Their booking agent, Paul Lohr, is a seasoned Nashville veteran who has decades of experience working with both big names and developing acts. Their manager, Dolph Ramseur, is also the owner of their label — a double-dip that can be risky, but in this case it’s merely the inevitable result of two fledgling endeavors that have grown up together.
Though Ramseur Records has been expanding lately — signing up-and-coming acts such as Bombadil and the Everybodyfields — it is still very much The House The Avetts Built. More than half the label’s modest catalogue consists of records by the Brothers or their various side-projects (which include Seth Avett’s solo pseudonym Darling, Bob Crawford’s jazz-tinged affair New Jersey Transient, and the brothers’ hard-rock alter-ego Oh What A Nightmare).
The hanging question, which looms ever larger as the Avetts’ audience expands with each record and tour, is whether they’re on the brink of outgrowing their label’s capacity to handle them. Ramseur arranged distribution through Sony/RED for last year’s Four Thieves Gone, allowing the label to sell Avett Brothers discs in the tens of thousands. But what if — as Nickel Creek did with Sugar Hill, or Old Crow Medicine Show more recently has with Nettwerk — the Avetts’ sales start creeping into the hundreds of thousands?
“There’s definitely a balance there that we are faced with,” Scott acknowledges. “Dolph and I have talked many times about, ‘Hey, you know, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot by letting pride close your eyes to intelligence, or wisdom.’
“That’s going be interesting for us. But so far, we’ve kept a lot of pride and a lot of dignity with what we do, and integrity. And we intend to maintain that, however it may change. And we realize it will change. It has no choice to.”
The challenge, ultimately, is to roll with those changes. “We’re not against it,” Seth says, regarding the prospect of someday moving on to a large indie or even a major label. “It may happen, but when and if it does happen, it will have to completely make sense for us. But we’re not opposed to it.
“The beautiful thing about it is that we aren’t really in a spot where we have to. At the risk of sounding revolutionary — I always try to sound like a revolutionary — we have the people on our side. We are very close with our fans — and I mean a lot of ’em; I’m talking about hordes of friends. Real friends, like we know their kids’ names, that kind of thing.
“And when you put this many years into it and work it as gradually as we have, the wonderful thing about it is, there’s no carrot dangling in front of your face. Not like we’re the ultimate success or anything, but we don’t feel like we’re in any kind of position where we have to compromise. So if that step does happen, it will be completely on our terms.”
In other words: If it compromises truth, then we will go.
“I can remember the exact moment when I wrote the first line and figured out the chorus, and then the second line,” Scott Avett remembers of the day in 2003 when “Salvation Song” came into being. “I was in a shop that we had an apartment above that Seth was living in, and I was downstairs in the shop when I was doing it. I just said, OK, I’ve got to bring Seth in on this before I finish it.”
“At the time, we were getting very excited about what was to come. We were getting ready to devote ourselves to this entirely. And with that kind of excitement, there’s a lot of preconceived claims and notions that I think we were putting within our songwriting. And that one has seemed to stick, and become an identity of a sort.
“I remember bringing Seth down and saying, ‘You’ve got to do a verse for this. You’ve got to do a good long think about it; think about it hard. Let’s finish this one, but I don’t want to do this one alone.’ It had to be that way for that song.”
The chorus may be the simplest thing they’ve ever written:
We came for salvation
We came for family
We came for all that’s good, that’s how we’ll walk away
We came to break the bad
We came to cheer the sad
We came to leave behind the world a better way.
“It makes a statement,” Scott concludes, “that we stand by, and have obligated and committed ourselves to.”
ND co-editor Peter Blackstock senses an ever-so-slight resemblance between the Avett Brothers’ newest material and the repertoire of circa-1990 Austin trio Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom. He compared their stuff to the early Beatles, too.
