Tag: The Avett Brothers

Avett Brothers Film Captures the Power of Character

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One of the many moments that jumps right off the screen during May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers comes toward the beginning of the nearly two-hour documentary. During an on-screen interview, founding member and one-half of the band’s namesake, Seth Avett, recalls meeting Doc Watson. Seth explains that, up until that time, he operated under the impression that, as a musician, power came from volume. But Doc, he says, taught him that power comes from character.

That lesson resulted in a paradigm shift for Seth, whose brother, Scott Avett, was about to encounter his own musical turning point in the form of bluegrass. It was an unlikely genre for the brothers to gain their footing. Growing up on a farm in Concord, North Carolina, they spent their adolescence rebelling against any semblance of the rural culture reflected around them. Amidst a landscape of NASCAR races and country music, the duo wore flannels and combat boots, idolized Nirvana, and started a heavy-rock band called Nemo.

“I was gone to art school when Seth was young and still around in Concord and able to visit with Doc, so the personal connection there was different for me. I had not found my voice with an instrument yet. I was used to being in bands where we would sit and we would just play and just jam loud riffs, and I would just write lyrics, so I was always just all about the show, the lyrics, the poetry of it, the art of it,” Scott says. “But when I picked up the banjo out of an attempt at irony — because I didn’t know people who played the banjo — when I picked it up, I instantly connected with it: the harshness of it, also the sweetness of it … the dichotomy of that.”

Scott had dreams of fame, even when he was a little kid. In May It Last, he talks about how he used to imagine that a camera crew from Hollywood would happen to discover him while walking through the woods where he was playing.

“That’s in the value of growing up in a small place, where the views of, let’s just say New York City or Los Angeles, through this window of TV in the ’80s, you saw neighborhoods and landscapes and places that you thought, ‘Well where is that happening?’ ‘What is that?’ and, ‘How does that happen?’ You romanticize about it,” Scott says. “Just being from a small place, the value of that is so huge to develop the reach that we all aspire to, and I try to maintain that to keep the romantic view of the Big Apple. I’m not looking to crack that and ruin that.”

He says his parents encouraged his dreams, instilling a belief and drive in him and his brother from an early age. “There’s a form of being privileged that we experienced that has nothing to do with money or economic status. Our parents, they raised us in such a privileged way, and we were privileged in the sense that they surrounded us with encouragement and love and motivation for imagination,” he notes. “Our upbringing is just a massive part of the whole story.”

After picking up the banjo, Scott began incorporating tunes by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Old and In the Way into the band’s live set, while never losing sight of the Avett Brothers’ signature energy and vocal delivery. The result was a fusion of punk’s grit and folk’s heart, which yielded an undeniable sound that was distinctly Avett.

They met Bob Crawford through a friend and invited him to join the band on the stand-up bass. Cellist Joe Kwon officially came on board a few years later with the recommendation of Crawford, solidifying the Avett Brothers’ core lineup. From the family farm in North Carolina to the stage of Madison Square Garden, May It Last chronicles Scott and Seth’s journey by combining home movies, curated performances found on YouTube, on-screen interviews, and footage filmed over a period of more than two years in which the band recorded 2016’s True Sadness, their ninth studio album and fourth consecutive full-length with producer Rick Rubin.

But May It Last goes beyond the confines of a traditional music documentary thanks to co-directors Michael Bonfiglio and Judd Apatow (who used the Avett Brothers’ “Live and Die” in the credits of his comedy This Is 40).

“The thing that we knew from the beginning was that we wanted to make something that was real, that wasn’t a promotional piece for a band, that wasn’t just a behind-the-scenes of making an album,” Bonfiglio explains. “If we’re following the making of an album, at least to start, we know there’s a beginning, middle, and end to that process … But we knew that we didn’t want to make something just for the fans. We knew that we didn’t want to make something just for people who are really into music documentaries. Judd and I are both kind of nerdy about that; either of us would totally watch a movie that’s nothing but the creative process, but we wanted to make something that kind of transcended that, that somebody who had never heard of this band could find things to relate to and could enjoy as a moving experience.”

May It Last is as much a documentation of the creative process as it is a study of the human condition. What Scott and Seth lack in commonalities, they make up for in brotherly love. “We were terrified a lot of the time because there’s no conflict. What makes things interesting and compelling is seeing strong personalities not getting along and being able to make something — and this is totally the opposite,” Bonfiglio says.

“There were so many times when we would be like, ‘Is anybody going to watch this?’ And obviously, as we continued to work, what we found is what was so exciting and fresh and different and beautiful about it was how well they do get along and how they respect each other and take care of one another as human beings, as well as artists, and that’s what our movie was about — in addition to the fact that we spent so much time with these guys that, throughout that time, life was happening. They were changing as people. Things were happening in their lives, and we were able to kind of document that and watch that unfold. It’s a movie about people and relationships.”

