Interview with Pete Bernhard from The Devil Makes Three

When it comes to music, keeping it real is usually the way to go. What do I mean by keeping it real? Being straight to the point and just writing a good song. You don’t always need a 3-minute guitar solo or 10 minutes of jamming nonsense. All the song needs is a fine strum, lyrics that stick in your head and a message that resonates in the psyche. There’s a trio that finds beauty in that kind of simplicity and it equates to a blast every time they play live. In fact, they’ll be rolling through Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence on September 23.

Santa Cruz, California, folk act The Devil Makes Three will be sharing the stage with The Huntress and Holder Of Hands lead by ex-Brown Bird member MorganEve Swain and folk troubadours Lost Dog Street Band at Lupo’s. Ahead of the show I had a chat with guitarist Pete Bernhard from the band about moving from his native state of Vermont to Santa Cruz where he started the band, moving back to Vermont, taking folk music back to its roots and why you’ll never see The Devil Makes Three on late night TV.

Rob Duguay: When you initially moved out to Santa Cruz was it to start the band or did it just happen that way?

Pete Bernhard: It just happened that way. California is kind of like my second home; my mom lives out there and I moved there when I was about 12 years old. I lived out there for a little while with my mom and then I moved back after high school and I was there for 10 years. I was born in Vermont, but California in general is where I’ve spent the other half of my life. We all ended up there separately and I actually went out to Olympia, Washington, first to live with Cooper {McBean} for a little while. Him and I were playing music together in Olympia, then we went to California on a duo tour, then we ended up moving to Santa Cruz and that’s where we met Lucia {Turino}. We’re all from Vermont, but we didn’t go out to Santa Cruz together and we didn’t do it to form the band, it just happened that way.

RD: You and Lucia moved back to Vermont in 2010. How has it been coming back home? Do you ever think about the differences between East Coast and West Coast living?

PB: I definitely miss California every once in a while, but I love New England. It feels like home here and the weather can make it the most beautiful place and also the harshest in the dead of winter. I just really love New England and we both really missed it a lot; I know that Lucia is pretty happy to be back here. We still go to California about twice a year, we’re going to do New Year’s Eve in Santa Cruz for two nights at the end of this year. We do still spend a good amount of time in California.

RD: The Devil Makes Three are definitely in the folk genre of music, but what makes the band different is that you take the music back to its roots with an early 20^th century style that’s influenced by ragtime and bluegrass. What made the band want to go that route initially? Were you raised on that type of music growing up?

PB: I grew up listening to a lot of folk music along with there being a lot of folk musicians in my family and they were the ones who introduced me to the style of music, but I kind of got into it on my own. When I was around 12 years old my brother bought me records like the Willie Dixon complete recordings and the Robert Johnson complete recordings and I listened to those for years and I just tried to learn them. For some reason I just loved the music and Cooper had a similar background where his mom was in a western swing band so we both were predestined to like the style. Early on we were really into acoustic music and we loved jug band music, but we wanted to try and have a little bit more fun at the shows. That originally became part of our mission statement — to play the music that we love, but have a little more fun by taking it outside the sit down, cookie cutter folk scene.

RD: Last week The Devil Makes Three put out their fifth studio album, Redemption & Ruin, and it consists of all cover songs. There are a lot of classics including Robert Johnson’s “Drunken Hearted Man,” Muddy Waters’ “Champagne & Reefer,” Willie Nelson’s “I Gotta Get Drunk,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around To Die” and Tom Waits’ “Come On Up To The House” with the latter being dedicated to the late Dave Lamb of Brown Bird. What was the process like when it came to picking the songs? Was it already planned out beforehand or was it done fairly spontaneously in the studio?

PB: It was planned out beforehand. Basically, we started out with the concept of having one half of the album be about heartbreak, drinking and drunks, with the other half being about redemption and gospel tunes. So we started out with this concept and then we just gathered a bunch of songs and before we went into the studio we basically had all the songs that we thought we wanted to do. We didn’t use them all because some of them turned out better than others, obviously. We went into the studio with the idea of the songs we wanted to do but not with the arrangements totally written. We kind of left it fairly open ended, so we did a lot of the arranging and writing in the studio but we knew what songs we were going to play before we went in.

