Seth Avett says Iowa is 'interwoven' with songster Greg Brown, reflects on 'Swept Away' musical

Seth Avett remembers Hinterland Music Festival 2021, where he performed with his brother Scott Avett and their folk-rock band alongside acts Old Crow Medicine Show and Tyler Childers.

It was celebratory, Avett said. Folks were eager to return to a connection as the COVID-19 pandemic cast its long shadow over the previous year.

It was family-friendly.

And one of the band members contracted COVID-19 right after the festival.

“He was fine,” Avett said. “It was just an inconvenience. That show, it felt like a breath of fresh air after sort of coughing for a couple of years.”

The Grammy Award-nominated act out of North Carolina will perform at Wells Fargo Arena on Aug. 25 at 7 p.m. The Avett Brothers gained mainstream attention for their 2009 album “I And Love And You” and are the subject of the 2017 documentary “May It Last: A Portrait of The Avett Brothers.”

Avett spoke to the Des Moines Register from his home in North Carolina, where he discussed being more open to experimenting with music, Iowa songster Greg Brown and the Avett Brothers’ involvement in a musical.

Note: Answers edited for clarity and length.

Des Moines Register: It would be remiss of me not to ask about last year’s album “Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown.” As you know, he’s from Iowa. What was it like to explore his discography, and what about Brown’s work drew you to it to begin with?

Seth Avett: The exploring of his discography is a process that’s been going on for over 25 years, so it was really sort of an acknowledgement of a connection with his poetry and with his work. It wasn't even really that much of a conscious decision. It was more or less just admitting what it is and using his work as a template for learning and exploring and the way that record started was sort of an attempt at spending off days on the road in a healthy way. It's kind of easy to go into some darker places when you're out, you're far away from home and you feel disconnected from everything … I was like, "I want to walk away from these days with some discovery," and Greg’s songs are just imprinted on me and in my heart and so I took it as an opportunity to do some interpreting — some obvious interpreting to my mind — and to use it as a discipline, take the mic stands, take some good microphones and a little computer and interface setup so I could build a studio in the hotel room in a relatively short period of time, spend a few hours on a song and then just move on. After awhile, I was like, "This might be an interesting thing to share," and it went from there. Iowa, it is completely interwoven into his sensibility and to Greg's humor and the gravity of his poetry and his voice. It could not be from anywhere else. I think it just comes from that beautiful Midwestern wisdom and the blue collar storytelling that's just very special to Iowa.

Des Moines Register: You and Scott have spent the past two decades releasing albums and I’m curious about how your music has evolved in that time span. Where do you find yourself now compared to just 10 years ago?

Seth Avett: I feel like I am more open to the experiment than I've ever been. I feel like I have less allergies to different textures and different processes than I ever have, which I think is a benefit for exploration, for finding the thing, for that sort of crystalline-golden-moment-of-discovery. I feel like it's really important to discard the allergies I used to have. Maybe I had an allergy to a certain combination of instruments. Maybe I didn't want to hear a saxophone or I thought the flute couldn't work or I'm not open to a keyboard or I’m not open to a drum machine. I realize now more than I ever have that it's not the saxophone. It's not the drum machine. It's not even the production. It's the song and it's the reality that you don't know what you’re doing. You think that you can guide this thing, but this a conversation with God, this is a conversation with providence, the mystery and the best way to ruin it is to think that you know what is going to happen and in that way, musicality and creative arts are no different than the blossoming of a marriage or of a friendship. You’re going to really create a rocky road if you try to dominate the process.

Des Moines Register: “Swept Away,” the musical with music and lyrics from the Avett Brothers, premiered last year. What’s next for the production?

Seth Avett: What's next is (Washington) D.C. and the sort of unspoken goal for any and all musicals, you hope the road leads to Broadway. That's the hope. But whether it leads there or not, there's a deeper hope that the same thing will happen that happens with our shows just in a different light, where there's a real connection through some heartfelt narrative.

Des Moines Register: How did it feel to see “Swept Away” come to life after all these years of work towards it?

Seth Avett: It’s been a very beautiful and very surreal experience that is quite different from anything I've experienced as a writer or as a performer, or even as a fan of music, really. What we saw happen through John Logan's writing initially was just a whole slew of synapses firing one to another that I didn't see before. That I didn't think possible before. To my mind, the records are pretty linear. The songs themselves are pretty linear. All of them are attached to my life or Scott's life, to our growing up and our true autobiographical experiences, even if they’re through a filter of abstraction, there's a connection and it's sort of inherently chronological. Then to have John basically see connections from one song to another that creates the new chronology in a fictional narrative, it was just bizarre. I just couldn't believe how some of the lyrics, how specifically they related to this other story taken from one context and set perfectly as if they were custom built for a different context. It's just been really mind-blowing, really beautiful and it's a continuing sensation. It's not something that has left me yet. It's been in different chapters and at different stages of the development of this thing. It just keeps getting renewed.

Visit Iowa Events Center's website to purchase tickets for the concert.

Paris Barraza covers entertainment, lifestyle and arts at the Des Moines Register. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @ParisBarraza.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: The Avett Brothers return to Iowa with Wells Fargo Arena concert