Popular N.C. group, the Avetts, hopes to go national

The title track of the North-Carolina-based Avett Brothers' coming album starts like a journey: "Load the car and write the note/Grab your bag and grab your coat/Tell the ones that need to know/We are headed north."

By all indications, the band's journey is well on its way.

The Avett Brothers -- real-life brothers Scott and Seth Avett, who grew up in Concord, and bassist Bob Crawford, a native of New Jersey -- have been popular in North Carolina for five or six years, selling out mid-sized venues such as the 2,100-seat Belk Theater in Charlotte, the 2,400-seat War Memorial Auditorium in Greensboro, or the 7,000-capacity Koka Booth Amphitheater in Cary.

Now, they're making a move toward bigger stages and larger crowds and are working to build a national fan base.

The Avetts just returned from South by Southwest, a massive music, art and entertainment festival in Austin, Texas, where they were asked to play at the Paste Magazine SXSW party. The folks at Bruce


Springsteen.net -- Bruce Springsteen's official Web site -- asked them to be part of a special section called "Hangin' on E Street," where "up-and-coming bands" (as dubbed by BruceSpringsteen.net) record covers of Bruce classics. (The Avetts covered "Glory Days.") In the last few months alone, they've been featured in such national magazines as Time, Esquire and Rolling Stone.

Last year, the Avetts signed with Columbia Records and are planning to release their first album under a major label this summer. They've still maintained their ties to Dolph Ramseur, a former Winston-Salem tennis pro who now runs Ramseur Records management, which is based in Concord.

"It's funny, how if you work your way toward a goal for so long and so gradually, by the time you get to it, it doesn't knock you off your feet," Seth Avett said. "If we would have gotten this type of attention when we were 19, 20 years old, there's no telling how we would have taken it -- it probably wouldn't have been well."

Seth wrote an essay of sorts -- a "mission statement," he called it -- for the Avett Brothers' last album, Emotionalism, that, he said, defined the album as the band's attempt to "sort of declare who we were in a way, and how we wanted to present ourselves."

"How we do want to present ourselves is in a very obvious and direct contrast to a world of music and pop music that seems to be very kind of cold," he said. "And in contract to a world in general that seems to be very cold, where there's not a lot of romance and drama is like the ultimate negative thing."

The new album, I and Love and You, is an extension of that mission statement, he said.

The title song grew out of a poem Scott wrote about two people who love each other, but who no longer find it easy to say the words "I love you." The song morphed as the brothers worked on it and became the inspiration for Seth's mission statement for this album.

"The advantage that Seth and I have is that we can interact with each other and let each other react on what one has written and a lot of songs that start as very simple, one-dimensional thing can sort of double into two, three, four, five-dimensional songs," Scott said. "Because one reacts from that, and they pull another sub-theme from the initial theme and then the other person may say, ‘Well, that makes me think of this,' and then all of a sudden you've got a song that started out as one song, but that's now based on layers and elements that way exceed the original thought concept."

Ramseur said the band is, in a way, modeling its approach to building a fan base after the Dave Matthews Band, who the Avetts are touring with for a few shows this spring -- including an April 22 show in Raleigh and an April 24 show in Charlotte. Both are sold out.

Those are the only North Carolina shows on the Avetts' tour schedule -- after the shows with Dave Matthews, the Avetts will play a West Coast tour before returning east to play in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York. That doesn't mean a North Carolina show is out of the question, Scott said.

Both said they hoped the new album would be ready to release this summer -- Scott and Seth are hoping for August.

"With that record is going to be a whole slew of publicity things that we'll do for sure," Scott said. "We do plan on at least a major show in North Carolina this summer."