Observer exclusive: Seth Avett of The ‘unstoppable’ Avett Brothers recaps a bold year
On the national stage, it was another objectively big, bold, busy year for Concord-based folk-rock band The Avett Brothers.
A nearly 50-show North American tour that kicked off in April in Riviera Maya, Mexico, and would go on to include three sold-out shows at Red Rocks Amphitheatre as well as three opening gigs at NFL stadiums for fellow North Carolinian Luke Combs. The May release of their first album in five years, a self-titled effort overseen by one of the greatest music producers of all time, Rick Rubin. The November bow (and all-too-brief run) of “Swept Away,” a new Broadway musical featuring Avett Brothers songs based on the real-life account of dark days for four sailors following an 1884 shipwreck.
Next week, however, The Avetts will bring 2024 to a close not in Mexico or Colorado or New York City, but rather where they have spent virtually every Dec. 31 for going on more than two decades now.
At home, in North Carolina.
Their annual NYE concert — which sometimes roams to Greensboro or Raleigh — is back in Charlotte this go-around, at Bojangles Coliseum.
The performance will mark bandleaders Scott and Seth Avetts’ third appearance here in less than eight months, with their other two local outings coinciding with the two buzziest live-music events of the year for the Queen City: the inaugural Lovin’ Life Music Fest in May and the Hurricane Helene relief-focused Concert For Carolina in October.
On the eve of Christmas and New Year’s, we spoke with the younger of the brothers, 44-year-old Seth, about those two mega-shows; how Charlotte’s music scene has changed; how he’s changed since the band’s early days; and their still-taking-shape legacy.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
.jpg "Seth Avett.Photo by Tricia Baron (1).jpg")
Q. You guys have played a ton of festivals over the years. What stood out to you about the experience of participating in Lovin’ Life?
We all have our conception of what Charlotte is. And we place the limitations on it that we perceive in it. And there’s this ongoing conversation about Charlotte, culturally, because of the identity of it being so wrapped up in banking. What I feel like I’ve heard a lot — from within and from without — is about Charlotte’s artistic identity, about what it has to offer in these cultural ways. It’s really spread out, and it seems to struggle at times for a central hot spot of creative energy.
Which is not to say that it’s not there. It’s just not unified and packaged in the same way you’re gonna find it in Portland, or Austin, or Nashville.
So to me, that festival was a very nice bit of evidence that Charlotte is not inhibited in any way when it comes to that kind of celebration, and that kind of bringing together of artistic output, and showing that the city supports that kind of artistically based good time.
We’re very familiar with that environment, but it was cool to see it in Charlotte.
Q. As compared to 15 or 20 years ago — prior to the city’s big population boom — does the scene here feel more evolved, more open-minded, more sophisticated?
Having been coming to Charlotte since I was a little kid who would have no interest or barometer for what is culturally significant or not, what I’ve seen is it was always here. Like, during the Fat City (Bar and Lounge) days, and seeing The Blue Rags, or Eyehategod, or Buzzoven.
But I think that it has become more accessible, which is the definition of growth.
All you’ve gotta do is look at the calendars, from the Neighborhood Theatre to the Knight Theater. You can see a group that can pull as many people as G. Love. You can go to The Visulite. Or you can see My Morning Jacket in a bigger spot. You’ve got the arena, you’ve got the massive football stadium for The Stones. ...
It’s all there, it’s all available, and it’s all heading in a really beautiful, varied direction.
Q. Speaking of the stadium, you and Scott were just there for Concert For Carolina. (They played two songs during the middle of headliner Luke Combs’ set, after midnight — due to a weather delay.) Can you recap how you guys got involved in that?
Obviously, right after Helene, there were tons of great, original thoughts about how and when and where to contribute, through the means that you know how to contribute. The best means I have at my disposal, the best means that Luke has at his disposal — everyone on that bill — is to play a concert, and to drum it up as much as humanly possible. So when Luke reached out to us, we initially were like, We’re in. Let’s do it. Then some things changed for Luke and his camp and it was like, Okay, so not that date, this date. And we’re like, Man, we’re booked on that date. It immediately got much more complicated.
In the end, for Scott and I, it was a question of, What is the most that we can do for our state? And it was the Concert For Carolina. (The Avetts canceled an Illinois show and rescheduled one in Kentucky to make it work.) It was to join Luke for his set and make it as big as we could, and gather together, and sing together, and have a big time, and then get a big old check going West.
Q. How far back do you guys and Luke go?
Luke always jokes about how his first time he ever got arrested was at one of our shows. (Laughing.) He grew up in Charlotte and Asheville and, yeah, I think at one of our shows at The Orange Peel (in Asheville) back in the day he maybe got a little rowdy, and got himself in a little bit of trouble. But he was very gracious and very appreciative of our music early on.
And then, of course, we opened those shows for him at the giant NFL football stadium-type venues. It’s always fun to be in that position — to be in front of so many people who we have to assume have no idea who we are. (Laughing.)
Q. Speaking of back in the day, I was talking to a friend the other night who mentioned he was going to see you guys on New Year’s Eve, and he told me he saw you guys play way back in the day — at The Wine Vault in University City in the early 2000s. When you think back on that time in your life, do you think to yourself, Oh man, I’m so glad we made it, being a struggling artist was miserable. Or do you think back to that as a simpler time that you almost miss?
