AUGUSTA, GA - Think of the Avett Brothers and many people think of, well, the Avett brothers.

Their voices may sound eerily similar on recordings, but fans can easily distinguish between Scott, the elder brother with the gravely voice and tender heart, and Seth, whose sweet voice acts as a lid that contains (but just barely) a jaded and angry soul that often threatens to make the pot bubble over.

For some, the yin and yang that is the two brothers is enough.

All the hype surrounding the two Avetts often overshadows the third member of the group, stand-up bassist Bob Crawford, something that the some time odd man out doesn’t seem to mind too much.

“Yeah,” Crawford said when asked if he feels like a fifth wheel, “I think that’s OK, though. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, but those are just temporary feelings that’ll come and go. But I have a job to do and that job doesn’t change.”

If the spotlight on Scott and Seth is tough for Crawford, who has been in the band since the turn of the millennium, then imagine what it must feel like for cellist Joe Kwon, who has been performing live with the group on and off since 2006. Those who believed that three was a crowd may balk at the new addition, but anyone who has seen one of the Avetts’ recent live shows can tell you that Kwon fits right in — shredding bows and playing the cello as if it was an electric bass are common occurrences.

And like Crawford, Kwon is not too concerned with the attention. Or lack thereof.

“Our fans really trust the direction of the band a lot and if they chose to bring on a cellist they were down with it because they trust the decisions of the band and they trusted that they weren’t just putting random people into the band as a trick,” Kwon explained. “It was a logical step, obviously, for me to come on.”

Both Crawford and Kwon point out that the Avett Brothers as a band have progressed pretty logically from 1999-2000, when Scott and Seth were performing roots and traditional country tunes as Nemo Back Porch Project, an offshoot of their rock band Nemo. Since then, they have evolved to a trio of street performers to a group on anindependent label touring small clubs around the country to bigger and bigger venues.

The past couple of years have brought about even more changes for the band, who shocked more than of a few of their fans when theyannounced plans to open for the DaveMatthews Band. They also caught the ear of legendary producer Rick Rubin, who signed the Avetts to his American Recordings label and has been producing their new album, “I and Love and You,” which has a release date of Sept. 29.

Bob Crawford’s interest wasn’t always in bluegrass music. Originally, he studied jazz guitar at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

“I purchased a vintage guitar and it just wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be, and I took it back to the salesman and he wouldn’t give me my money back. He gave me credit,” Crawford explained. “On impulse, I bought an upright bass, figuring that my friends who played bass would play it. I began to mess around on it and kind of dug it, so the day I started classes at Winthrop for jazz guitar, I signed up for lessons on the upright bass.”

From there, he said it was a surprisingly short leap to playing in bands.

“On aesthetics alone, people wanted you to play with them if you had one [upright bass],” he explained. “So I started to play with several different jazz combos and groups and I struggled.”

Soon afterward, Crawford said mutual friends put him in touch with Scott and Seth Avett, who were looking for an upright bass player to take the place of an electric bassist.

“It took a couple of weeks, but I met up with Scott and Seth in the parking lot of a Media Play at about 10:30 on a Sunday night,” he recalled. “They showed up in Scott’s gold Ford Taurus station wagon — the golden chariot — and Scott just got out and I got out and we got our instruments out and we played a number of traditional songs and an original song or two and that was it.

“I didn’t hear from them for a while and then slowly we made contact again and we began to practice and go and play on the streets and then we started to get gigs,” he said.

Still in another band, Crawford eventually found himself with a choice. Crawford had two dates on one night, as it were. He was supposed to play an early set with his other band, then rush across town to play a late set with Scott and Seth. Because problems always arise when a guy double books, the headlining band for Crawford’s early show predictably didn’t show up.

“So we had to cover the whole night, but I knew that I had an obligation to Scott and Seth,” he said. “My old band said, ‘Well, you gotta make a decision, here. What are you gonna do?’ and I decided to stay with Scott and Seth.”

Crawford credits the decision to a friend he had in New Jersey who, in the early 1990s, “dragged” him to a few bluegrass festivals.

“It really changed my perspective on music and it kind of touched me very deeply that music could be done so purely and that there could be so little separation from the person, the instrument and the audience,” he said. “You know, acoustic music is very… primal is not the word I’m looking for. The word I’m looking for… it’s very close and natural. It’s really the essence of something coming from the heart and being conveyed in a very natural way. It’s very intimate.”

Though New Jersey may have seemed an unlikely place for a bluegrass festival, it was there he heard Norman and Nancy Blake, as well as Alison Krauss. The next week, when he returned to Richard Stockton College, where he was a DJ at WLFR, he volunteered to do an early morning bluegrass shift.

“We had a station meeting and they said we needed to diversify our programming and we needed people to do things like play bluegrass at 6 a.m. on Mondays and I raised my hand,” he said. “And I got in there for several Mondays and had that box of bluegrass CDs that no one had ever touched at that radio station and started my education.”

