2-13-11 - "Head Full Of Doubt/Road Full Of Promise" ~ The Avett Brothers

In light of one of my favorite bands making their Grammy debut tonight, I can't resist posting this song.  When I first heard of The Avett Brothers, in 2008, they were doing 200+ shows a year, in bars and small venues across the country, busting their tails and leaving everything they had on the stage every night.  They'd already been at it since 2000, and were on the cusp of breaking through with their latest album, Emotionalism, which combined their punk/folk madness with just enough pop to draw in a new demographic of listeners.  I saw them at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in June of 2008, and fell in love within the first minute of their electrifying performance (which ended nearly two hours later with thunderstorms chasing the crowd away.)  By late 2009, with the release of "I and Love and You", produced by Rick Rubin, TAB was in the process of exploding into the consciousness of legions of new people.  And now, just over a year later, they're sharing a stage with some of the biggest names in the history of music, and some of the biggest stars of today.  It couldn't have happened to a better group of guys.


The song they performed tonight is one of my favorites of all time.  It's very simple, yet very poignant, and if you look up the lyrics on songmeanings.net, you can see in the comments that different people draw different meanings from it.  My take is that the author is struggling with the constraints of society, with years of going along with the crowd, not living according to what he knows to be true.  He's had big dreams, but been scared to take the leap and chase them.  He's decided not to live life as a mindless drone, just going with the flow, doing as he's told... but hey, give it a listen and come to your own conclusions.

"There's a darkness upon you that's flooded in light,
in the fine print they tell you what's wrong and what's right;
and it flies by day and it flies by night,
and I'm frightened by those who don't see it...
...decide what to be and go be it..."