The Avett Brothers and Mike Patton AVT/PTTN
In nearly four decades of genre-defying work, Mike Patton has built a career on unlikely partnerships. The Faith No More frontman has collaborated with avant-garde jazz saxophonist John Zorn, classical violinist Eyvind Kang, turntablists The X-Ecutioners, and art-world luminaries like Laurie Anderson and Björk. He’s worked alongside members of The Melvins and Slayer. And now he makes his first appearance here on Americana Highways.
He arrives courtesy of the Avett Brothers, and their collaboration AVT/PTTN offers nine songs that resist easy categorization. True to form, Patton proves himself a musical chameleon, adapting to his collaborators’ sensibilities. The result will feel more familiar to Avett fans than to those who’ve followed Patton’s restlessly experimental career—though neither camp will find this entirely comfortable territory.
The partnership emerged organically. Long-time mutual admirers, Patton and the Avetts began trading song ideas, eventually co-writing all nine tracks. Patton and Scott Avett co-produced the album with engineer Dana Nielsen, crafting something that belongs entirely to neither artist’s catalog yet couldn’t exist without both.
AVT/PTTN opens with two gut-punches: “Dark Night of My Soul” strips away illusions with brutal clarity (“I used to say that beauty/Was in everything/But now I just don’t buy it”), while “To Be Known” wrestles with exhaustion and longing (“Cling clang I’m dragging the chains/Locked up and wrapped around the dream/Please give me the key/I’m tired and weak as hell”). Both feature exquisite vocal harmonies, their musical brightness creating dissonance with the weight they carry.
The atmosphere shifts with “Heaven’s Breath,” the first song written for the collaboration. The folk-flavored warmth gives way to menace as Patton and the Avetts spit out accusations and pleas: “To grace the bedside of your death/To glimpse the truth that I’m bereft.” Echo cranked to distortion levels, the vocals transform into something primal. Where the opening songs traffic in sadness, this veers into rage and distress, culminating in the desperate refrain “I’m disappearing again.”
“Eternal Love” examines modern anxiety through a catalog of empty rituals—”I take my pills/I drink my drinks/I never stopped wondering/What people think”—before landing on its paradoxical title. The song understands that love’s permanence can feel as terrifying as its loss.
“The Things I Do” offers the album’s only real tenderness, acknowledging how small our grand gestures become when measured against genuine connection. Meanwhile, “Too Awesome” flips the script on conventional praise songs, finding tragedy in being told “You are beloved/You are a gift” when you feel “Perfectly broken now/Unable to be healed.”
Most of AVT/PTTN consists of original co-writes, but the inclusion of “The Ox Driver’s Song”—a traditional work song evolved from actual cattle-driver calls—surprises. Its archaic choruses (“Towmiroll towmiroll/Towmirydeo”) and physical struggle (“I crack my whip and I bring the blood/I make my oxen take the mud”) stand apart from the album’s soul-searching. Recorded during the folk revival era by Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, the Brothers Four, and Leon Bibb, it grounds the collection in honest labor where other songs probe internal darkness.
The closing track, “Received,” builds on repetition and accumulation, stacking images until the simple phrase “every gift of love I’ve ever received” becomes a meditation on gratitude, loss, and the impossibility of separating the two.
Scott Avett frames the surprising collaboration in familial terms: “Mike’s part of our DNA, like the fabric of our youth. Literally, we studied him. He’s a dear friend now, but when we were younger, I was imitating him… This is what art is. This is what making is supposed to be: in secret and with no ambition.”
Patton’s take is characteristically oblique: “My peculiar challenge in this was to become a long distant cousin. A brother who was orphaned. Maybe they kept him in the chicken coop or some shit. They brought him out years and years later.”
“In secret and with no ambition”—Scott Avett’s description of the creative process here—explains everything about why AVT/PTTN succeeds. This isn’t a celebrity collaboration as a marketing exercise. It’s what happens when artists who genuinely respect each other’s work stop performing for an audience and start exploring what frightens them.
“I’m disappearing again,” Patton sings in “Heaven’s Breath,” and the phrase haunts the entire album. AVT/PTTN is about all the ways we vanish—into depression, into performance, into the roles others need us to play. The collaboration itself mirrors this theme: Patton disappears into the Avetts’ world while they disappear into his. What emerges isn’t a compromise but a genuine third thing, born from mutual dissolution. It’s a dark, uncomfortable work. It’s also some of the most honest music either artist has made.
Find more information here: https://www.theavettbrothers.com and here: https://mikepatton.bandcamp.com
Enjoy our previous coverage here: REVIEW: The Avett Brothers self-titled
