G-Love & Special Sauce
Like a classic novel it all starts at a chance meeting one rainy, fall night in Boston, when fellow
torchbearers of new roots Americana, Seth and Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers invite Garret
Dutton aka G. Love onto their tour bus after a gig to share their love of back road blues. This
mutual affinity leads to G. Love sharing the stage with The Avett Brothers at a summer music
festival both are playing. The collaboration, sounding so natural and right, deepens, so much so,
eventually G. Love asks Scott and Sett Avett to not only play on his new record, he asks them to
produce it as well.
Inspired by this shared musical heritage, the result is Fixin’ To Die, a collection of rearranged
traditionals, a classic cover, and a slew of G. Love originals, many simmering for over a decade,
all sharing a common goal: to strip away all pretense and capture the original spirit and sound G.
Love has cultivated over his entire career but never fully embraced until now.
It takes a lot of hard work to speak the truth. And, in an age where most music has been
regulated to countless ones and zeros it’s even harder to make honest music without all the usual
trappings. On his fourth Brushfire release, G. Love has left the hip-hop blues, a genre he has
helped define, if for only a moment to make arguably his most sincere and candid record to date.
As Scott Avett says, “There’s a little bit of this record on all the previous G. Love records, you
just had to look for it. This is the record we all knew he should make and he could make, but
again, he had to open himself to the core to make it. That’s the difference. Ultimately the songs
tell us what needs to happen; it’s just our job to be prepared and identify that. Let’s just get in
there and see what the room evokes, and it was just go, go, go, which is the way we like it. I
mean the whole session was cut in just over a week.”
As G. Love confesses,
“It was an emotional recording session and I was truly blown away by the level of focus, care
and passion Scott & Seth brought to it. We felt connected the entire time – it was instantaneous.
It always feels like crunch time in the studio but it never felt like that with these guys. It was a
team thing, no drama, no agenda. It was a tremendously positive and encouraging experience.
This is the most inspired I’ve ever felt making a record – let’s just put it that way. I’m still
buzzing about it.”
It’s easy to hear why. Produced and engineered in the inspiring sanctuary of Echo Mountain
Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, the sessions underlying pulse is unabashedly, 100% pure
and genuine country blues. From the ragged jangle of its opener “Milk & Sugar” and floorboard
stomp of Bukka White’s “Fixin’ To Die,” over the loping lilt of “Home” and longing for “Katie
Miss,” through the greasy fried “Get Goin’” and moonshine reverb of “Heaven,” to the hip shake
hootenanny in Paul Simon’s infamous kiss off “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” G. Love and
The Averts deliver a life lesson in how to find a song’s sweet spot.
Best of all Fixin’ to Die is a true divergence from G. Love’s previous records and the function
and preparedness of a dogged work ethic by some of music’s hardest working artists who earned
their stripes the old-fashion way, veracious songs, road weary odometers, and sweat stained live
shows. Yet, with G. Love and The Avetts, it’s more than just stamina and gumption to sound
authentic and profound. It’s the ability to distill the sepia toned essence of the time honored past
and use it to take the risks needed to forge the future.
Scott Avett remarks, “For me, at a time when I was really into heavy music and leaning that
way further and further, G. Love really opened a door that let me see another side of music that
was really clever, good vibe, great melodically, great lyrically, and not always about the fight
of typical hard core stuff. It baffles Seth and I that the roots world has not just taken G. Love
and catapulted him into the sky; he’s a king of that world and they don’t even know it. If John
Hammond is, he is; if Bob Dylan is, he is too.”
As an insatiable musical omnivore, G. Love somehow manages to synthesize his iconic
influences by shedding their layers to find that harmonic convergence where song and listener
bare their souls to each other speaking nothing the raw boned truth. On Fixin’ to Die G. Love
has done just that; he has mined the sonic ore of his heroes only to emerge with a fresh lode of
precious stones. Yet remarkably, what makes this session such a rarity in today’s music world
is the lack of polish that makes these songs truly shine. By allowing the infectious simplicity of
these songs to stand in all their ragged glory, G. Love has paid the greatest respect to his muses
and the collaborative spirit.
“It’s a nod back and a step forward. It’s a return to the roots of what made me G. Love in the
first place. The music I fell in love with and learned as a teenager, which is such a developmental
time in one’s life, but especially pivotal in your music life. That when you decide you wanna
play guitar right? I was 16 when I discovered folk music, the blues, and Bob Dylan and that was
simply the backbone for everything that followed for me musically. I mean this is my second
decade as a recording and touring musician. I’m looking into the next phase of my career, and
although at heart I’ve always been a roots musician I want to emphasis it more now. I want to
carry on the tradition not in a nostalgic way, but by keeping it fresh, real and unexpected, and we
did it with this session.”
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