The pains and triumphs that arose for the Avett Brothers throughout the filming of May It Last weren’t byproducts of being Grammy-nominated musicians on the road. Instead, they were universal: heartache, loss, joy, success. The film’s most tender moments surround Seth’s divorce, the birth of Scott and Seth’s children, and the wake of Crawford’s daughter undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor.

A through-line throughout the documentary revolves around the family you’re born into and the family you make. There’s a distinct, palpable bond between Scott and Seth, but the genuine, strong ties between all of the band members can’t be ignored. Scott says the band’s closeness didn’t happen by design.

Michael Bonfiglio and Judd Apatow

“This can never be constructed intentionally, ever; it never could have been. We can’t take any credit for that. The only thing that we can identify as reason for this happening is that we try to be truthful and sincere about how we include people,” he explains. “Everyone that’s in our band, we worked together before we ever got on stage together, so it was never a hired first situation. It was really a friend first thing … For this band, we’re just lucky that we let it grow and, at this point, now that Paul [Defiglia] has left, let it contract naturally and not just fill spaces with someone else. We are what we are, and we grow and contract as we should and try to follow nature. The family love is there because it’s grown naturally and at a realistic pace.”

In May It Last, the band extends that same care to viewers, inviting them into their world as one of their own by offering an intimate look at some of their most vulnerable moments. One such moment occurs in the latter half of the film. After recording the gut-wrenching “No Hard Feelings” in the studio, Scott and Seth take a breather outside after Rubin and company congratulate them on the song. From behind the camera, Bonfiglio asks the duo to discuss what’s running through their minds. In an emotional and creative haze, they lay out the difficulty they have receiving praise for songs that stem from the most dark, tragic experiences of their own lives.

“That moment, after we shot it and by the time we got to the edit room, it was pretty clear that that would be the emotional climax of the movie. It was the most visceral, raw scene that we had captured and it spoke so directly to who these guys are as artists and what they do and their relationship with that and how they reconcile their lives,” Bonfiglio says. “That song is an incredibly personal song that you see what went into it in the performance of it and their reaction after and you hear it in the lyrics. It was probably one of the first scenes we worked on and one of the last scenes we worked on, in terms of just trying to get every single moment of it right. There’s not a whole lot of cuts in it, but we just really worked on it a lot, in terms of what came right before it and what comes after it.”

Completely funded by Apatow without a studio backing, May It Last premiered at this year’s SXSW and made its public debut during a one-night only screening last month. Encore showings have been scheduled through November, and HBO has picked up the U.S. television rights with an air date of early 2018. With the Avett Brothers’ down-to-earth nature and endearing honesty, viewers will carry the meaning behind May It Last with them long after the credits fade to black.

“You’ve got to throw yourself out there. That’s really what being an artist is about — exploiting your weaknesses,” Scott says. “I really believe that in myself, that I have to expose and exploit those weaknesses to relate to other people.”

Nicole Atkins and the Last-Call Lullabye

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She knew the session would be worth documenting, but at the time, Nicole Atkins didn’t realize that the cover of Goodnight, Rhonda Lee would be a shot of her soaking up one of the most difficult songs she’s ever written.

On the night they recorded the string parts for “Colors,” Atkins invited Griffin Lotz — a longtime friend of the Jersey native and a Rolling Stone photographer — to hang around the studio and take a few pictures of her and the guys in action. At one point, Lotz trained his lens on Atkins listening back to the somber strings that accompany her dusky voice and Robert Ellis on the piano. Atkins’s eyes recall the Atlantic waves that wash upon the shore that shaped her, a stunning aquamarine of mirthful reflection that turns tempestuous when the climate calls for it. In Lotz’s photo, the tide is calm: Captivated, and with eyes as big as her headphones, Atkins considers the parts she sang for the string players on the sad ballad that states, in simple, certain terms, that drinking had consumed her life.

“I can see exactly where I was when I wrote that song,” she says of “Colors,” which she and Ellis had recorded in one take in the fitting gloom of a lightless studio. Atkins had just left New Jersey for Nashville with her tour manager husband, Ryan; she had been struggling with sobriety and had gone through a rough relapse when she found herself lonely in their new city and he told her he was heading out to work a two-month jaunt. On top of that, she’d hit a wall on the creative front, and the combination of unlucky breaks had her steeping in despondence. “I was writing tons of songs,” she says. “We were shopping around demos, because we had no money to make a record, and I just had no idea what we were gonna do, you know? It was just months and months of not getting any phone calls, at all, about songs that I thought were good, and a record I thought was, you know, cohesive.”

She decided to go to New York for a few days, as her old friends from college and frequent tour buddies, the Avett Brothers, invited her to their gig at Madison Square Garden, and Margo Price had encouraged her to come along for her Saturday Night Live performance that same weekend. “I just thought, ‘Dude, everybody has stuff to do except for me,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’M QUITTING MUSIC.’ And then I drank a bottle of dark rum and called everyone I knew, and I was like, ‘I’m just gonna write a musical. Fuck this.’”

