Explore Steamboat Marketplace

Avett Brothers defy genres

With traces of many styles, this band just wants to rock

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Courtesy Photo. Enlarge photo.

The Avett Brothers, from left, Scott Avett, Bob Crawford and Seth Avett, perform at 7 p.m. today as part of the Strings Music Festival Different Tempo Series.

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly

By Margaret Hair (Contact)

Steamboat Springs — Somewhere on the road between Jackson, Wyo., and Steamboat Springs, Bob Craw­ford is conducting the longest phone interview of all time.

Between openly sharing his thoughts about the recording process and the idea of trying to shove music into neatly titled genres, the Avett Brothers bassist is battling Rocky Mountain cell phone reception, traveling through an area of the country with which his band — a group that performs about 200 nights a year — is not very familiar.

Along with Seth and Scott Avett, Crawford has spent the past eight years touring and recording relentlessly, drumming up a dedicated base of fans who aren’t quite sure how to describe the Avetts’ take on rock music played with traditional instruments, but who love it anyway.

The band just finished 10 days of recording with industry legend Rick Rubin, following up on a move from the group’s homegrown North Carolina label, Ramseur Records, to Rubin’s Columbia imprint, American Recordings. The Avetts’ latest release, “The Second Gleam” EP, is the band’s fourth EP, ninth studio recording and 11th release since 2001. The group’s first record with Rubin as producer is due out early next year.

Tonight, The Avett Brothers bring their famously frenetic live show to the Strings Music Festival Different Tempo Series. Crawford fought a string of dropped calls to talk with the Steamboat Today about what it’s like to make the leap to a major label, how the band’s sound has developed, and why things would be so much easier if record stores categorized releases alphabetically, and not by genre.

STEAMBOAT PILOT & TODAY: How is the recording going with Rick Rubin?

BOB CRAWFORD: We put in seven days in June and 10 days in the past week and a half, and we’re on our way. It’s not finished by any stretch of the imagination, and we’ve got a lot more to go. But I still cannot in my mind imagine what the finished product is going to sound like, and that’s very exciting.

SP&T: Has it been a major difference, working on this level?

BC: It seems to be like we’ve been working up to this. It kind of feels like we’ve been taking baby steps up to it for the past few years.

SP&T: What’s it like to work with someone so big?

BC: It’s intimidating in some ways, but also comfortable, as odd as that sounds. … For me — Scott and Seth (Avett) handle it very well — but for me, it’s a little bit intimidating. He (Rubin) brings a lot with him; his reputation precedes him. He’s heard a lot of great bass players, and he’s heard a lot of great drummers, he’s been around a lot of great people. … For me I had to get in my mind that I just need to be myself.

Everybody felt a little weird at first, but then after a while you forget who he is in a way, and his personality is such that he’ll put you at ease. … He really wants, I think, the artists to be themselves, and he goes to great lengths to create an environment conducive to that.

SP&T: Is the recording process different now than it was before? How?

BC: We’ve done several recordings, going back to 2001, and really initially, it was like, play the songs (mimics a song being played very fast), OK, it’s done. … We didn’t have any experience recording, so we didn’t know what you could do in a studio. …

(The process now) It’s kind of like filmmaking — you shoot a lot. You shoot from all different angles; you kind of have a plan. You shoot a wide shot, you shoot a medium shot, you shoot a close-up, and then you edit it down.

It seems like now we’re recording a song and then we’re recording it in a different way and then we’re editing it. We’re experimenting with beginnings and endings. … This is something we’ve never done before; it’s always been a more spontaneous creation.

SP&T: How do you think that will affect the end product?

BC: I don’t know yet, because we don’t have an end product yet. But what is coming from the first step a couple months ago and then this step is that it’s still very organic, and it’s very beautiful. It’s harnessing our strengths, I feel like.

There’s a live animal and there’s a studio animal, and the two don’t meet. And the two maybe aren’t supposed to meet. They’re both heads of the same dog, you know what I mean?

SP&T: Do you see this ‘new traditionalist’ thing that’s been used as a label for the band holding on through that process?

BC: You know, people have always kind of said bluegrass or folk to us, and I’ve never, ever heard that in our music. … We’ve been a rock ’n’ roll band since we’ve started.

The people who say we’re traditionalists or bluegrass or anything like that, they’re not wrong — it’s valid, there are elements of that. But I think it’s rock ’n’ roll.

There’s like this negative connotation to the word ‘pop.’ But if you think about pop music and what’s it meant, it means the popular music of the day; it doesn’t have to mean Britney Spears. …

When I say ‘pop’ and when I say ‘rock,’ I’m not meaning that we’re going the way of the Jonas Brothers or something. I just mean that we’ve always been a rock band, and I think that’s what we are. …

It’s really hard to define something in fine detail. But the great examples of the classic rock bands, they’re all really different from each other, like rock ’n’ roll — so if you want to categorize it, I guess you could put us there.

SP&T: The genre I keep seeing on billing for your concert here is ‘acoustic punkgrass.’

BC: What?

Maybe we’re being too politically correct or something. Maybe there’s just something simple here. Really, genres are for looking for something in a record store or finding something online.

I was having this same conversation with someone a few years ago, and he said, ‘I think you should walk into a CD record store, and at one end should be A, and the other end should be B.’ Everything would be there, soundtracks and everything. It just makes it easy.

SP&T: Along those same lines, when you guys were starting out, did you meet any opposition to playing music that wasn’t what people expected, from having the banjo and all?

BC: Sure, lots of it. We were at the AMA (Americana Music Awards) conference, which is a bluegrass award (the Avetts won Best New Group in 2007). And we were heckled pretty bad; there was an almost violent opposition to what we were doing.

It wasn’t something we did, and it wasn’t really peoples’ fault — they just see a banjo and they see an upright bass and they think bluegrass. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just their minds read this one thing, and it’s not very accurate.

But I think to our benefit, the ambiguity of our genre has allowed for a lot of different people and a lot of different tastes, and has allowed a lot more people to see what we do.

— To reach Margaret Hair, call 871-4204 or e-mail mhair@steamboatpilot.com.