Crawford’s same friend no longer had to drag him to festivals and the next one they visited was Merlefest in North Carolina.

“And that literally changed my life,” he said. “That festival was just so pure and so comfortable and I remember it was at the end of April and there were finals and I justremember getting there and unwinding and just feeling so good and knowing that I wanted to be there. I wanted to live in North Carolina.”

After graduating, Crawford made his way to Charlotte, N.C., through a film and video production job and his eventual meeting with Scott and Seth just sort of felt right.

“I knew that there was something that deeply connected me to Scott and Seth,” he said. “Not that they were bluegrass. The fact was they were completely not bluegrass. Everybody always thinks that we were bluegrass and we’ve been lumped in with bluegrass, but we weren’t and we aren’t and we never were. But it was roots-oriented and it was very old country-inspired and that’s what connected me with them. That kind of took me back to that moment in 1993 when I went to Merlefest.”

The trio played together for two or three years before Scott and Crawford both decided to go to graduate school. Before they went, however, Crawford pitched the idea of a tour.

“I said, ‘If I book a tour for the summer, will you guys go? I’ve always wanted to go on the road with a band and this may be a good opportunity. It’s only the three of us and we could probably do it pretty easily,’” he said. “They were skeptical, but said, ‘If you book it, we’ll do it.’”

Crawford went to work and, in two months time, had a 22-city tour booked strictly off the Internet. The next year, he and Scott made a deal.

“Scott and I said, ‘Well, if we get Merlefest,we won’t go to grad school,’” Crawford remembered. “And we got Merlefest and we never went to grad school.”

From there, Crawford said it was a matter of being smart about booking. They would play college campus events, like the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA) convention and piggyback it with club shows.

“Even if some of these gigs were in the cafeteria for an hour and no one’s paying attention to you, you’re making $1,200 and then you can book the local bar that you want to play at to get in front of the people you need to get in front of for $50,” he said. “The machine began to roll. As far as, did I know at the time what the potential was? I don’t think any of us did. But the fact was, we began to become empowered.”

Energy and youth may have carried them through those first years, but, since that time, the band dynamic has changed. Crawford said bluegrass purists who’ve never liked them still don’t, but they’ve now learned to play in tune and to channel their raucous energy so that band members, for the most part, no longer get hurt.

“It’s a sad fact of life that the more you do something, the better you get at it,” Crawford explained. “The better you get at it, the more you mature. The more you mature, the more you’re going to rein things in and you’re going to be more focused on what you’re doing. You can only hide behind the raw energy for so long.”

Change, he said, is a part of life, just as it’s a part of the Avett Brothers. And if that sounds like a preemptive strike against those who might yell “sellout,” Crawford admits that it just might be. But, he adds, the band has always changed from one album to the next, even before a major label and a world-renowned producer became involved.

“You tell me there’s not a difference between [2004’s] ‘Mignonette,’ [2006’s] ‘Four Thieves Gone’ and [2007’s] ‘Emotionalism,’” he challenged. “And I don’t think ‘Emotionalism’ and the new record are too far apart. They’re connected. And, God. The new songs we have that have not even been shown to Columbia, that Rick Rubin has not even seen or no one’s seen or heard but us are a continuation of that growing process and that’s what’s very exciting no matter who we work with in the future or no matter if we’re with Columbia or if we’re independent or whatever it is. We’re going to stay on our path and wherever that leads us.”

For his own peace of mind, Crawford said he tries to avoid Internet chatter, both about the band and his role in it.

“You’re supposed to discount the good so you can discount the bad,” he said. “If you’ve got five people and three love you, one doesn’t care about you and one hates you, then you get a million people or a hundred thousand people or five thousand people, then that group that hates you really has grown and that seems to wash out all the good. I’m OK with all of them, though, because I’ve got a job to do and that doesn’t change no matter what people are saying about me.”

While Bob Crawford may have been a natural fit for the Avett Brothers, Joe Kwon seems an odd choice. The 29-year-old South Korean-born musician is, after all, a cellist.

And cellos aren’t often found among the instruments used in roots rock, traditional country, bluegrass or whatever other label those who try to describe the Avetts’ sound may try and affix.

“It’s not common in any sense other than classical,” Kwon laughed. “You’ll hear cello and strings in large productions. Metallica did that album with the San Francisco Symphony, but cello is used as a supplemental thing. It’s rare that a band will have a full-time playing cellist because it’s not one of those instruments that’s usually played the way I play it.”

Kwon certainly has a unique style that even he is well aware of.

“Calling me a cellist is an insult to cellists,” he laughed. “You know, I play the cello, but I stand up playing it and most of it is improvised. There are very few things that are actually written out. And sometimes I play it like a guitar or a bass guitar.”

“I’m not an authority on cellists in rock music, but I like to think there’s a small niche out there that I’m filling,” he continued. “Hopefully, that little niche market will grow bigger in a few years and we’ll have more cellists out there playing.”

Kwon’s musical education began traditionally enough. Born to musicians who immigrated to North Carolina shortly after he was born, Kwon began playing piano at age three.