One of those calls was to Jim Sclavunos, drummer of the Bad Seeds, who stepped out from a photo shoot with Nick Cave to answer the phone and assure her that quitting simply wasn’t something she was “allowed” to do. Another was to Ryan. “I obviously had to tell my husband the next day that we couldn’t have booze in the house, and it was just freaking me out,” she says. The melody for “Colors” came later, when she was sad, tired, and singing lines of the song into her phone on a train platform on her way to the airport in Newark: “Everywhere I go, the only things I see are glowing brown and green. The bottle’s gonna kill me.” That’s when she set the backbone for Goodnight, Rhonda Lee, an album named for Atkins’s drunk alter-ego: This is her sober record, one that thrives off hard-won clarity throughout, but “Colors” is a breakthrough so simple, painful, and pure that it serves as the album’s anchor. It’s a reminder that the toughest trouble can teach us things, though its lessons — to pour out the poison; to wean off a person or substance you can’t quit — are difficult to learn or even discuss.

“I think there’s a lot of shame that comes with being a woman, and being a musician, and being an alcoholic,” she says. “There’s a lot of embarrassment to feel; it’s not pretty or cute to talk about. There are a lot of sober women in music, but I don’t know if a lot talk of them about it — the only one I can think of is Bonnie Raitt. I write about my life on every record. This was just what was going on, and I couldn’t really write about anything else. Being in and out of sobriety for two years was just totally taking over my life. It was all I could think about. It’s weird: You know when they’re like, ‘It gets better, it gets easier, and you’ll have a day when you don’t even think about booze.’ I couldn’t imagine that because, even in long stretches of sobriety, it was like, ‘I’ll just have one.’” She did get there — at Bonnaroo, where she didn’t even think about the open bar, of all places — and reaching that internal summit was illuminating. “I thought, ‘Now, I have all this room in my brain just to think of music and my husband when he comes home.’ It was such a good feeling, that I wasn’t constantly like, ‘I’m so fucked. How am I going to be unfucked?’”

Those “other things” flooding her grey matter include intricate arrangements and some of the most challenging compositions she’s written yet, as Goodnight, Rhonda Lee is as much an instrumental triumph as it is a lyrical one. In addition to Ellis and Sclavuno, Atkins sat down with a number of esteemed pals — including Chris Isaak and Binky Griptite of the Dap-Kings — to hone in on exactly what she wanted to sing and how she wanted to sing it. Thanks to these collaborations and the brassy guidance of Nile City Sound, the Fort Worth-based production team behind the timeless quality of Leon Bridges’s Coming Home, the result capitalizes on the wry grit of her New York-honed chops; her unadulterated adoration of Lee Hazelwood, Roy Orbison, and classic soul; and the alt-country framework that informed her first forays into songwriting. Though her marriage is wonderful and she’s open to compulsively unpacking her relationship with alcohol in songs like “Colors” and the album’s title track, Atkins found inspiration in painful memories of broken romance, the kind of stuff most people are eager to leave in the haze of a blackout-peppered past. One instance took the shape of “A Little Crazy,” the grand, lonely cowgirl call Atkins and Isaak wrote in an hour after he suggested that she revisit a relationship that went wrong instead of the one going right.

“He was like, ‘You’re happily married — but remember the guy you dated when we toured? Let’s write about that,’” she says. “A lot of [Goodnight, Rhonda Lee] was written about a past relationship. I wanted to own a lot of things instead of saying, ‘This is terrible and I’m a victim.’ After that one particular breakup, I was fucking nuts. I had no control of my emotions whatsoever. I was willing to degrade everything I believed in just to have that comfort back.”

And thus we have Goodnight, Rhonda Lee instead of Goodbye. By dusting off the conversations, opening heartwounds of the past, and keeping those tidal eyes of hers open, Atkins is able to mine the hurt, humiliation, and disappointment they caused for musical gold, just as she does while working through her sobriety with the tape rolling.

“There are aspects of Rhonda Lee that are still kind of there that I’m kind of grateful for. I didn’t get sober and become a giant square,” she laughs. “It’s more so being in a place where you feel confident and better about yourself, that you’re able to hold certain situations that were painful and have some empathy for the people involved in those situations — including yourself.”

Real Player’s Music: A Conversation with Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass

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Greensky Bluegrass first got together and started playing music in 2000, and the band has spent the better part of the years since on the stage playing dive bars, living rooms, festivals, or, more recently, sold-out crowds at well-loved venues like Red Rocks and Ryman Auditorium. The Kalamazoo, Michigan, band — which is made up of members Anders Beck on dobro, Michael Arlen Bont on banjo, Dave Bruzza on guitar, Mike Devol on upright bass, and Paul Hoffman on mandolin — has done its part to welcome new fans into the bluegrass fold, too, thanks to funky covers, relentless touring, and an approachable jam band vibe in and out of the studio that is evident on their latest full-length, Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted.

