True Sadness: Seth Avett's Brutal Ballad of Love, Hate, and Divorce

The Avett Brothers get romantically forensic on their ninth record—and their most personal effort yet. PLUS: An exclusive look at True Sadness, featuring behind-the-scenes footage with producer Rick Rubin.


Without intending to do so, the Avett Brothers have spent the better part of two decades quietly perfecting the art of the breakup soundtrack.

Though they're best known for leading the advent of folk-inflected rock 'n' roll, the ballad—specifically those of the sad, self-flogging, "November Rain"-gone-country stripe—is as much their specialty as their sound, which was initially dubbed "grunge-grass" when Seth and Scott Avett started embracing both an Appalachian grip on the banjo and an appreciation for '90s alt-radio fodder in the early aughts. "If It's the Beaches," off 2006's The Gleam EP, has a distraught Scott refusing to accept the end of a relationship as an answering machine message he can't bear to erase is drowned out by his desperate pleas for reconciliation. "The Ballad of Love and Hate," off Emotionalism, the 2007 full-length that followed, is another ventricle punch, though this time Seth leads a sad-eyed waltz through a gentle romantic parable. Even "I And Love And You," the title track off of the 2009 Rick Rubin-produced album that brought them out of small club obscurity and into the mainstream spotlight, balances scarred sentiments with hopeful, soaring instrumentation. "Three words that became hard to say / I and Love and You" is a line that makes for one of the strongest sing-along moments in their live show, a tear-glistened lull in between the rapid fire bluegrass jams and electrified rock excursions.

For every charming ("Will You Return?"), rambunctious ("Kick Drum Heart"), or uplifting ("Morning Song") tune for the congregation of the stadium, there's a sad one that peels the listener's heart into pulpy, ever-bleeding halves just as it did to the brother who wrote it. It was only a matter of time before the Avett Brothers arrived at True Sadness given the emotional compass of their songwriting: their path may take them down comical detours, cheerful turns, or hurt and angry bends, but their magnetic north tends to point toward the house of the heartbroken.

Going through tough times—if that means a breakup, if that means a loss of some sort, perhaps the sickness or the death of someone who you love, a family member—there are all these tragedies that we live.

This is where they were at when they started to write True Sadness—or where Seth was at, anyway. In March, he penned a letter to Avett fans announcing the June 24 release date of the album, detailing how the line separating their domestic lives and their artistic pursuits had disintegrated in their 16 years of writing, recording, and touring behind their music. The Avett Brothers have always traded in first-person confessions and accounts—hell, "If It's the Beaches" isn't even the only song they've released that pulls from Scott's answering machine—but as Seth said in his letter, their songs before True Sadness "would show mere versions of ourselves" instead of straight autobiography, and the cloak of narrative ambiguity was left in tatters upon the mastering of their ninth studio album.


"I can say that for me, going through tough times—if that means a breakup, if that means a loss of some sort, perhaps the sickness or the death of someone who you love, a family member—there are all these tragedies that we live," says Seth of the record's themes. He speaks in long, sweeping lines, as though the route of the conversation were mapped out before him in the veins of his eyelids. "That's what the phrase 'true sadness,' is about: Eventually you're going to have to find some resolve within the reality that part of life is suffering, processing loss, and letting go. In a breakup kind of situation, certainly I've had music that I've leaned on and used as a tool—either to feel like I have company or that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. If it's useful, you use it. Every song, every voice, every artistic endeavor, I feel that if you mine deep enough and find your honest voice, then the function of the song—or the usefulness of the song—will find its way into the experiences of other people."


