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Roots rockers on staying 'organic' on the road to Malibu
By Jonathan Zwickel
Special to MSN Music
When you're the Avett Brothers, growing pains sound like gold, but they still hurt. "I and Love and You," the North Carolina quartet's fifth full-length, is their graduation from good-ol'-boys-next-door to Rick Rubin´s latest big-budget development project.
It's been a nine-year DIY climb for brothers Scott and Seth, bassist Bob Crawford, and newly anointed cellist Joe Kwon. Each album, previously self-produced and released on a local label, has refined their raw-throated acoustic pop and won them legions of new admirers. But the band's foremost assets -- brazen earnestness and relentless humility -- are under assail at the cusp of their major-label breakthrough.
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"You gotta be careful with ambition," says Seth Avett -- singer, guitarist, pianist, baby brother. "There's this mentality around us that says the more you can get, the better. At this point it's become an impossibility to connect on a personal level with the people that come to our shows. And that's frustrating."
Frustration and its shadow, resignation, are at the core of the Avett aesthetic. Musically, the band grapples with their instruments in punkish love/hate death match; their lyrics, penned by both Seth and Scott, are the heart-trampled yearnings of a couple hill country Romeos. "I and Love and You" is baroque compared to previous albums, injecting a piano-driven, emo-grass grandeur that emerged from the band's collaboration with Rubin, who singled out the band after hearing their 2007 breakthrough, "Emotionalism."
"He's all about letting the band flow, the way our energy is, allowing that to happen," says Scott of the producer/Columbia Records chief, with whom they recorded over two ten-day sessions in Malibu last year. "He's been very unintrusive while we were in the studio." Especially reassuring was Rubin's advice for selecting which of the recorded material would make the album. "Rick said, 'I want you to pick songs that you have a passion for. Don't worry about what song's gonna be the single or which song's gonna be most popular'," Scott recalls.
The single, and "mission statement," according to Seth, is the meditative title track ("Those three words are in our minds the most important words you can say," explains Seth). Highlights are the acoustic-Zeppelin melodicism of "Ten Thousand Words," the sugar-buzzed "Tin Man," the giddy "Kick Drum Heart," and the Grand Ole Opry-ready "Filled With Want." "I and Love and You" is more of everything Avett, offered as modestly as a career-changing opus can be.
"How we wanna present ourselves, what we wanna be a part of, is in pretty direct contrast to a lot of pop music," Seth says.
"There's an organic approach that I wanna keep," Scott adds. "The sky's the limit and I don't want that to stop, but I want to do it in our own original way."
Related: More on the band
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Seattle-based journalist Jonathan Zwickel caught up with the Avett Brothers when the band played the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco in late August, where he conducted the video interview excerpted here.