You started out playing in people's living rooms and at open mic nights. What aspects of your beginnings, the first couple of performances that you did, have you retained now that you're playing these huge venues? How did that shape the way you guys perform now?

That is a very interesting question. Congratulations. I think [what remains is] the spirit of what we do and playing for fun and making it fun. We kind of have, for better or worse, this motto that, if you want to be on the line, you've got to be over the line sometimes. There's a lack of fear of mistakes, or a lack of fixation on perfection. We were pretty bad in those early days, but we were just going for it, having fun. I think that spirit of us truly enjoying what we were doing and making music together translates really well with our crowd. The experience of our show and that whole aspect of it is really important to our music. It's one of the things that have kind of been there all long.

Tell me about Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted. What about that lyric stuck out to you for the title? What made you think that would sort of encapsulate the rest of what was on the record?

The whole verse is, "I know everything for all that I know, but there's always two sides to the way both of the stories go. Sometimes things are left unspoken, should be shouted, written down, and quoted." I think, for us, there's kind of a underlying meaning that “Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted” means things better left unspoken.

I don't know — we liked it. Album titles are tough. We threw around a lot of ideas. We debated this one because it's long. Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted … that's wordy. I dig it.

I think that lot of your fans are not necessarily bluegrass fans first: They're not finding your band because they're out looking for the hottest new bluegrass band. Some people may be finding out that they love bluegrass through Greensky. What about your music and the way that you interpret bluegrass do you think is drawing new people into the genre?

I suspect that you are entirely correct. I think its because we came [to bluegrass] that way, too. Most of us found bluegrass through the Grateful Dead, through Jerry Garcia.

In those early years of playing shows, we did all these bizarre covers. “When Doves Cry” was one of the first ones. That was the first off-the-wall thing we did. We'd go to these bars and do these gigs where I'd have to really sell the band to get us in there in the first place, to the manager or whoever is booking the bar, because they're like, "There's no drums? Do people like that?" Then we'd play "When Doves Cry" and it's like, "They know this."

It's the same story you hear about bands all the time playing covers to draw people into their sound. Not only does it draw them into us, it draws them into bluegrass. They’re like, "Maybe I like the banjo."

Maybe there's this preconceived notion before that bluegrass is hillbilly music that they would never be into. We're kind of a jam band and we improvise, so that's something that also drew us to the music — that bluegrass is a real player's music because there is so much soloing. It's like jazz almost. There are these standards. There's a form and a melody: You blow the head and then you improvise on the theme and then you blow the head and the tune's out. It's like what horn players do with be-bop. That attracted us all, as instrumentalists. It’s not like being in a rock band where the guitar player takes all the solos and the keyboard player does a little bit of solo flair, but it's really like the one guy's the lead guy and the rest are all the accompanists. We all do all the jobs. We all accompany each other. We all share the role of the drum kit. We all are soloists.

That brings me to another question I had because I know that you are one of the chief songwriters in the group. There's a big process from the time that you think of a song and when it's a finished song — or who knows if its ever really a finished song. Can you run me through the general process? How does a song go from being in your brain to being something that you're fleshing out with everybody to being something that you're either playing on stage or recording?

It varies from song to song. The typical process for Dave and me is that we write most of the framework of a song and the lyrics, and then the band is more involved in the arranging process. Sometimes we write the instrumental hooks together that go with the songs, which is often described from the melody of the lyrics. Sometimes it's different figuring out different parts, stuff like that, but the degree to which the song is finished can really vary.

There have been songs that I had written that were pretty much done when I brought them to the band and didn't need a lot. Then, there are others that needed parts. The textures and the rhythmic feels are where we can really experiment with our different influences and fusion. If it's a straight-ahead bluegrass tune, it's pretty easy to just figure out who does what and what goes where. When we start getting into different rhythmic textures, we talk about how a lot of our music has these soundscapes, and I think this album is a good example of that. There are moments on there that are spacey melody mood pieces more than a solo flair or something like that. It's not like, "That's so cool what he played." It's this texture that we all create together. For us, that's some of the most fun stuff we do.

One of my favorite songs on the latest albums is “More of Me.” Where did that song come from and what might it mean to you or what do you think it might mean to other people?

That's a good one for that soundscapey kind of thing that happens in the middle of that tune — just that bereft moment. I think it's very much resolved of what our lifestyles are like: touring and having other desires, maybe someone else, or maybe just other things in life that you don't have time to do because you're busy doing whatever you need to be doing. It’s about the idea of wishing that there was more of you to do all the other things. It's kind of creepy. [Laughs] I wrote it with the intention of being sort of romantic, wishing somehow that I could have more of me to leave you when I go. It comes off as a little creepy I've discovered, plus the melody and the general vibe of the tune is so dark. I joke around with Yoda, "More of me, keep you when I go, I will."

