If you don’t have “Emotionalism” or “I and Love and You” yet, you are missing two of the best albums of the last few years. Great harmonies with a punk attitude ascribed to folk. This is a great, easy tune to learn and you can add as much detail to it as you like with your own riffs or use the ones I have offered here.

Enjoy! Sean

Grab my interpretation of the song for acoustic guitar here.

“Laundry Room” by The Avett Brothers from Sean on Vimeo.

*Because I am capoed on the 4th fret, we are actually playing in the Key of B major. Let’s talk about it as if it is in the key of G, since that is the notation I used.*

Lowercase roman numerals denote minor, uppercase major:

Intervals  I     ii    iii    IV    V     vi     vii*

Notes      G   A     B     C    D    E       F#

Chords   G  Am  Bm   C    D    Em    F#*

This song is largely diving back and forth between the I and IV chords, G and C. The Avett Brothers know this and to spice it up, the riffs below are used to create movement within each chord (Riff 1), and to build from one chord to next (Riff 2 & 3). I found that the subtle changes in the chords guided my voice to the melody the first few times I sang it. The E/G6 adds a middle E (second-fret 4th-string) to the G, while the C6 emphasizes the 2nd-fret 3rd-string A note, and the Cmaj7 adds a high B on the open-2nd string.

The Em-D-G-E/G6 breakdown at the end is a vi-V-I-iv, as E/G6 is like a fancy way of saying “inverted C major chord”. Or maybe that is more fancy, I don’t know.