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" EXCLUSIVE: Watch Avett Brothers Perform &amp;#039;Morning Song&amp;#039; &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Bands &amp;quot;graduate,&amp;quot; in a way, at Newport Folk: It&amp;#039;s not uncommon for an act to be booked for one of the festival&amp;#039;s smaller stages, only to have their popularity spike with a lucrative album release and a coveted main-stage spot the following year. This has been the case for the The Avett Brothers, who headlined the Newport Folk Festival Saturday night. Since showing up with little more than a guitar, a banjo, a solo kick-drum, and an upright bass for their first set at Newport Folk, the Avett operation has brought in more members and an elaborate stage setup that now includes strings, a piano, and a drum kit in full. Songs off I and Love and You, their major-label debut and the record that took them from a niche genre to mainstream success, received a proper introduction with an eager crowd at the big stage at Newport Folk in 2009. &amp;quot;Down with the Shine&amp;quot; from last year&amp;#039;s universally lauded The Carpenter was played for the first time on the Newport Folk stage two months prior to the record&amp;#039;s release. Though material from the yet-to-be-titled Avett Brothers record dropping early this fall didn&amp;#039;t make its way into their headlining set this year, Scott Avett, Seth Avett, Bob Crawford, and Joe Kwon joined us backstage for a stripped-down performance of the never-before-heard &amp;quot;Morning Song&amp;quot; before talking to us about the new stuff, the old stuff, and where exactly they&amp;#039;ve gone \u2014 and continue to go \u2014 from this fort right here. ESQUIRE.COM: How have things changed for you since the first time you played the Newport Folk Festival? SCOTT AVETT: With Newport, I was saying to Bob, &amp;quot;We can&amp;#039;t build it up to be more than something it already is.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s been tough shows here sometimes, but we&amp;#039;ve actually had a great show every time we&amp;#039;ve been here.  SETH AVETT: As soon as you get here, any intimidation factor just completely washes away. It&amp;#039;s just a bunch of smiling faces. It&amp;#039;s a friendly atmosphere where you don&amp;#039;t feel like you have to live up to any legend, because there&amp;#039;s no one here vocalizing any intimidation in any way. BOB CRAWFORD: Something that&amp;#039;s always struck me about Newport is that the history is very present wherever you go. You see pictures of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez around, but the festival isn&amp;#039;t hung up on its history \u2014 it&amp;#039;s proud of it. I remember seeing the David Wax Museum right outside there at that tent bringing down the house, as though that were their big coming-out here, as did Calexico. Newport Folk just seems like it continues to be relevant.  ESQ: Do you prefer to play outdoor festivals like this? What&amp;#039;s the perfect venue for an Avett Brothers show? SCOTT AVETT: I don&amp;#039;t think we can make speculations about how shows will be based on the setting. I was just thinking in terms of what Seth was saying \u2014 over the years we&amp;#039;ve had this realization about how privileged we are to be onstage. Some nights, you have the urge to complain about something. In settings like this, these open-air beautiful settings, it&amp;#039;s not as hard to remember that you&amp;#039;ve been offered this opportunity for whatever reason. ESQ: Well, context is everything, especially when your songs carry the kind of emotional weight that yours do. SCOTT AVETT: Sometimes a dive is the best place for it. ESQ: So, which Avett Brothers song is a song most appropriate for a dive bar? SCOTT AVETT: &amp;quot;Yardsale&amp;quot; seems to be a most appropriate song for that kind of place. SETH AVETT: I like when we do a gospel song in a dive bar. It does this weird thing where some folks have an averse reaction to it \u2014 &amp;quot;Is this the place for that?&amp;quot; \u2014 while some folks are like, &amp;quot;This is the perfect place for that!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s always fun to sing those there. Or in a casino. SCOTT AVETT: Yeah, in a casino, too. You can always make that juxtaposition happen.  