That's funny.

I think there's just some darkness in those lyrics that maybe I fell a little short on the romance. I think the concept is sort of romantic or lofty or idealistic or something like that.

Speaking of being in a couple of different places at once: Y’all recorded this in two different places, and I think I saw that this was the longest time that you've spent in the studio for any of your records. What effect do you think that had on the final product, and why did you choose to do it that way?

If you go back and read any of the bios of any of our records, we've said that every time, because that's what we do. That's how we increase our budget: We just take more time. Taking more time allows us to be a little bit more experimental. This time we came into the studio a little less prepared. We had played none of the tunes live. We had some really serious arranging and learning to do. We did it intentionally to let more of a creative process happen in the studio. With the earlier albums, spending less money and having a smaller budget, you want to be more prepared so you're not wasting your time, but also wasting your time can be really artistic.

We'd go down the rabbit hole of chasing some tone on an instrument or on a microphone for hours at times and maybe were aware the whole time that we weren't even going to use it. We just wanted to see if we could do it, challenge ourselves. "Let's try this tune like this." And then everyone being like, "I don't know if we're going to be able to do it or if it's going to be a good idea, but let's try it to see if we can accomplish it." Then, if we tried it and we didn't think it worked, we’d try harder to make it work, even though we might not use it. Having the opportunity to do that is, one, fun as hell. Two, it creates more of a creative process than just us going in there and playing the music.

We recorded in two places, which we've never done before, and we took a longer break than we've ever taken before between spots. When we recorded the last record, we took two days to just watch the Super Bowl and take a break, which was nice. This time, we had a couple of months off. As I mentioned, we were sort of composing the songs and figuring out what to do with them as we recorded them. We laid almost everything down in Nashville and then we had these really rough mixes of everything mostly done to sit on and reflect on and figure out what they needed and what they lacked and if they were working and how so and such.

You guys are on your own label and you've always been independent. Now that you've gotten to know the music industry a little bit better, do you think that's affected the band's trajectory at all? Is there anything that you particularly like about it or that has been an obstacle for you guys in doing that?

It's certainly presented some challenges and some unique development. Not to discredit record labels and what they do either, but I don't know if some gigantic budget to expose us to a wider audience would have made us like Mumford and Sons or something. I like that band, too, just so you know. But I get the concept that the record label now sort of stands for this thing that's like a million dollar loan: If you have enough money to invest, you can turn your money into a lot of money.

But we’ve self-funded our albums and stuff, and you know we're reaching a wider audience everyday and we're doing it one fan at a time. I have this theory that a lot of that stuff that the media of the music industry blows up can sometimes create hype for a band that the band's not ready for. If that had happened to us a couple of years ago, I don't know if we'd be as prepared as we are now. We keep taking a step up — steps up — into bigger rooms, and because those steps are somewhat gradual, we're learning a lot as we go. We're ready to carry the weight, so to speak.

In the lifespan of our band, a really awesome thing has been happening where bands like the Lumineers, the Avett Brothers, and the Head and the Heart, Mumford and Sons — these acoustic-esque bands that you guys cover a lot of and who write their own material — have come into the mainstream. A lot of that is really encouraging for us. There's this duality of successful music, and the very produced pop music and pop country that's succeeding is sort of creating this thirst for the opposite. I want something that sounds real, and it’s good to see a record just blow up because it’s real. I think that that's really cool, very encouraging.

Photo credit: J VanBuhler

New Book Tells 30-Year History of Green River Festival

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The Green River Festival is one of the most beloved music festivals in the United States. Founded in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1986 as a small event for local talent and enjoyment, the festival has since grown into a nationally known entity, boasting artists like Mavis Staples and Steve Earle as two of many impressive performers over the years.

Now, festival veterans and newcomers alike can have unprecedented access to the festival’s history through a new book, Music in the Air: A History of the Green River Festival 1986-2016. Written by radio personality and long-time festival friend Johnny Memphis, the full-color book painstakingly details each year of the festival’s history, providing artist line-ups, exclusive photos, and anecdotes from past attendees and performers.

According to Memphis, the book was planned in conjunction with the festival’s 30th anniversary. "This year was the 30th anniversary of the Green River Festival, so they wanted to do something special for that,” he explains. "Jim Olsen, who runs it, is an old friend of mine — we did radio together for 20 years, and I’ve done various things for them over the years. So I said, ‘Jim, I’d love to write a history.’ There was really a story to tell there, especially as I did more and more research and interviewed more and more people. There was this really cool arc of a small, local thing that a radio station and the Chamber of Commerce, over time, grew through thick and thin to make it a world-class festival. It’s kind of amazing how it transpired.”

