Avett Brothers sing of mortality, forgiveness

The Avett Brothers have experienced surreal moments. Let's allow bassist Bob Crawford point out a couple of the highlights.

Playing with Bob Dylan at the 2012 Grammy Awards, with Dylan keeping a workmanlike distance at first. It was, "Bob, do you want to play this chord or this chord?" Crawford says. "But then, after the last rehearsal, he went up to everybody and shook their hand."

And just three weeks ago, the surrealism peaked with The Avett Brothers opening for the Rolling Stones. "My wife's all-time favorite band, so I was thrilled she could see them," Crawford says. "There was a brief meeting, they were very polite. It was amazing for a bunch of 40-year-old guys like us to see men in their 70s happy with what they're doing and loving it and enjoying each other's company."

But meeting Dylan and the Stones isn't reality. "It's one of those things you just get to do if you're lucky," Crawford says. "We're not gonna walk out there and play for 40,000 people, and the next day your career is completely different."

No, reality is getting back on the bus and moving on to the next gig. Something The Avett Brothers have been doing since 2001, when Scott and Seth Avett, joined by Crawford after his audition for the brothers in a parking-lot meeting, first put the band together in North Carolina. A folk band whose roots are planted deep in American traditions of music, yet with its own identity as howling, energetic, acoustic rock.

When it plays Wednesday at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, it will show off its expanding appetite for sound. With the addition of the marvelously animated cellist Joe Kwon, The Avett Brothers became four. Plus three more touring musicians onstage, performing songs that frequently dwell on the biggest questions of life.

"Every band, in their songs, they have a world view," Crawford says. "Consciously or self-consciously, they present a world view."

The Avetts' view is mortality, and dealing with it gracefully. And a theme less remarked upon, forgiveness.

"Scott and Seth see the best in humanity," Crawford says. "We're all out there, all struggling, and we all need to give each other a break. Where we're coming from, forgiveness is as big a part of life as death."

But what about the worst in humanity? How do you forgive a man who carries a gun into a church and murders nine people? That happened just a couple of months ago, in Charleston, South Carolina, just hours from where some of the band members live.

"Here's my personal take on evil," Crawford says. "It seems to be everywhere. ISIS, the guy who killed those people in church, Nazis, the slaughter that happened in Somalia. Evil doesn't stop, it's with us. I don't think we're going to collectively evolve into a humanity where people stop killing each other. The only way we can combat that is love and forgiveness.

"The forgiveness expressed by those families, for those horrible murders, that is Christianity. If someone is wondering what a Christian believes, that's it. Televangelists and politicians stand behind the mantle of Christianity and conservatism and can say otherwise. But the people who are forgiving, that's what Jesus called Christianity. And it's painful being a Christian."

Four years ago, Crawford's wife, Melanie, went to check on their 2-year-old daughter Hallie in her crib and found her in the midst of a seizure. As Crawford rushed home from Germany, where the Avetts had been on tour, Hallie was hospitalized and diagnosed with a brain tumor.

This was reality. And from here out, life would be completely different.

"My daughter was fighting for her life," Crawford says. "I just walked in, held my wife, we talked for a few minutes. Then I gathered everyone in the waiting room and said, 'Let's pray.' I had never done that before. I don't know where that came from.

"Except, this was something I was not capable of handling. I had come up against a wall, I was not humanly capable of surviving the situation by myself. It's like Abe Lincoln said during the Civil War, 'I found myself on my knees many times. Because I had nowhere else to go.' I was just so weighted down by things."

Music, that's where a man can go. "A Father's First Spring," written by Scott Avett, with lines like:

When I'm in the sweet daughter's eye

My heart is now ruined for the rest of all time

There's no part of it left to give

There's no part of it left to give.

"I told him, 'Scott, man, you have nailed it,' " Crawford says. "Because once you have children, you are truly ruined as a person. People ask, 'What do you mean, ruined?' It's because nothing you can provide yourself, no self-gratification, can ever compare with what your children may need, and your desire to help them."

Yet Crawford knows, there are limits.

"The physical disabilities and wounds from it, it crushes me that I can't heal her," he says of Hallie. "And it's inevitable that something will happen to my son some day, and I won't be able to help him. You know your child is suffering in some way, shape or form, and you will not have the ability to help them. You have to give it over to God, that's where spirituality comes in."

Perhaps it was a team effort. Doctors and 81/ 2 hours of surgery, four years of rehabilitation therapists, God.

"She's going to kindergarten in a month," Crawford says. "Four years ago, we would have not imagined it."

If you go

What: The Avett Brothers, with the Texas country-bluesman Shakey Graves and the mother-and-son soulful folk duo of Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Where: Constellation Brands at Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, near Canandaigua on the campus of Finger Lakes Community College.

Tickets: $39.50, $55 and $65 for the pavilion, $25 advance and $30 the day of the show for the lawn, available at ticketmaster.com, (800) 745-3000 and the Blue Cross Arena Box Office, 1 War Memorial Square.