RD: I don’t know if you, Cooper and Lucia consider The Devil Makes Three to be a folk band, but you’ve played a lot of shows that identify themselves with the genre. Folk has experienced a big resurgence this decade. What do you think of the state of folk music? Do you think it’s getting very crowded and concentrated with a lot of artists copying each other or do you think it’s doing just fine the way it is?

PB: I think it’s doing fine; with any genre of music there’s always been sort of a competitive nature. Within the realm of folk there is tons of different music. I’m not a huge believer in comparisons; yes we are a folk band but we are different than a lot of other bands that are considered folk. These days, if there’s a banjo in the band then people say it’s a folk band. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think there’s a lot more to it than that. There are bands that are more traditional, there are bands that are less traditional, there are bands that are musically pop as far as I can tell, but they have acoustic instruments in the band. There are some bands that are more like punk bands but they play acoustic instruments. I think that the idea of folk music as a genre has vastly expanded to mean pretty much what anybody wants it to mean. A lot of times when people see that we have a banjo in the band they say we’re a bluegrass band. The banjo has been in every kind of music historically, everything from blues to jazz to country to bluegrass to folk music. All those things are sort of in my mind different.

RD: I think even Jethro Tull wrote a few songs with a banjo.

PB: You could have a jazz band that has like three banjos in it and that would seem totally normal these days. I just think that the folk music genre is huge and there’s a lot of music that’s within that new umbrella. I don’t think necessarily a lot of it has to do with any of the rest of it, it’s sort of like a bunch of different people playing acoustic music. Acoustic music is very broad these days and it’s a huge genre. With all the bands that are in there, I’m not sure if they have that much in common with each other. There’s some stuff in that proposed genre that I think is great and there’s other stuff in it that I don’t like at all.

Overall, for the genre as a whole, the resurgence in interest has been nothing but good and I’ve always loved acoustic music and traditional music. A big part of our band and the new album has been to open people’s eyes to how great this stuff is. It’s really a big part of the history of America more than anything else and it’s one of the best things we have as an export.

RD: After the show at Lupo’s on the 23rd and before the two shows on New Year’s Eve in Santa Cruz, what else does The Devil Makes Three have planned? Are there any special shows going on? Are you guys gonna be on TV on any of the late night talk shows?

PB:  I highly doubt it, I think as far as late night is concerned I think our music is maybe too weird for that audience. We tend to try and write songs about politics, we write songs about drug use, we write songs about war and we write songs about things that I don’t think are popular with the mainstream audience, which is totally fine with me. I don’t think you’ll be seeing us on TV for that reason because some of that stuff isn’t very popular to talk about these days but I really wish it was. I wish more bands would write songs about things that I think are meaningful. That’s sort of like going out of fashion, which is a real bummer to watch happen. The less substance a song has the more popular it is these days, which is starting to be pretty depressing.

As far as our band goes, we’re on this current tour and then we’re going on another tour of the West Coast to promote the record. We’re going to be playing out there a lot while this record is out. Afterwards we have plans to go back to Europe, we have plans to start recording a new album of originals and we sort of have plans to launch our own record label. That stuff is going to eat up a lot of time over the next year and that’s our basic plan. We got a lot of new original tunes that we really like to go into the studio and start demoing, so that’s the next big thing on the list.

RD: Do you have a name for the label yet?

PB: It’s still up in the air, but we’re working on it.

Buy tickets to see The Devil Makes Three, The Huntress and The Holder Of Hands and Lost Dog Street Band @ Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel on September 23^rd here: etix.com/ticket/online/performanceSale.do?method=restoreToken&performance_id=7896625&partner_id=240&method=restoreToken&cobrand=luposri#_ga=1.160363965.1856686550.1467040207; The Devil Makes Three’s Website: thedevilmakesthree.com