Megan Brown
Staff writer
The Avett Brothers have been busy since their third visit to Chautauqua three summers ago.
After Scott Avett spoke on Aug. 24, 2022, as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “A Vibrant Tapestry: Exploring Creativity, Culture and Faith with Smithsonian Folklife Festival” and the band rocked out on stage later that night, the band has released a self-titled studio album in 2024 and collaborated on the Broadway jukebox musical Swept Away, a survival tale of sailors whose ship capsizes.
At 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, the Avett Brothers will once again take the Amp stage, the latest stop on their current tour. So far on their tour, they’ve played a mix of songs from their recent release along with some of their older hits.
The band, comprised of brothers and vocalists Scott and Seth Avett, bassist Bob Crawford, cellist Joe Kwon, pianist and bassist Paul Defiglia, drummer Mike Marsh and fiddler Tania Elizabeth, have been nominated for four Grammys and were inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame; they’ve also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association.
Scott and Seth Avett grew up in rural North Carolina. While at first they wanted to connect with the art coming out of metropolitan areas in the East and West Coast, they then realized their upbringing held an important voice, too.
“It helped keep us, I dare to say, bored a little bit, and alone,” Scott Avett told the Daily in 2022. “And I think that was nice, like alone in our heads and alone with time to do what we might do. You find yourself drawing and you find yourself imagining and you find yourself thinking.”
On their most recent album, which is the band’s 12th to be recorded studio, the Avett Brothers run the gamut in their musical range from a seven-minute ballad with “Cheap Coffee” and a rock-inspired banger with “Love Of Girl.”
When writing music, Scott Avett sees lyrics as thoughts that you can come back to and use.
“Words are a place to shuffle or sift through … kind of like if you have a trunk in your attic full of trinkets and things you’ve collected,” he told the Daily in 2022. “Sometimes you go and find something in that, a memory or a love or something that’s dear to you. You flip through those things and something very special happens.”
And at the end of a week at Chautauqua that has grappled with “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism” through its Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, perhaps folk music can serve as a balm — not to fix the problems discussed, but to find community with the people here.
“Folk music is likely much less a genre conversation and more a conversation about commonality, leading to inevitable oneness,” Scott Avett said in his 2022 morning lecture. “This is not to say that folk music or music alone, for that matter, has been given the task or even the ability to unify all people. But it is to say music, especially music for all people, does a great job at pointing out commonality.”