“I hated playing piano,” he said. “My mom tried to teach me, obviously, and I just totally rejected it, so it only lasted about two weeks.”

Kwon’s parents gave him a break for about six years, but then told him he had to learn to play something. He chose cello.

“I fell in love with it right away because it was one of those things that totally made sense to me,” he said. “It was one of those love at first sight moments.”

He took private lessons in classical cello until college, where he majored in music at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For the first two years, that is.

“I switched over to computer science you know, just because that’s what I thought you should do,” he explained. “You should choose a practical career and something that’s going to give you a good, comfortable living.”

After graduation, Kwon went to work for IBM. Though he stayed there for nearly three years, he quickly realized that a “normal” job wasn’t for him.

“I felt like I was really missing music a lot,” he said. “I would pick up my cello once in a while, but I traveled a lot for work, so I never actually had my cello with me and, when I was home, I didn’t want to — I guess it’s not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t have the motivation to pick up the cello and start playing again.”

So he quit his job, got one in a restaurant and started playing with a roots rock band called Big Pretty and the Red Rockets on the weekends.

Kwon had been listening to the Avett Brothers, so when his band was playing in Winston- Salem the same night the Avetts were playing a festival there, he decided to go check them out.

“So we said, ‘Well, we’re done with sound check so let’s go over there and listen to some of their set,’” he said. “We were too cheap to pay the five dollars to get into the festival, so we just stood outside the gates watching them.”

Later that night, during the second set of Big Pretty’s show, none other than Bob Crawford walked into the bar.

“I heard later that he didn’t even feel like going out, but his friends had convinced him to,” Kwon said. “And I was like, ‘God, I am forever in debt to those friends.’”

Crawford, who had a side project called New Jersey Transient, tapped Kwon, plus the accordion and guitar players from Big Pretty, to record with him. When New Jersey Transient opened for the Avett Brothers at a show, Scott and Seth also liked Kwon.

“At that point, they had done the majority of the tracking for ‘Emotionalism’ and were starting to do the overdubs and they wanted to put a cello on a couple of the tracks,” he said. “And so after hearing New Jersey Transient, they asked me that night if I would come in and put down some tracks. I went in to record, and two tracks became like six tracks.”

The first show he played with the Avetts live was a pre-New Year’s Eve show in 2006.

“Of course, I really wanted to go to their New Year’s show in Charlotte at the Neighborhood Theatre,” he said of the group’s legendaryannual performances. After asking Crawford for advice about whether he would be imposing on the group to ask for tickets, he tried his luck. “So I asked Scott if I could go to the show, if he had any extra tickets because it was sold out, and he said, ‘Well, the only way we can give you tickets is if you come out on stage with us and play again.’”

It wasn’t until “Emotionalism” came out in 2007 that Kwon began touring with them full-time, but it only took a few moments onstage for him, and everyone in the audience, to know that he fit right in.

“I remember the first show at the Lincoln Theatre, I tried to sit down and that lasted all of 20 seconds,” he laughed. “After that I was like, ‘I’ve never played standing before, but there’s no way I can sit down for this.’ So I stood right up and, ever since then, it’s been one long road to back problems later in my life.”

In Kwon’s point of view, he doesn’t really have a choice.

“You can’t be 80 percent if they’re 110 percent because then it shows, so you really have to match that energy or give even more,” he said. “I’m lucky enough to have youth on my side where I can just throw my body around and only somewhat feel theconsequences of it the next day, but it’s not hard with these guys.”

Just like the other band members, Kwon’s instrument gets quite a workout during live shows as well, although he said that, at $300 a pop, he doesn’t go through quite as many strings as Seth on guitar and Scott on banjo. His bow, however, is another matter.

“I go through those more often than not because I can’t hear myself, so I’ll play harder,” he explained. “And the harder you press down, the more you’re damaging those bow hairs and the more likely they are to break. But our recent transition to in-ear monitors has made it so I can hear myself.”

While the in-ear monitors point to a more professional Avett Brothers, Kwon reveals something surprising about the group that helps keep the live shows fresh.

“You know, we don’t have a set list so, obviously, we don’t get into the routine of playing the same songs over and over in the same order every night,” he said.

And while Kwon admits that he initially felt an overwhelming need to win over Avett Brothers fans, he now realizes that the hardcore fans, of which the band has many, trust the members of the group. All the members.

“I think the fans realize,” he said. “I think they respect the decisions of the band because they love the Avett Brothers.”

As for what all of his classical cello teachers think of his new profession, Kwon says he’s heard from a few who say they’re just happy he’s earning a living doing what he loves.

“I don’t consider myself to be a great cellist. It’s even hard for me to say I’m a good cellist because there are so many out there who just never had the opportunity to play music for a living,” he explained. “It’s just one of those things that is very sad, but the classical world, or the world of music in general, is very fickle and it’s very difficult to break into. It takes a lot of luck and a lot of being at the right place at the right time.”