ESQ: A song like &amp;quot;If It&amp;#039;s the Beaches,&amp;quot; where you&amp;#039;re begging for the woman you love to reconsider leaving you \u2014 I like when you perform that in front of a bigger crowd, mostly because we feel like we&amp;#039;re being let in on something we don&amp;#039;t already know. SCOTT AVETT: We always want to have that. That&amp;#039;s great to hear. ESQ: You share a lot of your personal lives with your fans, be it Joe&amp;#039;s food blog, or Bob&amp;#039;s work to raise awareness for his daughter Hallie&amp;#039;s ongoing fight against cancer, or even just a video of Scott trying to play the piano while his daughter Eleanor comes in and tries to get him to stop. Where&amp;#039;s the limit when it comes to how much you reveal? SCOTT AVETT: We keep songs under our belt now longer than we used to. We used to literally finish a song and play it that night. SETH AVETT: We wouldn&amp;#039;t think twice about it. We know now that that&amp;#039;s not appropriate to our ages and our professional interest. SCOTT AVETT: It&amp;#039;s not best for the songs, because we&amp;#039;ve learned that they take longer to develop. It could have a great melody and be produced well and really get you dancing, but a good, lyrical song that&amp;#039;s torn open and exposed? That was very important to me. I think we have to be realistic about how much we want to expose. If you have a child involved, you want to protect that child. That&amp;#039;s your job. ESQ: I&amp;#039;m sure parenthood has changed a lot about what you do. And hey, these songs are like children in a way \u2014 they&amp;#039;re a legacy you&amp;#039;re leaving. SCOTT AVETT: Yeah, those songs aren&amp;#039;t your children anymore because you have children. They take a backseat to the children, and that&amp;#039;s bizarre. I&amp;#039;ve done art talks where I&amp;#039;ve told a room full of parents that my paintings were as important as a child, and that was the biggest mound of horse shit I&amp;#039;ve ever said in my entire life. I remember offending someone, and someone defending what I said, and I just didn&amp;#039;t know what I was talking about! ESQ: Over the years, you&amp;#039;ve made some changes in your live show beyond lineup additions and instrumentation. What sorts of changes make your 2013 set different than previous performances at Newport Folk? BOB CRAWFORD: Scott and I were talking about how this is a new chapter for us in our career. We&amp;#039;ve been playing together for more than 10 years, and we&amp;#039;ve been through many incarnations of what we are as a band. We feel like we&amp;#039;ve got a great team that&amp;#039;s well-manned, that we&amp;#039;re onto the next incarnation.  SCOTT AVETT: We&amp;#039;re armed, and we&amp;#039;re in the beginning stages of trying to wrap our heads around what we&amp;#039;re capable of in the set. Logistically, there are two new additions: We played for the first time last night with someone on keys and someone on drums. There&amp;#039;s a lot of rock-and-roll possibilities around the drum kit that haven&amp;#039;t been as available to us in the past, so we&amp;#039;re very much at the beginning of a section of our time together as a band where a lot of worlds are opening up. It&amp;#039;ll take off some of the shackles of some of the songs we can&amp;#039;t write. I think about us playing here in the past, and it feels very similar to me. ESQ: Newport Folk is different from other festivals, in that it&amp;#039;s got a legacy of some of the most legendary moments in American music history. Has that affected how you perform here? SCOTT AVETT: I think we rarely think about that. SETH AVETT: Anytime you start getting a real tangible relationship with something that&amp;#039;s been blown up to a legendary status, you just realize that every part of it is just people getting ahead. If you go to the Village Vanguard, it&amp;#039;s just a room \u2014 it&amp;#039;s the people there that make it a special thing, that make the possibility for it to be something legendary. We think about what it&amp;#039;s like right now while making connections with folks in the moment. That&amp;#039;s the only way we can make sense of it. Not to diminish anything about a legend, but look at Dylan: Dylan went electric, and that&amp;#039;s a story we all know. But for the man himself, he doesn&amp;#039;t think about that show, probably \u2014 in his memory it&amp;#039;s probably just another show. The personal relationships we have with shows, art, whatever, they are our own, and they become legendary because of our own perspective. Right now, I&amp;#039;m thinking of seeing the Foo Fighters in 1995 at the Ritz in Raleigh. To me, that&amp;#039;s on par with Dylan going electric. EXCLUSIVE: Watch Avett Brothers Perform &amp;#039;Morning Song&amp;#039; &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/interviews/a24034/avett-brothers-interview-newport/>