Swept Away: The Avett Brothers Broadway Musical - 2025

This sounds like a joke, right? Like a rejected Portlandia sketch or something? But no, it is absolutely real, as I recently discovered when looking at their full discography in Spotify. And it’s bad!

I’ve been a fan of the Avett Brothers ever since I saw them play in a barn at the Edinboro Folk Festival in 2006. They had a sort of bluegrass-by-the-way-of-screamo thing going on that was like anything I had ever seen, and they absolutely killed. This was my one moment of “hipster cred”, where I got to go back home and tell my friends that there was this band they HAD to check out, well before they were well-known. I loved their first four albums but started to fall off when they signed with a major and teamed up with Rick Rubin. Their early stuff is foundational to my musical education and I love to dip back into it.

So imagine my surprise when I discover that they went and made a full-on musical, featuring songs heavily pulled from their early catalog! I spun the whole thing on a road trip and came away very disappointed. It starts promisingly, where lyrics are changed to set up a story about ill-fated mariners (their second album, Mignionette, is named after a ship that wrecked, forcing the crew to resort to cannibalism to stay alive), but once it gets rolling, there’s not much to the plot. Some guys go on a boat, it crashes, they die. Along the way, they sing a bunch of Avett Brothers songs, which—to be fair—are often about boats or death. But it’s a pretty threadbare skeleton to hang a musical on. Mama Mia has a real plot, at least (and, it should be said, female cast members, bafflingly absent from this show).

Maybe it works better with the rest of the script, but what I was really excited for was to hear how the music might be adapted for a Broadway music ensemble and professional stage singers. This is where it really fell apart for me. The lead has a vocal timbre uncannily exactly between that of brothers Scott and Seth, and his rural North Carolina accent is delightfully over-the-top, but the vocals and music both struck me as very uninspired. The Avetts are virtuosos harmonizers, having had two decades as a band (plus another two just as brothers) to come up with a unique vocal style that makes use of clever intervals and very specific vocal flourishes. To hear what I know were thrown-off takes be recorded as a Book and sung very faithfully is weird, and the guitar and banjo parts similarly felt uninspired. The whole thing had Disney live-action remake energy, if I’m being honest.\

In the pit, it sounds like we have the instrumentation the brothers use for their live shows, plus maybe a few more violins. The guitar and banjo players are too rigid, and the whole thing feels like it needed to move more in the direction of a traditional score to work. Some artists lend themselves to covers. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen wrote songs that had good bones, and other artists could combine the base layer with their own style. My worry with the Brothers A is that their songs are too tied up in their unique style to make it easy to extract the underlying structure and make it your own. Just like it’s impossible to do a good cover of Stairway to Heaven, most of their ouvre is songs that only they can play. For a minute I imagined that what I wanted instead was a show where they play in front of a full symphony orchestra, like Ben Folds or Gregory Alan Isakov, but then I remembered that they record and tour with a piano and half of a string section, so they’re kind of already doing that.

My friend watched Across the Universe, the Beatles musical film, and his only comment coming out was “idk, I wish I had just listened to the Beatles instead.” That’s how I feel here.

So I didn’t like Swept Away: The Avett Brothers Musical, but I’m also fascinated with it. It’s such a bizarre cultural object (and it’s also a sign that you are getting old when the punkish band you enjoyed as a teen does something like this). It’s sort of special when something that’s ill-advised from the start makes it across the finish line anyway. I don’t think it’s my last time listening. If you enjoyed the Carolina Twins as much as I did, I encourage you to check it out too! We can compare notes.

Originally posted to LinkedIn