Avett Brothers expand sonic palette
The Avett Brothers have always found inspiration all across the musical spectrum.
But for their latest album, “True Sadness,” the Americana band went even further, taking apart the songs and reassembling them from a different set of musical influences.
“We’ve always drawn from lots of, I guess, genres,” said Scott Avett, who plays banjo. “We always have, from the beginning. I think the difference this time was, we certainly tried the songs in more ways, with more instrumentation. I think we deconstructed the songs further than we normally.”
But what made “True Sadness” different was the way the Avett Brothers approached the songs.
They wrote songs, then deconstructed them, then deconstructed them some more. The song “Victory,” for example, started out as outlaw country before morphing into a Caribbean calypso. And “Satan Pulls the Strings” began life as a fiddle and banjo tune, but eventually shape-shifted into a song with a distinct EDM flavor.
By exploring the music from a different perspective, the Avett Brothers, who play Saturday at Bon Secours Wellness Arena, found the common ground.
“In the end what was revealed with that was a note to us of the similarities in genres,” Avett said in a phone interview from Little Rock, Arkansas. “Everything gets categorized when you’re looking at iTunes and going through all the different genres. But when you break it down to rhythms and melodies and keys and chord progressions, you realize they all pretty much mingle together.”
For “True Sadness,” the Avett Brothers again worked with producer Rick Rubin, whose extensive resume includes Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, Kanye West and Lady Gaga.
Having Rubin in the studio helped the band look at the music, and the work in general, differently. He encouraged them to take time and space to create the songs, rather than trying to get them done as quickly as possible, Avett said.
“We’ve been so urgent and on-the-fly all our life. We grew up with that approach because we were taught to hustle and that would win the game. And so we were always hustling … but we weren’t really taking the time and listening and letting it happen before us. We were always action, action, action. He’s helped us pull back from that and say, ‘OK, action, listen. Action, listen. Listen, listen, listen, action.’ And so it appears to be slower, but it’s not by a forceful hand at all. He’s really just make some ways of thinking available that we were probably longing for,” he said.
Like his brother and bandmate Seth, Scott Avett studied visual arts in college. And that visual approach to creating art can’t help but spill over into the way he writes and performs music.
To illustrate, he talked about how the band prepared for its recent performance in a tribute to Jerry Garcia.
Some of the band members were unfamiliar with much of Garcia’s music before learning the songs in order to perform them. In a way, it became like a “homework assignment,” but eventually, the band found creative inspiration in working out their own takes on more than a dozen Garcia songs.
“Somebody else’s palette will force you to use colors that you never, you literally would never use those colors on your own because your sensibility doesn’t go to that particular green or that particular orange,” he said. “These are these sort of triggers. Same with keys and rhythms for me. I have these triggers that I go after. Same thing with color. To me, they kind of flow together, and they live together. They used to, in the past four or five years, I have brought them closer together. They interact for sure.”
YOU CAN GO
Who: The Avett Brothers
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Bon Secours Wellness Arena
How much: $41.50-$57.50
For more: www.ticketmaster.com