G. Love

By Jeannette Madden
Contributing Writer

They met one fall night in Boston when Seth and Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers invited Garret Dutton, a.k.a G. Love, onto their tour bus after a gig to share their love of back road blues. This led to G. Love sharing the stage with The Avett Brothers at a summer music festival both played. Eventually, it also led to G. Love asking Scott and Seth Avett to not only play on his new record but 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 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 and now embraced.

As Scott Avett said, “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.”

G. Love spoke with the Reader about Fixin’ To Die” and how he’ll be mixing in his new songs with his older fan favorites when he and Special Sauce play the Fargo Theatre on April 26.

“The goal of the record was for me to go back and make a blues roots record of the kind of material I was playing when I first started writing songs and getting my chops as a street performer,” he said. “That’s when I was heavily into the delta blues and heavily inspired by people like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed as songwriters. So, for me, this is kind of a second chance to make a first record.”

G. Love said that the response to the new album has “been amazing. I think a lot of people, especially fans of ours, they know that side of me because on every record of mine I definitely strip it down and do a solo acoustic tune and you can get that feeling of that raw, delta blues. I think it was a long time coming for me to do a whole record of that material. On top of that, the way we recorded it, very acoustic and all live performances. There’s nothing fancy about the recording, it’s just real, honest, straight up good music. I think for our fans that’s what they like about what I do. I think our audience gravitates more toward a rawer, more performance-orientated song. That’s what this record is top to bottom, minimalistic and honest and that’s something the fans are reacting to in a big way.”

“Whenever I think I’m getting a little ahead of myself or my focus is getting a little diluted musically,” G. Love said, I take it right back to the blues and to the learning process, which is to go through those old records and try and figure out how they’re playing it. I learn some of those old tunes and whenever I do that it’s like instant inspiration.

“You’ll be running around doing your own thing so much and sometimes you get so caught up in what you’re doing, whether you’re recording or rehearsing or touring or writing, that you have so much music going on that’s coming out of you, you don’t take the time to listen to the sources of where you’re coming from…I always get that inspiration back, you know?”

When asked about playing new songs during the tour, G. Love said that “The challenge of this tour is to take this rootsy stuff and work it into the set. As it is, we play about seven or eight tunes off the new record. We build from the blues to New Orleans funkier stuff to the hip hop blues. What I’m trying to do with this show is bring out the blues side of everything I’m doing, whether it’s the straight up hip hop stuff or not. People come up to me and say ‘That’s the best show I’ve ever seen you guys do and that was the first time I felt like you guys ever really did a show’ because we’re making a presentation in order to get the music across in a way that’s going to bring people into it.”

You can catch G. Love’s video for ‘Fixin’ To Die’ here and then you can catch it live at the Fargo Theatre on April 26, with The Belle Brigade opening.

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