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The Avett Brothers: Hot Tea And Honey

Seth and Scott Avett spend a good chunk of their lives on one tour bus or another, so asking them to perform in one isn't all that different from asking them to perform in one of their own living rooms. They may be far away from their native North Carolina — to be exact, they're captured here in a Camden, N.J., parking lot in conjunction with the XPoNential Music Festival — but the setting is cozy enough for Seth Avett to brew tea before performing.

The Avett Brothers will soon spend a lot more time on that bus: The band's new album, The Carpenter, comes out Sept. 11. Naturally, when asked to play a song from the record, the Avetts picked its first single, "Live and Die" — a sweetly hooky jam which lends itself perfectly to the pair's acoustic-guitar-and-banjo interplay. The resulting performance is five minutes of hot tea and honey, perfect for New Jersey parking lots and all points west.

Credits

Producer: Mito Habe-Evans; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Second Videographer/Production Assistant: Nick Michael; Coordinator: Saidah Blount; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins

Copyright 2012 XPN

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)