The Devil Makes Three formed in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was perfect. Starting with early blues in the indie rock hotbed of Olympia, WA at the turn of the millennium, Pete Bernhard and Cooper McBean took their neo-primitive string band sound to Santa Cruz, CA, a city of punk and jam bands. That’s where, in 2001, they added Lucia Turino on upright bass and christened their trio with a lyric from a traditional folk song that was on the then-new O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
“People were like, what are you doing?,” says singer, songwriter and guitarist Berhnard in Episode 314 of The String. “When we started, it was difficult to get a show.” But with patience and hardscrabble touring, the market began to come to them. They were ahead of their time, on the same timeline and with a similar if darker ethos as Old Crow Medicine Show. But while we in Nashville are vividly aware of Old Crow’s rise and renown, we tend to hear less about how and why the DMT has become an institution. Now, 23 years into their journey, they play Red Rocks and the Fillmore and still regularly sell out 1,000+ seat halls. The formula seems to be sturdy songs that invite group singing and grooves that stir up dancing like you see on the jam band circuit.
“We never thought that it would be this long of a career. It's really amazing,” Bernhard told me from his home in southern Vermont by Zoom. “We had a very slow and steady career, and a lot of it was very much do-it-yourself and grassroots, you know? And that's sort of how we grew as a band. We never could have imagined that it would be what it is now.”
I met Bernhard once before, along with his bandmates, in Nashville in 2016. I interviewed them to write the bio for Redemption & Ruin, the only album of cover songs the Devil Makes Three has released. And it was revelatory, because it helped explain the foundation of their distinctive blend of American traditions. They drew songs of Saturday night and Sunday morning from Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters and Tampa Red, and made them their own with the aid of some ringer guests like Jerry Douglas, Duane Eddy and Emmylou Harris. From this I took away an understanding of the esteem they’d built up among leading roots artists and their determination to see old blues, country and gospel with clear eyes, in all their ragged reality.
But they are a songwriting band, and Bernhard is the lynchpin. Leading up to Spirits, he had a lot to process. “This album for me was very emotional, because I lost a lot of people in the last, I don't know, five years. I lost my best childhood friend, my mother, and my brother in that time period. And I think the album was a way for me to work through all of that.” But it also took a nudge from Ted Hutt, the British-born producer who’s worked with bands of a similar ilk - Dropkick Murphys, Old Crow, and the Violent Femmes - as well as DMT’s 2018 disc Chains Are Broken.
“He was like, ‘Look, we haven't made a record in a long time, you know? Just send me some demos,’” Bernhard says. And that simple ask unlocked a string of ideas. “It was really because of his wanting to make a record that I started writing. This was very spontaneous. It had a lot of the feelings of what was happening now, which isn't always the case with a record. Sometimes it's seven years of work, you know what I mean?”
So Pete wasn’t sitting on a pile of songs but on a pile of feelings and questions about how to best live with loss and how to be mindful of the time we all have left. Once he got on a roll, a collection of vivid if sometimes uncomfortable songs emerged. Opening tracks “Lights On Me” and “Spirits” poke around in the liminal space between life and death, where we can hear the voices of those we loved and lost, and where we prepare ourselves for the great beyond. Elsewhere, the album’s concerns are more earthly, with the Woody Guthrie populism of “Hard Times” and “The Dark Gets The Best of You,” a song that seems to allude to the mob-like politics that’s surged in the country. Cooper McBean contributed a couple, including the sardonic but not unserious song “I Love Doing Drugs,” drawn from his journey to sobriety in the past few years.
Death, says Berhnard, “is in the songwriting tradition that I love. It's part of it to talk about death, and I think that's always been a big attraction for me - just to talk about these things that we really just do not understand, and try to understand them. This album more so than ever before, and I think that's just because it was such a big part of my life.”
As we wrap I tell Pete that I especially like the record’s redemptive closer “Holding On,” and he says it was a collaboration with Boaz Vilozny, a former drummer with DMT and a regular contributor to their repertoire. Pete took what Boaz had written and, with permission, expanded it into the inspiring anthem of resilience it became.
“Someday, everything I love will be gone
I don't believe in chance, I don't believe in fate
I just believe in holdin' on”
