AVTT/PTT (The Avett Brothers & Mike Patton) LP

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180 gram sunspot vinyl. 

The debut album from AVTT/PTTN, a collaboration between The Avett Brothers and Mike Patton. In 2019, Scott Avett and Mike Patton began communicating after Avett mentioned his admiration of Patton in an interview which caught the eye of Patton's management team. Patton told Avett the door was open for collaboration should Avett ever be interested. A year or so later, Avett sent some song demos to Patton that blew him away. The trading of songs and sounds continued between The Avett Brothers and Mike Patton until several years later, they had a full album of songs—and AVTT/PTTN was born.

 

Scott and Seth Avett are the brothers behind the chart-topping, Grammy-nominated band The Avett Brothers. Mike Patton is the journeyman rock icon best known as the frontman of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. These three are proud to unveil a new album and project. Together, they are AVTT/PTTN.

None of the three members of this freshly minted collective quite remember how they first made contact. Mike seems to remember receiving a letter from Scott, and as a fan of the Avett Brothers’ records, he decided to respond. Scott doesn’t remember this; he and Seth seem to recall talking about their love of Mr. Bungle and Faith No More on a podcast. Maybe that’s how the first spark happened? None of them are particularly curious or interested in their origin story. Somehow they all found themselves on a two-way street of mutual musical admiration, and through an open line of frequent communication, an album was born. That’s what matters.

AVTT/PTTN finds these three kindred spirits on equal footing as songwriters and collaborators, no one party seeming to hold greater creative influence over the other. “Dark Night of My Soul,” the album’s opening song, begins with gentle fingerpicked acoustic guitar that soon leads to the voices of Scott and Seth melding with Mike’s seasoned croon for a velvety three-part harmony. Throughout the record, there’s an ease and musical seamlessness to how these first-time collaborators lock in with each other.

The creative genesis for these songs was, of all things, Scott’s busy schedule coaching his child’s soccer team. With entire afternoons off the table for any sort of creative work, he developed a rigid two-hour songwriting schedule for himself every morning.

“There was a discipline—a pattern that was developing with me,” Scott said. “There wasn’t a plan for where these songs were heading, whether they were Avett Brothers songs or something else.”

Serendipitously, Mike reached out to the brothers around this same time. “I had been wandering for a while, knowing that somehow I would find an outlet that was more personal—an environment that was more peaceful,” Mike said. “On a personal level, this project came at a point in my life when I was looking to pivot.”

With the idea of a collaboration floated, Scott sent his longtime hero a demo. “It came back to me turned inside out and upside down,” Scott said. “I sent another one and I thought, ‘This is what art is. This is what making is supposed to be: in secret and with no ambition.”

That feeling of contentment about the creative process was mutual. After toying with his own very different material to send to the Avetts, Mike set his work aside as soon as he heard what Scott had been working on. “His songs meant so much, immediately, in a visceral way,” Mike said. “I knew what to do with them. It was like, OK, this is the way.”

All of the AVTT/PTTN songs were created in a kind of assembly line: Scott would send a sketch to Mike, then Mike would send his updated version over to Seth. Over two decades into The Avett Brothers’ recording career, this method of songwriting was a complete novelty. “There would normally never be a step between Scott working on something and then me hearing it,” Seth said. “I’ve gotten into this way of thinking that I know Scott musically. This music coming from Scott and Mike together completely changed Scott’s voice to me.”

“Heaven’s Breath” is one such example. The driving and fuzzy rock’n’roll track introduces a heaviness to the album and showcases a new edge to Scott’s voice. Mike, meanwhile, delivers a signature dynamic vocal performance—one that Seth likens to Mr. Bungle’s “Retrovertigo.” It was the first song Scott began writing with the intention of it being an AVTT/PTTN song—a first attempt to “crank the saw a little bit.” That heft looms again on “The Ox Driver’s Song,” a usually stripped-back folk traditional warped by the trio into a scuzzy, stomping monolith.

Both Mike and Seth agreed that there was an unromantic, workmanlike approach to creating this music. “We’re so fortunate to get something that’s like, ‘Hey, you want to add something to this?’ So you just start chopping wood. It’s not mystical,” Seth said.

It was an additive creative process in nature, but Mike found that he wanted to avoid weighing the music down with unnecessary spectacle. “I have a tendency to kind of overdo things,” Mike said. “I could go on in the studio forever, and some of my projects have suffered from that curse. This music is not about that at all. This music does not have that in its soul. It’s about bare essentials and making them meaningful—letting the ingredients really speak.”

After the secret labor of making AVTT/PTTN was finished, the emotional weight of the project—its beauty and its vulnerability—finally landed on all three of them. In Mike, the Avett brothers had found a collaborator with whom they could cut the small talk and dig deep right away. They made music born from mutual respect, trust, and an inherent understanding of where each person was coming from. “Mike’s part of our DNA, like the fabric of our youth,” Scott said. If you flash back decades to a Mr. Bungle show in North Carolina, you could very well find a young Scott and Seth Avett in the crowd. “Literally, we studied him. He’s a dear friend now, but when we were younger, I was imitating him.”

After the album was finished, this long-distance project materialized in the real world—a North Carolina kitchen, to be exact. For the first time, the three men sang in a room together, each of them blown away by how their harmonies locked into place. All three of them talk about this record and new band as a manifestation of the deepest kind of friendship. “It’s like we were pen pals with this older brother that we hadn’t seen in forever,” Scott said.

Mike sees his role in AVTT/PTTN in a similar (but darkly funny) light: “My peculiar challenge in this was to become a long distant cousin. A brother that was orphaned. Maybe they kept him in the chicken coop or some shit. They brought him out years and years later.”

TRACK LIST:
Dark Night of My Soul
To Be Known
Heaven's Breath
Too Awesome
Disappearing
Eternal Love
The Ox Driver's Song
The Things I Do
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