You know, I’m not sure. It must be something in between those two things. There’s no question that it was more simple. No question. It had its own list of complexities — which, at the time, felt like a lot — but youth was very much in our corner. That verve and that vitality was in our corner.
At those Wine Vault shows, we were going in, taking our own little P.A., our own little speakers, our suitcase full of wound-up cables, plugging everything in, making sure it worked, starting the set, and playing for three hours. And it all seemed to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of one tempo. It’s like this Zeppelin song that I always remember: “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.” It has this rhythm that is completely unstoppable, and it’s very much linked to the unstoppability of youth. Just this dummm-tsss, dummm-tsss, dummm-tsss, dummm-tsss — to me, those entire shows were that rhythm and that tempo. That’s not really true, but in my memory, that’s what it was. It was so simple and so infectious.
And we weren’t really saddled with a lot of expectation. We weren’t really saddled with the concept of four buses and two semis, seven people on stage and a full crew and all this stuff. But all of that has happened so gradually as to be digestible.
So, wanting to go back, that never really enters my mind. The reality is I still very much feel, in my spirit, that we are unstoppable. We will stop one day, so that will eventually not be true. But for now, it feels true.
Q. Getting back to the New Year’s Eve show, you guys created this tradition 21 years ago now, and I know you’ve said it started out as sort of a way to ensure that you’d be home, or near home, around the holidays. But — and this is a serious question — couldn’t you ensure that you’d be home by not booking shows around the holidays and just being home?
Yes. We have, at this point, the luxury of shaping the year. That’s a privilege. To say, “Okay, we’re gonna hit it hard through the summer, we’re gonna taper off around late November...” That luxury did not exist when the New Year’s shows started. At that time, we had to more or less say yes to everything, and take what we could get. I mean, no one wants you to come and play on Christmas or Christmas Eve, sure; so you’re gonna be at home anyway. But it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility to say, “This thing is happening in Baltimore on the 26th and we should be there for this,” and we would not have been able to say no back then.
The other piece of that is we saw ourselves from very early on as a band that can bring a celebratory vibe. So, early on, it was like, “We’ll do this so we can be at home for the holidays,” but it was also like, “Man, like, we can really blow New Year’s up this year. We can make it something that that everybody’s gonna remember. We’ll shoot confetti, and we’ll dress up nicer.” A lot of it’s just taking in the fun of the season — that was as much a part of it as the practical part.
And all that’s still there, but now it has been partially replaced with the family-reunion vibe of the tradition, and the dependability and the reliability of this concert that a lot of people have taken into their holiday practice.
Q. One of the things I’m sure you’re reflecting on as 2024 comes to an end is “Swept Away,” which took a decade to reach Broadway and was inspired by your 2004 album “Mignonette,” about a notorious shipwreck. Can you sum up your feelings about this journey, which at least as it pertains to Broadway ended sooner than you’d hoped?
The entire thing has been an education, and it continues to be an education.
Broadway is a word that we all know. It conjures up relatively similar images, I think, for people that live in New York, for people who live in this country, for people on this planet. The recognizability of the name and what that entails is its own thing. But the bigness of the word Broadway aside, (I am in awe of) the performances, the building of the show, the dedication and the ownership and the labor within it, the players and the writer and the director and the producers, the way they have honored the music, the way they’ve honored the story, and the way that even more so they have honored the themes of the story.
The songs and the story, they’re just vehicles for these big themes that are needed. We have to keep them at center stage — excuse the pun. We have to keep them in our minds, these themes of suffering, and of remorse, and of death, and of redemption, and of faith. It’s better not to bury them beneath our Amazon carts, and our dependencies, and our pleasure-seeking. Service, gratitude — these are, obviously, the things that we need to keep close. The show keeps them close, and that’s because of the dedication of people that are involved in it.
Artistically, it’s been a course in humility. In realizing the smallness of your ego and how irrelevant it is, and I’m very thankful for that. I have a long way to go in that respect. It’s just really very helpful for me to see how small I am.
Q. Even so, it really has been a big year for you guys, considering all the accomplishments we’ve talked about. On top of that, as The Avett Brothers you also continued to build on your legacy last month by being given the North Carolina Award (the state’s highest honor) for your lifetime achievements in the fine arts. I’m curious: How important to you is that legacy? Do you and Scott ever talk about that?
We don’t really. I consider it, personally. But not on a day-to-day basis.
I have a knee-jerk reaction to be like, Ah, you know, the North Carolina Award doesn’t matter. But it does matter, and it matters differently than an award through the means of a pop-culture kind of deal. Because of where it’s coming from, because of the lineage of other recipients. It is clearly not a flippant consideration on the parts of those who award it.
I do try, every day, to do some work towards something. An artistic work, something to share, or something that I can call complete. And if something that we have done — or something we leave behind, or a body of work — is helpful in some way, then that’s really important to me.
I know that I’m not living this life just for myself. I’m aware of that now.
The Avett Brothers on NYE
When: 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 31. (The show will end after midnight.)
Where: Bojangles Coliseum, 2700 E. Independence Blvd.
With: Neo-traditional country music trio The Castellows.
Tickets: $79 and up.
Details: boplex.com.
This story was originally published December 23, 2024 at 5:52 AM with the headline "Observer exclusive: Seth Avett of The ‘unstoppable’ Avett Brothers recaps a bold year."
