A lot of musicians give what they get, especially when they spend more than half their lives on the road eating strange food, sleeping upright and trying to conjure the faces of loved ones in fogged up windows. The Avett Brothers, whether in a barn with 70 people or a theater with 7,000, go full tilt.

One year ago, they played Boise for the first time. The crowd was small compared with their usual diehard mob, but it didn't affect their delivery.

Through wild foot drumming, hard picking, plaintive chords and loaded spaces, the energy was constant, the messages earnest and raw. Sweat (and an enormous bra) flew one minute, and the next, everyone stood silent to hear Bob Crawford's fingers on his bass, the falsetto overtones of Joe Kwon's cello and the way Scott and Seth Avett blend now and then into a single voice.

Loyalists were sated and fans created that night, and The Avett Brothers are headed back to Boise this weekend, touring between sessions with legendary producer Rick Rubin.

With a new six-song acoustic EP, "The Second Gleam," Scott and Seth Avett remain in the spotlight. The "other brother," Bob Crawford, always stays just a little to the side. He's a bass player, after all, but he also is a mature artist who knows when to play just a few notes, or none at all. He talked with us from the road about Hall & Oates, musical furniture and reaching the "medium top."

Q: Your show last year was one of the best I've seen in recent memory.

A: Boise was great. It was one of those surprises. We'd never been there before or even within a couple hundred miles. To be so warmly greeted and have such a great show, it was one of those that really pumped us up.

Q: Knowing the kind of turnout you're used to, I was afraid the small crowd would discourage a return trip.

A: Playing your own town, your friends and family are there. You've been building it and building it and building it. There's all this expectation and weeks and months of preparation and hype. It absorbs your life in a lot of ways. But to go somewhere like Boise or Des Moines, Iowa, these places you don't get to go to very often, you show up there and it could be an odd night of the week, a work night. And then you have this show that kind of hits you from left of center. It's a different kind of special than playing in your own town for people who already love you.

Q: The project you're working on with Rick Rubin is sure to bring attention to the band on a major scale. What does that mean for your fan connection?

A: I can see where people lose contact. We played for 7,200 the other night. We can't talk to everyone anymore. It is not possible. We do it as much as we can, but you're on the road 200 days a year and need to play the show, get going, get some rest. I see both sides. I didn't start doing this until I was 30 years old, so I had a whole life of being a fan, going to shows, following bands, going to festivals. I am as much a fan as I am a musician, even more so because I don't know how much of a musician I really am. I do see where the bigger it gets, the connection, the personal one-on-one, can fall away.

Q: You have some crazy fans here. One of them wanted me to ask this question: 'Your house is burning down and you have to choose between your Tom T. Hall CDs and your Hall & Oates CDs. Which do you pick?'

A: I guess you just die in the house.

Q: You once aspired to be a news photographer. What pushed you into music?

A: In 2000, I decided to go back to school to study music and got accepted to study jazz guitar at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. The day after classes started for my first semester, I bought an upright bass on a whim. Within a week I was taking bass lessons in addition to studying jazz guitar. I learned so much about music theory and just about music. It was a dream come true to be able to get that far into something you love.

I was playing in bands in New Jersey and I came down South and was playing in bands, but I knew music only so far. It's like wanting to speak a language but only knowing so many words, verbs, phrases, tenses. I wanted to go to school so I could know it.

Q: And what turned you from guitar to upright bass?

A: Ironically, I was going with a friend of mine to a vintage guitar shop in Concord where the brothers are from, but I didn't know them at the time. I bought an old Gretsch hollow body, and the tremolo system wasn't working quite right so I took it back. I looked around the store and saw this bass.

Q: What attracted you to it?

A: I lived in a house with several guys, and we had this beautiful back porch. On Saturday nights there would always be people playing guitar and singing and such, and the bass player wouldn't have anything to play in the acoustic situation. So I figured, they can use it and, at the very least, it will be a piece of furniture that's really cool looking. I'll hang my coat on it. I got it home and started messing with it and felt, literally, akin to it. Like, man, there's something here. So I started pursuing it, and next thing I knew everybody wanted me to play music with it. I became the most popular guy in town. I didn't even know how to play the thing, which is really disturbing.

Q: The bass is the melodic core, but it doesn't get as much of the spotlight. Does that ever bother you?

A: Everybody wants to shine occasionally. It's a very human quality. But if you're a musician and you understand, then you know how important what you're doing is. A lot of people think the bass is like the beginning position and then you move up to being lead guitar player if you work really hard.

You have to fend that off. I just want to do good work with my hands and my head and my heart. And after a while, you're just playing for the guys on stage with you.

Q: Sometimes, you guys sound like an orchestra.

A: I think it's the overtones that do it, that make you think you're hearing other things. There were times when the three of us would play when I swore I heard another instrument. Adding Joe has put us in 3-D a little more. We can be one guy with a guitar singing a song, or we can be two guys with guitars singing a song, or we can be three guys or four. We do a lot with what we have.

Q: Does the layering force you to scale back what you're doing?

A: I think every year I play less notes. It's about letting the music kind of weave its own way, letting it fill up the space. ... You listen to Miles Davis, and that's where you learn the beauty of the space between the notes. It's just as loud.

Q: Critics agree that the energy you give to every show is striking.

A: On the nights that aren't as good as the great nights, that's when you work harder. You physically work harder because if you're not getting it from the crowd, you turn inward.

Q: And you joined the band in a parking lot?

A: It was 10:30 at night on a Sunday, so there was no one there but us. I pull up and get my bass out, and I see these two characters drive up in a gold Ford Taurus station wagon. They were all cut-off shorts and flannel shirts, looking like Pearl Jam. We played some songs and it was going well, and then we played an original song of theirs and I just thought it was really unique. They weren't a bluegrass band, that's for sure.

Q: Have you named your new tour bus?

A: Well, it's not really ours. We're not that big. We've hit the medium top.

Q: What will you play in Boise?

A: We'll play a little of everything. We've never had set lists. We just go up there and call 'em as we see 'em.

Q: What keeps you going?

A: I believe we've gone further and done more than even my most wishfully teenage dreaming moment ever imagined. This came to me at a time in my life when I had put it away. It wasn't something I was looking for anymore and wasn't something I ever thought I would do. So you need to serve it. You've been given the opportunity, and now you need to pay it back.

Erin Ryan: 672-6732