True Sadness succeeds in this and in the way it invokes the darkest recesses of their catalog. The rousing lead-off track on the album and the single "Ain't No Man" benefits from the buoyancy of hand claps and gang vocals, and "Smithsonian" is a twangy heir to The Carpenter and Magpie and the Dandelion, their most country-leaning efforts to date. But the most compelling moments on True Sadness lie in domestic discontent ("Satan Pulls the Strings"), the whispered contemplation of unrequited love ("I Wish I Was"), road-weary resignation ("Fisher Road to Hollywood"), and wry marriage post-mortems ("Divorce Separation Blues"). Instead of dressing up hurt in the dramatic flourish of metaphor, they spell their disappointment, rage, and utter defeat out in plain language. They find personal revolution in the relatable. Washing dishes is a mundane chore, but in "Divorce Separation Blues," scrubbing plates and paying bills are rendered clever coping mechanisms for Seth to employ as he makes sense of the rubble of his marriage.

Seth Avett during soundcheck before the Avett Brothers' Madison Square Garden performance, April 8, 2016
Elizabeth Griffin

"For a song like that, I had to get just far enough away from it before I could speak on it intellectually or artistically, but just close enough to it where it still hurt like a bastard to write it," he says of 'Divorce Separation Blues.' Though Seth is happily engaged to actress Jennifer Carpenter and the couple welcomed their son, Isaac, back in August, the divorce Seth refers to is the 2013 dissolution of his marriage to ex-wife Susan. "And that's a very specific moment, a very short time. You're either too far away from it to really understand what that real pain was, or you're too close to it to care at all about writing songs. It's a rough balance. I had to be in a very specific place where I could actually put the pen to the paper about it because that's the last thing you care about when you're going through a divorce. The last thing you're going to do is dishonor it by trying to turn it into something else. I'm not thinking about writing songs. I'm just thinking about surviving."


Did Seth Avett write his own—albeit delayed—breakup album with True Sadness? Yes and no: the album, as every other Avett Brothers release, is a work borne from the songwriting duo of Seth and Scott. Avett records are spliced between the distinctive narratives of each brother, and though Scott's marriage doesn't inform the majority of True Sadness' ballads this time around, his presence fortifies Seth's words, just as Seth's did on "If It's the Beaches" and deeply personal pieces like "A Father's First Spring," which Scott had written about his first months of parenthood. (The music video for "Ain't No Man" plays with this dichotomy, too: Before heading to the Asheville airport in the "Ain't No Man" video, Scott kisses his wife and kids—his actual wife and kids—goodbye.) 

"Every step we make as men, every step that we make in terms of learning what's valuable in this life, and what's worthwhile in terms of how you spend your time, and how you treat others—those are things we bring back to this project," Seth says of his relationship—and working relationship—with Scott. "The band just kind of happens to be the avenue that we take, and I think we would've been collaborators regardless, if it would've been in a band or laying brick or building bridges. We probably would've found a way to work together because we work together so, so well."

The emotional core of True Sadness is undeniably fueled by Seth's internal upheaval, though, and it's what brought them back to this not-so-sweet spot where they seem to tap into a melancholy genius nestled between the prolific and the painful. They wouldn't have gotten there had it not been for this familial tendency to rip shades of their most merciless, humiliating heartbreaks out of the ether of memory for the sake of their songwriting. The ballad has been the cornerstone of the Avett Brothers' career, but it's a foundation laid by the hands—and hearts, and answering machine tapes—of both brothers.

"If it's a song that doesn't have gold to back up the cash, so to speak—if it's a song where someone's not really telling the truth, if they're making the song to make money or because they're under contract or they want to be a famous person or rock star or heartthrob—they have no substance and can't really help a person," Seth says. "As long as we keep the focus simple—which is to be honest in the work, and to be honest with ourselves while we're making the work—then, yeah, maybe someone's able to parlay the emotion, sacrifice, love or whatever that went into the song and use it in their own lives. If we've taken the songs to where they needed to go and then went too far and brought them back to that perfect place for them to live, I feel like we've done well and we've achieved what we wanted to with each one. The record is certainly honest, and it's certainly surprising to me. I have no reservations about sharing anything on this record. If I reach a level of vulnerability that makes me a little uncomfortable, that's also a good sign."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Music