The Devil Makes Three: Kindred Spirits
photo: Jarrod Macilla
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Early in 2025, on the final day of February, The Devil Makes Three released Spirits, the trio’s 10th album, and its first since 2018. In the seven years following the group’s previous LP, Chains Are Broken, they’ve endured personal tragedy, taken an extended, COVID induced recess from the road, welcomed an old friend into the fold and found a way to breathe new and compelling life into its rebellious old-time, acoustic-folk stylings. They then stirred all of this into a baker’s dozen of songs centered around grief and ghosts, darkness and the devil, politics and personal inventory, for what just may be the band’s best record yet.
Let’s start with the grief and ghosts. In either instance, unfortunately, there is plenty of source material to choose from, trailing the album’s conception like a hellhound. The trio’s primary songwriter, Pete Bernhard, absorbed the brunt of it. Over the span of Spirits’ creative gestation— from writing to recording—Bernhard suffered the loss of his mother due to kidney failure, his brother in a hit-and-run accident and his childhood best friend from a heart attack. In the wake of each of the three losses, Bernhard leaned on his guitar and his pen, as much as ever.
“A big part of processing grief and loss, for me, is writing music. That’s how I deal with that. It’s more of a must than a planned thing,” Bernhard says. “I don’t think I could have made the record without writing about it.”
The death of his best friend shook Bernhard particularly hard, a reminder of his own mortality, especially at a relatively young age. Likewise, he had taken some of his earliest musical cues from his brother, who was a guitarist and Berklee College of Music alum; his older sibling’s gift of a Willie Dixon album, as well as countless suggestions of other blues artists to discover, left an indelible mark. “And, of course,” Bernhard says, “There is nothing like losing a mother.”
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A Vermont native, Bernhard formed The Devil Makes Three in 2001 while he was living in Santa Cruz, Calif. He teamed up with an old friend from Vermont who’d also relocated to The Golden State, guitarist and singer Cooper McBean, as well as bassist Lucia Turino, another Cali transplant who shared their New England roots. Together, they drew on their affinities for folk music tradition, the cathartic power of the blues and the dissident, DIY ethos of punk-rock. Over the next two decades, the band went on to issue nine albums, including three live records, while building an eclectic and devoted fanbase. The group’s hallmarks were instantly apparent— stringed acoustic instruments, rich and thoughtful lyricism, as well as doses of humor delivered with a wink and a nod.
Gradually, they expanded their sonic palette—at times going electric and augmenting the threesome with additional musicians, both in the studio and on the road. They also expanded their mutual admiration society, developing friendships within their musical community, including with a Rhode Island husband-and-wife duo, Dave Lamb and MorganEve Swain, who performed as Brown Bird.
“Cooper and I were huge fans of their band. We toured with them a ton,” says Bernhard. “We really respected them a lot.”
In 2019, on the heels of touring in support of Chains Are Broken, Turino announced her departure from The Devil Makes Three. Swain, whose husband had lost his battle with leukemia five years earlier, was the group’s first and only call to replace Turino on bass. But, shortly after Swain accepted the invitation, COVID-19 enveloped the world, and the recalibration of The Devil Makes Three was put on pause indefinitely.
Like so many artists during the pandemic, Bernhard wondered if his band could survive. Touring was essential to their existence, and they had never been off the road for longer than six months. Through it all, he continued to write.
As the months turned into two years away from the stage, and the heartbreaking life experiences piled up, so, too, did Bernhard’s hoard of songs. Sometime in the middle of 2023, he got a call from producer Ted Hutt, who’d first worked with the band on Chains Are Broken. “Ted said, ‘Hey, it’s been awhile, send me some things you’ve been working on,’” remembers Bernhard. “So, I sent him some demos, and he said, ‘I think we have a really good record here.’”
Over the next year, Bernhard passed Hutt dozens of songs. McBean submitted a trove as well. Hutt made a list of favorites, paring down the stack into a dozen or so contenders for an album.
They scheduled a studio session at Dreamland Recording in the summer of 2024. “By the time we get into the studio, I feel like the work is done already,” says Bernhard. “We have to have a good performance. Everybody has to be on their game. But, the work is done.”
Housed in a late 19th-century church in the Woodstock region of Upstate New York, Dreamland provided the ideal spook factors for raising up the material and its apparitions. Fittingly, the occasional summer thunderclap turned the sky foreboding and gray as the musicians stripped their ideas down to their bare essentials, then rebuilt the tracks into a record-ready repertoire. “We found the perfect environment for the record we wanted to make,” says Bernhard.
The conditions proved ideal, as well, for the group’s newest member. Swain, who is also a songwriter with her own The Huntress and Holder of Hands outfit, immediately felt comfortable contributing thoughts and ideas to parts and arrangements. “It’s the most natural thing in the world to be with those guys,” says Swain. “They’re my brothers.”
