ourselves. We don’t really see what we look like, our body language, whatever, when we’re having this intimate conversation…In the end, it was very beautiful and for the rest of our lives, it’ll be stepping into that chapter of our lives exactly how it was, which is unnatural in a way.”

The Avetts are now working in yet another art form — the musical. “Swept Away,” which is slated to premiere in June 2020 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California. It uses music from the band’s catalog, particularly songs from 2004’s “Mignonette,” as the framework for a story, set in 1888 of a shipwrecked crew, including two brothers, struggling to survive on the Massachusetts coast.

“I never had the vaguest idea that could possibly happen,” Avett said. “The thing is going to be incredible, it really is. John Logan, the fellow who wrote the thing, used our music as the engine, the thing that powers the story. He painted a piece with our palette. We got together with him after the first draft and have been checking in and making suggestions. It’s really a beautiful thing. It’s going to be very interesting. For me, seeing the songs used this way has created new meaning.”

The changing meaning is revelation for Avett in part because the brothers’ songs are largely autobiographical, singing about their lives and those of their bandmates, be it good, or tragic.

“That was not exactly by design,” Avett said of that aspect of the songs. “Early on, we realized in terms of, I don’t know, fuel, what we need to do them, in order to sing a song over and over and over again, it had to be autobiographical in some way. If you look at artists, entertainers who don’t have any skin in the game, they run out of gas early, which I understand.”

So has becoming popular made it harder or easier to write and share the personal songs?

“The growing popularity of the band made me self conscious of how I live my life,” Avett said. “I’m not going to create a Twitter account. I’m not going on Facebook. I’m not going to share pictures of my son.

 “Actually, it’s made it easier to share the personal things because of the connections we’ve made — that we’re all one family, we’re all part of a big community has been laid out in front of us,” he said. “You can’t take that in and be more guarded. Like my divorce, that I wrote about, I’m one of many that share an experience like that and there are probably some that want to talk about it. So I write about it.”

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