Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
AVETT BROTHERS’ TRUE GLADNESS
Roots-rockers finding peace as they work through sorrows.
Since the Avett Brothers released their 2013 album “Magpie and the Dandelion,” bassist Bob Crawford and his bandmates, guitarist Scott and pianist Seth Avett, have felt the wounds of new tragedies: death, divorce and childhood illness. While Seth weathered a divorce from his first wife (he has since married actress Jennifer Carpenter) and the death of his aunt Alice, Crawford has taken periodic tour breaks for his 9-year-old daughter, Hallie, who has since 2009 suffered through chemotherapy, seizures and an ongoing battle with a brain tumor. Hallie’s cancer has been in remission since 2013 but now Crawford is preparing for his daughter’s upcoming hip surgery, which will require four months in a full-body cast.
Crawford would be forgiven if he considered quitting the band. Instead, he refocused the pain into “True Sadness,” the North Carolina band’s ninth album, a collection of confessional roots-rock songs that sound more buoyant than anguished. When released last June, the album shot to No. 1 on Billboard's Top Albums, Rock Albums and Digital Albums charts.
Speaking by phone from his car in Chapel Hill, N.C., Crawford says he found catharsis in recording the new album, which catches fans up on the past three years of the Avetts. On Saturday, the band will perform at the Pompano Beach Amphitheater.
“My daughter lost the right side of her brain. She’s severely disabled. It’s never going to be OK. My wife and I are constantly working through it,” Crawford says. “But she’s such a joy to be around, you know? So I think that true sadness is where we walk through life, feeling the sweetness of joy. We experience that while also suffering a little bit, feeling the pain and fragility of life.”
Crawford, who took a brief hiatus from the Avett Brothers in 2011 to support Hallie, devotes his spare time between tours to raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He says “True Sadness” confronts the band’s personal hardships and finds acceptance of them. It’s also true for the plucky bluegrass single “Divorce Separation Blues,” an on-the-nose meditation on Seth’s divorce that’s a throwback to the Avetts’ early folk ballads (“Swept Away,” January Wedding”).
“If you like the Avetts, you know how Scott and Seth write, and how close to the vest and vulnerable they are when they express themselves,” Crawford says.
If “True Sadness” captures the stress and heartache of the Avett family, Crawford says the band’s next album will swing more positive. Midway through the recording sessions in 2015, Seth Avett and Jennifer Carpenter welcomed their first child, Isaac.
“I fully expect Seth will produce one of many songs about having a child, because that’s what happen,” Crawford says. “We’ve been doing it this way for 16 years now. We always accept now that whatever’s going on in our lives, for better or worse, will end up in the music.”