Features

Group At Work: The Devil Makes Three

“We’re confusing everybody—and I think that’s a good thing,” laughs guitarist/frontman Pete Bernhard, speaking on behalf of his Devil Makes Three bandmates Lucia Turino (upright bass) and Cooper McBean (guitar).

Like Gillian Welch, who spent her college years in TDM3’s hometown of Santa Cruz, Calif., the trio specializes in taking the primitive components of American folk music and assembling them into post-apocalyptic nostalgia. Their albums treat contemporary culture as though it were already a thing of the past—a destroyed town reduced to the status of myth and lore. Borrowed from a traditional rhyme so shopworn it’s become practically impossible to trace, their name is a part of folk’s mythology.

There are elements of bluegrass, jug band music and Dixieland jazz here, and the trio drives them home with the coarse and persistent energy of an early punk band. If the group can be called “traditional,” then it’s mainly due to the fact that they understand what is timeless and recurrent in the character of American life. Loneliness, for example. Or fear.

“You have to make a song relevant to the time you live in or else nobody cares,” Bernhard says. “That’s the thing I don’t like about our genre—I don’t feel any connection to a song that somebody is writing now that sounds like it’s from a different time. It’s fun to play with the idea of how it’s supposed to be and break that.”

For all of the antique melodies and old-world ghosts that drift through their music, the most anachronistic thing about The Devil Makes Three—in a world inundated with disposable blog-posts and Twitter rants—might be their stubborn, watchmaker’s insistence on taking their time. It’s been more than two years since Do Wrong Right, but the band has begun to shuffle around the pieces of something new, live-testing unrecorded songs and determining how the disparate parts are supposed to fit. “We like to save it up,” says Bernhard. “But, every time, I feel [like], ‘Ah, the next one is the one that’s going to be really great.’ And who knows—maybe I’ll go on like that until I die?”