The team spent four months pulling the book together, relying heavily on both die-hard festival fans and local media outlets like Greenfield’s daily newspaper, The Recorder, for the photos that ended up filling the book’s pages. "It was under a tight deadline, so the whole thing was pressurized,” Memphis says. "We had to get it done for the festival. We didn’t get a huge jumpstart on it. We knew they had really been on-site and documenting from the beginning, so we were able to tap into a lot of that. Other people who just go to the festival contributed things. We were so thrilled with the images we got. Of course, in more recent years we had more to pull from. It was the early years we were scrambling for.”

Thanks to that crowdsourcing, the resulting book — while certainly a thorough piece of history — reads like a testament to the love that all involved feel for the festival. Memphis sees that love as an integral part of the festival’s evolution over the last three decades. “The local music scene, over time, has developed and nurtured and grown a really cool festival that represents the area, and great music from outside the area,” he says. "Things are kind of small potatoes around here. We don’t have big cities, but there’s a lot of great culture out here. There’s music and food and a really nice way of living. The festival reflects that in that it’s smaller — it’s 5,000 people on a sold-out day. It’s on this grassy field at a community college and it’s very family-friendly and low-key, not a hassle at all. It just happens to have unbelievable music.”

Memphis himself has attended (and been part of organizing) almost every festival since Green River’s inaugural year, and has a few favorite moments of his own, notably the day that he first witnessed the Avett Brothers. “They did a set and I happened to introduce them,” he says. "Even when they came out for the soundcheck and they were warming up, they were so magnetic and so exciting and so talented. This was in the early days when they played with really high energy and were kind of mountain music meets punk rock. They were so spirited, and also such good singers. They ended up off the stage dancing in the crowd with their banjos. The crowd went insane. That’s one of those examples of hitting it right and getting to see something up-and-coming thing that’s really incredible."

Music in the Air is available at GreenRiverFestival.com and in select independent bookstores in the Greenfield area.

MIXTAPE: The Capitol Theatre

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Up in the farther most corner of Westchester County New York, right at the Connecticut border, sits a renovated 1920s playhouse that also happens to be one of the best music venues in the Northeast, if not the whole country. The Capitol Theatre first opened its doors on August 18, 1926. Over the 90 years since, it has seen quite a few changes … and a whole lot of history. In the 1970s, the Cap was an A-list rock club before a 1983 change in ownership flipped it back to being a traditional theatre. More shifts happened over subsequent decades until the Cap's most recent rebirth in 2012 with Peter Shapiro (Wetlands Preserve, Brooklyn Bowl) at the helm.

Here, Shapiro takes us through the club's musical history, song by song.

Grateful Dead — “Ripple”

Jerry Garcia said it best himself: “See, there's only two theaters, man, that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting, and all that — the Fillmore and the Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country."

With that level of praise, it’s no wonder that the Grateful Dead played the Cap 18 times in 1970-1971 alone. To this day, members of the Dead still play the Cap.

Janis Joplin — "Mercedes Benz"

Perhaps the Cap’s most famous true story of rock history is that, on August 8, 1970, Janis Joplin wrote "Mercedez Benz" at a bar in Port Chester called Vahsen’s. Later that night, she performed the song for the first time at the Cap in what turned out to be her last New York show and her third-to-last show ever.

Hot Tuna — "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

Hot Tuna has the distinction of being one of the few bands to play the Cap in all three major eras that it's hosted rock bands. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassidy have played the Cap stage four times in the '70s, three times in 1989-1990, and twice in 2014-2015. They were back again this year.

Derek & the Dominoes — “I Looked Away”

The Eric Clapton-led supergroup didn’t tour much in support of their classic album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, but on December 4-5, 1970, the Cap was one of the lucky stages to have hosted this group. Duane Allman was not part of the band’s touring lineup but he also played the Cap with the Allman Brothers Band that same year.

Phish — “My Sweet One”

When the Cap was first reborn as a rock venue in the late '80s, many of the '90s future musical innovators were just beginning to make a name for themselves. Phish gained a huge New York following in the early '90s with seven shows at the Cap between 1990-1992 before moving on to bringing 80,000 people to their own festivals. While drawing from just about every musical influence under the sun, the Vermont foursome never shied from showing their love of bluegrass and Americana on songs like this one.

Little Feat — “Sailin’ Shoes”

During the Cap’s '90s revival, many bands that hadn’t had the chance to play the theatre in its prime were finally able to take the stage. In 1990 and 1995, rock heroes Little Feat were able to bring their unmistakable melting pot of musical influences to the Cap. Since reopening in 2012, they’ve been back three more times, and on September 9 of this year, we'll make that four.

Bob Dylan — “Times They Are A’ Changin'”

When the Cap was reborn in 2012, Bob Dylan had his first performance ever at the Cap in the newly renovated theater. What better song to celebrate an exciting new time in the Cap's history.

