Although I’m very religious, religious music isn’t usually my thing. However, I adore the Avett Brothers even though their music definitely has a “higher meaning.”
I attended the Brothers’ concert on Saturday, Oct. 16 at Pier Six Pavilion at the Inner Harbor. The night was cold, but music and dancing quickly warmed up the outdoor venue.
The band consists of Bob Crawford and siblings Seth and Scott Avett. I have been a fan of the Brothers for a while but never as ardent as I am now after experiencing them in person. Their voices, paired with the harmonica, banjo, piano and cello, were out of this world.
As their producer, Rick Rubin, said on theavettbrothers.com, “The Avetts’ songs have such a sincere emotional resonance. The purity of the messages stops you in your tracks. It’s unusual to hear such open-hearted personal sentiment from young artists today.”
The “purity” Rubin speaks of is obvious when one listens to the Brothers’ lyrics. Their song “The Perfect Space” from this February’s “I and Love and You” album concludes with the lines: “I wanna have pride like my mother has, and not like the kind in the Bible that turns you bad. And I wanna have friends that I can trust, that love me for the man I’ve become and not the man that I was.”
In the Brothers’ song “I and Love and You” from the song-titled album, they sing, “When at first I learned to speak, I used all my words to fight, with him and her and you and me. But it’s just a waste of time. Yeah, it’s such a waste of time.”
In today’s world of lyrics like “I love the way you lie,” it’s comforting and exhilarating to hear a group of young men create such wholesome, sincere music.
The band definitely is crowd-pleasing, too. They sold out Pier Six and even had people in the Harbor on boats and across the Harbor on benches craning their necks to hear their music.
It blew me away to hear my two favorite songs of theirs, “I and Love and You” and “Kick Drum Heart,” played back-to-back towards the end of the actual concert, not in the encore as I’d expected.
During the Brothers’ encore, they performed an interlude cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just like a Woman” in the first of two songs, “Pretty Girl from Annapolis.” Saturday night was one of the first times, if not the first, that the Brothers covered Dylan live, and it proved to be a welcome surprise to the crowd at Pier Six. The Brothers then proceeded to play their last song of the night, “Slight Figure of Speech.”
When one takes into account the Brothers’ heartfelt, moral lyrics and the enthusiasm that radiates off of them as they perform, it is impossible not to enjoy their music, whether or not one usually enjoys bluegrass rock .
Mollyann Pais can be reached for comment at [email protected]