SPOILERS AHEAD
In 2004, my parents took me and my brother Sean across Lake Champlain to Burlington, VT to see Carbon Leaf play at Higher Ground again. I was about fourteen and Sean was about sixteen.
Whenever we went to Higher Ground, my parents would sit back at the bar behind the pit while Sean and I would shove up to the front, putting as little distance between us and the stage and as much distance between us and our parents as we possibly could. The opener that night was this unheard-of trio called The Avett Brothers. They were, in a nutshell, a glorious, shocking mess.
I specifically remember that, at one point, both Seth and Scott’s strings broke on the same chord. While Seth chose to further brutalize his guitar by slamming out an endless strum of nonsensical fury and stomping his hi-hats together, Scott grabbed his broken string, slowly pulled it out like he was torturously gutting his banjo, and screamed into the microphone. Bobby just kept playing somehow. The crowd absolutely lost their minds.
“We’re not done, we’re just messing up,” said Scott.
Their whole set went pretty much like that. After they threw free copies of their Swept Away EP into the crowd and left the stage, Sean and I ran back to our parents because that was the rule.
Me: “You guys probably HATED that, but THAT WAS AWESOME.”
Mom: “Are you KIDDING? I LOVED IT!”
That was the first sense that I got that my mom might actually be cool. Apparently the fact that she brought me to concerts wasn’t proof enough. I was kind of a stupid kid.
For the next nine years, I followed The Avett Brothers more closely than I had any other artist before and since. As a family, we caught them any time they came into town. Sometimes we went out of our way to see them, bringing us from a side tent at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, MA, to a free show in a Philadelphia city square (where I got a personal shout-out from Seth for requesting ‘I Killed Sally’s Lover’ while chatting with the group before their set) and beyond. We became known to them as their “Burlington Friends,” and though we were technically from across the lake in New York, we were too glad to have been given a nickname to correct them. I bought every album the day it came out and learned all the words as quickly as I could. I carried my favorite band in my back pocket through high school and into college. My girlfriend constantly blamed me for keeping better tabs on their touring and recording schedules than on our own relationship, and she wasn’t even wrong about that.
All of this is to express just how significant it is that I chose to stop listening to them in 2013.
The release of Magpie & The Dandelion was memorably odd. For the first time, someone else reminded me that The Avett Brothers had just dropped a new album. With every second that ticked by that day, I felt more and more detached from my formerly favorite band. I had already sensed myself abandoning them when I first heard “Another is Waiting” some few weeks prior. I didn’t mind the lyrics, but the mix made me homesick for their raw sound, so I never really revisited it. That was different. I always revisited everything of theirs until I knew it well.
I was pissed at Rick Rubin. The way I saw it, their sound was raw and real before he came into the picture. The Man killed my favorite part of the band. I no longer felt like people were making this music. It sounded like the front cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine; impossible to exist in nature, “perfected” in every tiny little petty and meticulous corner the higher-ups could manage to detect. I haven’t followed their career since. I’ve been listening to their old albums like an ex reading old letters.
“I feel like they dumped me, you know?” I was talking to my brother about it a few months ago. His response absolutely killed me.
“No, you dumped them.”
On September 12, 2017, my wife and I drove to Concord, NH to see May it Last, a documentary surrounding the career and lives of The Avett Brothers. I didn’t know anything else about it going in. I had been avoiding trailers and teasers like the plague. I wanted every second of the film to be 100% fresh to me. I was so excited to dive back into the history I grew up with – the parts of it that mattered to me – that I had difficulty breathing as I watched outdated law firm and credit union advertisements lazily fade in and out at this tiny, independent movie theater in southern New Hampshire.
Had I actually listened to their most recent album, True Sadness, I would’ve known that the documentary title was also the title of the album-ending track and may have even deduced that the film would have quite a bit to do with the album itself. Of course, had I known that the film was associated with True Sadness in any way, I just may have been stubborn enough to not even bother. I’m kind of a stupid adult.
While it was exciting to learn the specific details of larger events that I’d seen unfold in real-time in the band’s career, in the wake of that emotionally-loaded date night, all I can really say is thank you. To Seth, Scott, and Bobby, the rest of the group, and to Judd Apatow… thank you.
You’ve reminded me that Seth, Scott, and Bobby are still the same guys who made the music I fell in love with. Those minds, hearts, and hands, and their thoughts, spirit, and work, are not lost, and that’s clear to me now.
In particular I want to thank the cameraman who followed Seth and Scott to the back porch after recording No Hard Feelings, and Seth and Scott for being candid when that happened. Scott’s expression that he felt conflicted about being congratulated on an incredible record that sells was absolutely everything to me. It shook me to tears. It was a moment that, though broadcast to thousands in theaters across the nation, I felt incredibly privileged to have seen.
It was a strange feeling. On the one hand I felt absolutely validated in my frustration that their sound was becoming more processed and less raw; that their music was becoming more of a product and less of an art. On the other hand, I could just feel them looking at me saying, “Thanks for leaving, stupid. We don’t like it either.” It was like finally removing a popcorn kernel that’s been stuck in my teeth for four years.
I don’t deserve this band. I dumped them. I didn’t deserve the opportunity to be shown why that was a stupid thing to do.
I love you, I’m sorry.
-Mark
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