Willie Nelson — “Somebody Pick up my Pieces”

The country legend made his long-overdue debut at the Cap with two consecutive shows on September 18-19, 2013. Not many artists of his caliber can say that they’ve had several generations of fans in their audience at the Cap.

Wilco with Billy Bragg — “California Stars”

Jeff Tweedy and company were well aware of their musical roots when they recorded “Mermaid Avenue” with Billy Bragg. Using lyrics from Woody Guthrie they crafted music that sounded timeless yet relevant for the 21st century. In 2014, Wilco sold out three nights at the Cap to mark their 30th anniversary, even throwing in a nod to the Grateful Dead with a cover of "Ripple."

My Morning Jacket — “Get the Point”

While their eclectic sound can range from garage rock to funk and electronic music, My Morning Jacket always incorporates elements of their Kentucky roots. Despite having already headlined major festivals and arenas like Madison Square Garden, MMJ stunned the Cap with a three-night run of shows in 2012. To make these intimate shows even more special, each show had a unique set list with no songs repeated from previous nights.

The Avett Brothers — “Morning Song”

Of all the bands that have brought the sounds of roots music and Americana to new audiences in the last 10 years, few have generated as much excitement as the Avett Brothers. Their 2016 show at the Cap sold out within minutes, providing fans with a special and intimate night. The Cap loves to book bands that are known to play much larger venues as a way to give fans a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Ryan Adams — “To Be Young Is To Be Sad (Is To Be High)

Few people have held the torch of consistently prolific songwriting in America as long as Ryan Adams. While his musical ventures have taken him as far as metal covers and Taylor Swift interpretations, Adams always returns to his folk-oriented roots. In his debut at the Capitol Theatre on July 24, 2016, Adams brought along bluegrass group the Infamous Stringdusters and singer/songwriter Nicki Bluhm. The Stringdusters and Bluhm added lush harmonies and acoustic bluegrass instrumentation to his songbook.

Greensky Bluegrass — “Burn Them”

Ninety years later, the future is most certainly looking bright with up-and-coming groups such as Greensky Bluegrass set to carry the torch for roots music on the Cap stage. The Michigan bluegrass group will be making their debut at the Cap on September 17, 2016.

Nashville's 3rd & Lindsley celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with a MIXTAPE of its own.

Photo credit: Scott Harris

The Avett Brothers: A Truth That Soars Above the Bickering

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True Sadness is an album about duality. It would have to be, really, for the boys behind the big-smiled, unbridled, foot-stomping joy on-stage at an Avett Brothers show to be naming a record something that sounds like such a drag. From lyrical jabs at the aging process to a well-rounded foray into new instrumentation, the Avett Brothers' effort catapults the listener and its authors into a sort of maturity where sadness isn’t a monumental event, but rather an underlying part of everyday life.

“It’s not necessarily this ongoing bummer,” Seth Avett says. “True sadness isn’t about becoming this dark thing, where you’re just giving up and realizing, ‘You know what? Screw it. Everything sucks.’ It’s more about just sort of accepting, as Bob [Crawford], our bass player, has very eloquently put it many times, that the human heart is fully capable of experiencing great joy and great sadness simultaneously.”

For True Sadness, the band’s fourth consecutive full-length working with producer Rick Rubin, every song began with a bare-bones recording using only the core trio of Seth, Scott Avett, and Crawford. Then, the songs were recorded with the full seven-piece band all live in the same room — a studio setup they hadn’t pursued since 2007’s breakout record, Emotionalism. They didn’t stop there: With Rubin’s assistance, a third step brought the final tracks well outside of their boundaries, instrumentally.

“We worked with another engineer who took the raw tracks and sort of re-imagined them with all these different samples and synths — just all these crazy sounds,” says Seth. Then they re-performed every song with the added depth of the tape sounds and synths, with certain tracks maintaining more of the new territory than others.

“What we ended up with was about four versions of every song,” Seth offers. “’You Are Mine’ ended up being one of those that was in, like, that third stage … third or fourth stage … it’s kind of everything mixed up in one.”

While this experimental, synth-stained streak reveals itself most clearly on tracks like “You Are Mine” and “Satan Pulls the Strings,” the energy behind the songs is unmistakably created by the same band that came up screaming and stomping their way through Southern stages.

“The simple answer here is that we do our best to just follow the song. Whichever way the song is represented best, that’s the way we leave it. We try not to get too caught up in how we’re perceived,” Seth says. “Like, ‘Well, we’re an American Roots band or and Americana band, so every song has to have only acoustic instruments’ and all that. We’ve never really felt any kind of allegiance toward that. [If] one song was kind of an oddball, [it’s because] it felt right like that.”

