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Family Musical The Avett Brothers blend downhome tunes with soulful lyrics They're real players, these guys. Brothers Scott and Seth Avett and Bob Crawford of the Avett Brothers have a way with the music they've been making for over a decade. It's almost a love letter to the highs and lows, hard times and joys of life; acknowledging the wisdom gleaned in growing older with experience behind you. The unanticipated adventure in what awaits seems the marrow that keeps them nourished. Theirs is a brotherhood, not just through blood, but through those milestones and markers that defne a relationship, especially one with that certain brand of intimacy that comes from making music together. T P h o t o g r a P h c o u r t e s y o f t h e av e t t b r o t h e r s This is mosT LikeLy whAT hAs earned them a spot in the hearts of a growing legion of fans, as well as a No. 4 spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart with their seventh full-length record, The Carpenter (produced by Rick Rubin on Universal Republic), released last September, for which they were nominated for Best Americana Album for the 55th Grammy Awards in February followed by (yet another) European tour in March. But just "Americana" their music is not. What it is, is like small-batch bourbon: There's the sting, the heat, the mellow glide of the mélange of many elements that come together in satisfying unity, so that one doesn't overpower another. You know what it's made of, even if you can't specifcally defne it. "Their music is real. It's thick," says Avett fan Trey Brown, a musician and sailor. "The more you hear a particular song, the more layers you fnd in it. The emotion, human nature, and raw feeling you fnd in an Avett Brothers song are unrivaled in today's music scene." The genres they've been fled under so far include rock, folk, alt-country, and bluegrass, for starters. When asked what the band calls its sound, bass player Crawford says simply, "We don't. We leave that to the writers and the fans and the critics." What you'll hear is the plink and pluck of the elder Avett's, Scott's, banjo, the throttling thump of Crawford's upright bass, supported by the steady and sometimes frenetic strums of Seth's guitar, with arching vocal harmonies that send the listener a sonic snapshot of the porch pickin's the fedgling band would have heard years ago in Concord, North Carolina, where they got their start and where Scott and Seth are from. Not that it was overnight, their success. "We had a couple of years of not being able to book enough gigs to live," says Crawford by phone after just leaving rehearsal with Scott and Seth to drive the two hours back to where the New Jersey transplant lives outside of Durham. "It was a lot of scrounging, and pawn shops and all kind of stuff like that," he continues. "It wasn't easy to make a living for a while." But slow and steady as you go means you can usually go for a long time, and so far that's what the band has done, on their own terms, with great success without losing their identities or their sanity—even with the challenges of life on the road. All three members are married. Scott has two children; Crawford also has two, including his three-year-old daughter, Hallie, who has been battling brain cancer since 2011. With their latest effort, there is an atmosphere of weight. Of real life—and accepting its spring-loaded surprises. With this comes a beauty in the vulnerability, which has been there all along but is somehow more selfassured. You don't just hear their music so much as feel it. "There's a darkness upon me that's fooded in light," Scott Avett sings on "Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise" from their 2009 breakthrough album, I And Love and You. It isn't so much a confession as it is an affrmation: Without the dark, how would you ever know the light? "The emotion, human nature, and raw feeling you fnd in an Avett Brothers song are unrivaled in today's music scene." Spring 2013 . Tempus-Magazine.com 85