Swain’s own experience with loss triggered her innate sense of empathy working on Bernhard’s songs. She marveled at the universality Bernhard brought to such personal subjects as death and politics and shared in the unanimity of purpose supporting both the plainspoken content— and the band as a renewed unit. “It’s that quality of being a family. And we’re a type of family that doesn’t argue about politics at Thanksgiving. We are of one mind in a lot of ways, I think,” she says. “There’s also a sense of respect among the three of us, like, ‘Hey, if that’s what you need to say, we’re right here with you for that.’”
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Spirits opens hauntingly with “Lights on Me” serving up fingerpicked noir. With Hutt shadowing on percussion, guest drummer Stefan Amidon swings the ensemble in the poetry of a last breath, when the devil has gone to sleep and the Lord is forsaken. Bernhard has no intention of easing in gently.
He sings of freedom in death and the suggestion of another life after this one. It’s a mood that will intermittently touch several of the songs as the album unfurls. Swain is a fan. “Yeah, keep it dark,” the bassist enthuses.
On the lead single—the album’s title track—Bernhard moves to the burying ground, touching on spirits in the house, in the head and in the bottle. It’s the first appearance of a favored device—the double entendre—but just the start, as Bernhard and McBean continue to challenge connotations and intentions at every turn.
“I love a double meaning,” says Swain. “The devil is whatever the devil is to you. Your demons are your demons, whether it’s substance abuse, politics, sickness or grief.”
Yes, about those drugs and the double entendre. It’s a combo that will pair-up more than once on the record, though Bernhard gently clarifies one of those moments. “It’s not for me to run around explaining it,” he says.
In 2025, drugs remain, as both a word and an entity, a lightning bolt. Efforts to legalize, normalize and utilize the medicinal worth of formerly tabooed substances run parallel to rampant and lethal opioid abuse, to the seesaw world of pharmaceuticals—its dangers and dependence, costs and benefits—and to the time-honored tradition of having a party and getting high. Leave it to once and future punk-rockers, Bernhard and McBean, to swirl up the colors even more.
“I never want to write a song that only I understand,” says Bernhard. “I think that would completely defeat the purpose.” He is, however, more than happy to play with the language, even at the risk of being misunderstood. Take “Half as High,” a nuanced, metaphor-laced social commentary aimed at the disparities of income and the harbingers of a monarchy brewing. Yet, this populist warning flag hinges on a questioning chorus delivered in apropos, devil-may-care droll: “How come we got to take a bigger hit/ Just to get half as high.”
“The song is not about drugs at all,” says Bernhard. Actually, he explains, it’s about working twice as hard for half as much. The musician looks around his home state of Vermont and sees, among other things, the cost of everything elevated and rising. He describes a rural, once reasonably valued community—never able to boast a thriving economy—that’s become increasingly difficult to afford. “For people that live here, it’s like, ‘How is this going to work,’ you know?” says Bernhard. “And Cooper’s song is not about having a good time on drugs. It’s about having a bad one.”
That number, “I Love Doing Drugs,” arrived as the second single nearly three months ahead of the album’s release. Its origin traces back to a long distance truck ride from Washington state to his home in Austin, Texas, with McBean and his muse emboldened behind the wheel.
“I had a series of voice memos of me in the truck, just singing out lines that kind of made me laugh,” explains McBean. “I’m an addict, a recovering addict and alcoholic, so it comes from a real place. But, I wrote it as a gag. The first line that stuck in my head was, ‘It feels so good that I bet I could whoop Jesus Christ himself.’”
With the spirit of Billy Joe Shaver wafting in his conscience, McBean started crafting lines around the tongue in-cheek brag, still never intending it to be a “message song” or even intending it to be taken seriously at all. Yet, McBean included it in the demo batch they sent to Hutt, and Hutt insisted it was a song for the album.
McBean went all in, still believing that, in today’s quick-bite culture, the title may be the takeaway for many. The Devil Makes Three had been here before, going back to “Old Number 7,” a live favorite that ostensibly celebrates whiskey, but really speaks to the sadness of a life spent on a barstool. Similarly, “Gracefully Facedown” details the bar’s bathroom floor after one too many.
“People have construed those as party songs—odes to drinking and drugging,” says McBean, who has been clean and sober himself since December of 2022. “But if you dig in and read the lyrics, those are not celebratory songs. Those are songs about the experience of struggling with life, using substances as a way to cope and losing control of that. Cloaking a message in a lighthearted song is something we’ve been doing for a long time—a way to process the horrors of existence is to laugh about them.”
Despite all the pain and sadness— delay, change and adjustment—Bernhard, without equivocation, says this was the most fun he’s had making an album. McBean agrees, feeling a palpable sense of relief and delight, being able to make music as a band again after so much time away. For him, making a record sober, for the first time, was particularly poignant. Swain suggests it runs deeply in their blood—a collision of truth and authenticity spoken through folk, blues and punk.
“It’s OK to go through hard points. It’s a test for who we are as humans,” says Bernhard. “I don’t feel hopeless at all. You say goodbye to things that don’t work anymore. You find hope where there is none. There’s an element of rebirth in death. I hope that comes through.”
