The Twangs All Here

There’s quite a buzz around North Carolina folk rockers The Avett Brothers, whose Rick Rubin-produced major label debut, I And Love And You, was a US top twenty hit on its release last September. The band also recently embarked on a European tour that was notable for the number of sold-out dates, and indeed there is not a ticket to be got for their show in Dublin’s Crawdaddy, where Hot Press catches up with the band a few hours before their performance.

I start by asking how the band hooked up with the legendary Rubin.
“We were contacted through an A&R at Columbia,” explains Seth Avett, one half of the sibling duo who give the group their name. “She said that Rick would like to meet with us about possibly working together. So he invited us to his house in California, and we were received warmly. Rick was quick to respect us by making sure we were all on the same playing field. It made Columbia much more attractive to us because we knew we were going to learn.”
How was he to work with?
“He made sure that we never said 'no' to an idea without trying it,” replies Seth. “Also, he treats each band differently – he adapts.”
“There is no Rick Rubin factory,” adds Seth’s brother, Scott. “That was big to us, because we didn’t want to feel like we were being run through an already built system. It helped us that he has the reputation that he does, because we felt it would be a good exercise for us to give up some control, and it would be difficult for us to do that with someone who we didn’t have considerable respect for.”
There has been a notable resurgence in the popularity of folk-rock bands over the past couple of years, with the likes of Fleet Foxes and Midlake operating in similar sonic terrain to The Avett Brothers.
“I feel like since about 2000 there’s been a relatively strong wave, and I think it is a movement,” reckons Seth. “I like to compare it to the folk revival in the ’60s. The acoustic scene is thriving in America. We just toured in America with The Low Anthem, who are another band in that vein. It’s beautiful, because we’re all enthusiastic about so many different types of music, but we bring it back to this realist style that has a lot of flavour to it.”
Scott, meanwhile, notes that boyband music of the N*Sync variety reached an apex of popularity in the early noughties, which may have inspired many bands to strip their sound back to the barest of essentials. It’s interesting also to consider that in the ’90s, from Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, US alt. rock was generally dark and angst ridden.
Over the past ten years though, whether it’s been The Strokes and The White Stripes or, latterly, Fleet Foxes and The Avett Brothers, American guitar bands have usually had quite an upbeat outlook. Perhaps because we’ve had the stark realities of terrorism, war and climate change thrust in our faces, being pessimistic now feels like more of a luxury.
“Maybe so,” considers Scott. “There are so many factors. From our own perspective, we found as we made records that we did want to offer some hope in our music. But for some reason, growing up, a lot of the music we heard that had some level of positivity was also cheesy. That’s why Nirvana and Alice In Chains made sense – the aesthetic was so nice that it almost didn’t matter what they were talking about. By comparison, the positive music seemed so silly and unconvincing. The trick is to write songs that are optimistic without being cheesy. It’s a challenge, but one that we’ve embraced.”