While the band is tapping into new sounds for True Sadness, they continue to thrive thematically with material that can be continuously re-interpreted by the listener: On standout track “Smithsonian,” the narrator rails through universal truths about aging like they’re breaking news. The song zeroes in on the strange quality of certain lessons or life changes that you have to experience yourself to truly understand, keeping pace with the album’s overall perspective.

“It’s a lot about resolve,” says Seth. “Just coming to a resolution about breaking down, and how that is completely, 100 percent natural — 100 percent normal — and it’s all good. It’s fine!”

A scroll back through the Avetts’ catalog almost feels prescient. Lyrics like the forlorn mention of elections on “Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise” feel almost political today, where they may have once felt coming-of-age. The Avetts’ songs evolve with the listener in a way that’s given them a timeless quality, and True Sadness expands upon that facet of their music admirably.

“The truth remains the truth,” Seth muses. You won’t hear the Avetts proselytizing about current events — despite the ongoing controversy in their home state of North Carolina — but that’s not to say there aren’t takeaways that feel bigger than heartbreak or personal strife. “If you have your heart in the right place and you’re making your comments about humanity from the right place,” he says, “I think that it soars above the bickering within the political landscape.”

Lead single “Ain’t No Man” makes a strong argument to that point:“Ain't no man or men that can change the shape my soul is in / There ain't nobody here who can cause me pain or raise my fear.” You can take it as a personal pick-me-up, a nod to religion, or a knowing wink at current events, but you certainly won’t come away from the song feeling weighed down.

“It’s meant to be self-motivating — a little bit of currency to buy yourself a little confidence when you’re not feeling so confident,” he says. “We don’t always wake up in the morning thinking, ‘All right! Now I’m gonna knock it out today. I’m going to be joyful and I’m gonna be confident, but I’m also gonna contribute!’ Some days, you’re stepping into ‘em feeling just like a wounded animal. It just takes everything you’ve got to act civilized, in a way. So I think the song is a little like just giving yourself a motivational speech, and just getting solid and getting centered and kind of squaring your shoulders up, picking your head up, and just getting into it.”

True Sadness was announced to the world in an open letter about the ways that the Avetts’ music has become intertwined with their real lives, pointing from the very beginning to the heightened thematic complexity in each number.

"It does occur to me now, that in some regard, before any professional success, we were perhaps paradoxically more self-aware. The songs would show mere versions of ourselves — the heartbroken introvert, the frantic worker, the forlorn traveler, the philosopher, the romantic, the loner — all somehow imbued with the meaningful sheepishness of a James Dean character. We used to hope and vie for that attention, that perceived personality, that coolness."

If their previous work was about compartmentalizing the parts of themselves that feel, True Sadness abandons the pursuit of cool in favor of a pursuit of the optimistic and honest. “You have to come to a place of resolution within the tragedies that are always happening,” says Seth. “You don’t ever get to a point in your life, regardless of how well things are going, where everything is good — where it’s all good. There’s always going to be a duality, and I think we are all more aware of it than ever.”

Leave it to the Avett Brothers to serve up True Sadness and leave us mostly with real, gritty, imperfect joy.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Gig Bag: Brett Dennen

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Welcome to Gig Bag, a BGS feature that peeks into the touring essentials of some of our favorite artists. This time around, Brett Dennen gives us a look at what he has to have handy when he's out on the road.

Brett Dennen is something of a road warrior. A fixture on the festival circuit since releasing his self-titled debut album in 2004 (as well as his breakout record, So Much More, in 2006), the northern California singer/songwriter has likely earned a sizeable portion of his legions of fans at his own lively headlining shows and through opening slots for folks like John Mayer and the Avett Brothers. 

Now, Dennen is about to hit the road again, this time in support of his brand new album, Por Favor. Helmed by Americana super-producer Dave Cobb, the album shows Dennen at his most vulnerable, both lyrically and sonically. "I think the songwriting is top-notch, compared to my previous work," Dennen says. "The depth is subtle. The melodies flow easily and everything feels peaceful. I'm most excited about the rootsy feel of it. It's natural. Nothing is forced." 

Dennen and Cobb recorded the album in Nashville, with Cobb's quick, no-BS approach to recording setting the tone. "[It was] fun. And fast," Dennen says of working with Cobb. "There's no bullshit with him. He doesn't like to do any second guessing."

The new tunes are road-ready, too. "We'll play them pretty much the same way they are on the record," Dennen explains. "At least right now. Maybe by the end of the tour, we'll work up some jams."

Check out what Dennen carries in his Gig Bag, and peruse his tour dates here.

Coconut oil: For multiple uses. I rinse with it in the AM (oil pulling), I eat it, put it in my hair, use it as sunblock, and as moisturizer. 

My knife: My girlfriend gave it to me. I'm a pocket knife guy. So is my dad. 

NutriBullet: I use it multiple times a day, mostly for smoothies. I get a lot of vegetables on my hospitality rider, so I blend them all up and drink them. It's much easier than chewing.