A Bittersweet Year for The Avett Brothers

GREENSBORO — Scott Avett sits with his cat on the back porch of his home in Concord surrounded by the calm of the woods and a cow pasture. On this dank, winter morning, this poet, artist, musician and songwriter describes the weather as “sitting still.” It’s the perfect setting for Scott to reflect on the past year and ponder the year to come.

Scott is the elder brother to Seth Avett, who bonded together in 2000 with bassist Bob Crawford to form the now famous band, The Avett Brothers.

With a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album for their latest release, “The Carpenter,” a modeling stint with The Gap, numerous television appearances and articles in magazines, such as “Rolling Stone,” it would appear that 2011 has been more than kind to The Avett Brothers.

But the year has also been bittersweet as the band has huddled together to support Crawford’s daughter, Hallie, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2011.

As a closely-knit band, Scott says one of greatest challenges they dealt with last year was not having Crawford on tour when he took time off to be with his family.

“Overcoming that was something we really just had to have all hands on deck, although we had Paul Defiglia come along and help as we tried to stick together as a band. But, you know, one of the challenges artistically and as a group was to try to remind ourselves what this is all about and how enjoyable it can be if you let it.”

Despite public accolades for their accomplishments as a band, Scott says the favorite moments of the year were memories made with close friends and family.

“A lot of publicity is nice, and it’s icing on the cake, and boy, we sure are honored because everybody wants to feel loved and wanted, but the best moments have been with friends and family and times like yesterday, which was a recovering day for Hallie.”

When asked if Scott could sum up the year with just one word, his first response was “educational,” in terms of the challenges that forced the band to grow.

Then Scott added the word, “gratitude,” for the ability to perform on stage. And finally, he settled on the word to best describe 2011.

“The thankfulness word,” he says. “How do we say we are thankful? We were taught so much last year, how lucky we are to be on stage and how humbled we are. The word has to be “gift.” Last year the lessons we learned were a gift.”

The band has been on a break from the road just long enough to crave the stage and to re-evaluate how they will approach their dynamics and music in the year to come. They’ve parted ways with drummer Jacob Edwards whom Scott refers to as “an amazing drummer, musician, and terrific fellow to be on stage with,” and have spent more time rehearsing than they usually do when on the road. Their main focus for 2013 is to “put everything aside in terms of what we are releasing and the events that are happening. We think about how we live and how we express ourselves through our performance and how is that going to change,” Scott says, adding that the band intends to release some music in 2013 as well as do some recording. He reminisces about the band’s humble beginnings, playing at Greensboro’s The Green Bean in 2004, and says he’s looking forward to playing at The Greensboro Coliseum New Year’s Eve.

“Greensboro has been so supportive from the beginning,” Scott says. “We’ve played lots of shows in Greensboro, and I haven’t forgotten a one. They’ve all been pretty special, and I expect the New Year’s show to be just the same, only better.”

Contact Carole Perkins at cpguilford@aol.com

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Scott Avett in his own words

On songwriting:

I certainly compose in my mind in a visual, compositional way. I sort of look at a song as a room. … There’s this one little room where I live for the moment in this teeny, tiny room and that’s kind of how I see it, and in between it mentally I’ve developed an endless source of metaphors or a way that I can play on that, and I think I do that a lot. I guess it’s pretty organic. I just hope it’s different every time. I’ve got a stack I’m embarrassed to say, I mean literally there are thousands of words of unfinished lines, songs verses and choruses that I really can’t finish all of them, and then one day they just move. Like a lot of things, I’m just trying to answer a question I have no answer for.

On success:

I always thought we worked hard from the beginning to keep our mindset where we define success and it’s that success that carried us. So, I guess what I’m saying is to get a magazine or a nomination or our picture in this or that it’s great, but if we don’t get it, it absolutely means nothing, and it never did mean anything, and you have to remember that. It’s only good if you get it; if you don’t get it, it’s doubly fine as well.

On Greensboro:

People cared so much for us and for music and art in general. … It is like a homecoming. Also, my folks met at UNCG while they were there together, so there’s a lot of history in Greensboro for us. Playing any coliseum for us is spectacular and amazing watching the growth over time.

On balancing music and family:

I think that work is the most important regulator in terms of keeping us in touch with our spirits and with God and with the world. I think that I can have a lot of anxiety, and putting myself in a task - be it splitting wood, cleaning a room, working on artwork, or building a chicken house - then I find my anxiety truly just goes to the side. I’m not putting family aside, but I think being busy is crucial to your well-being and health, so there’s no end to what can be done when you connect yourself with that, and involving the family only tightens the bond between my children and me. If my daughter wakes up and I’m going to the studio to draw or to paint or print, if I can have her watching that, she can be taught just by watching what the discipline is. For me, incorporating the family as much as possible is crucial and I hope to incorporate that more in the future with music as well as traveling with them.

The dangerous thing for us that we’ve really had to work on in terms of the work ethic and productivity is that when it goes into the realm of ambition and success there’s such a fine line between when it turns into something very disgusting. It’s very dangerous to the people around you because it can become all self-consuming. That is a line I try very hard to stay away from and that I used to indulge in.

-- As told to Carole Perkins