Nobody wants to die, but if there’s an upside to it one day being all over, it’s that you need to make the most of being alive.

That’s not lost on Devil Makes Three frontman Pete Bernhard. Reached in Vermont at the tail end of the holidays, the singer-guitarist reveals that he’s been busy visiting old friends. He’s also planning out a new concept album of covers titled Redemption and Ruin. 

Like the Devil Makes Three’s most recent outing I’m a Stranger Here, the new record will fall on the dark side. And that’s nothing new for the trio of Bernhard, tenor-banjo player Cooper McBean, and standup bassist Lucia Turino. On I’m a Stranger Here, the trio mashes up everything from neon-lit rockabilly (“Goodbye Old Friend”) to bump-and-grind blues (“Hand Back Down”) to shitcking barn-dance country (“Spinning Like a Top”). 

Binding the songs together is the way that Devil Makes Three doesn’t exactly seem overly optimistic about where we find ourselves as a species in the new millennium. Bernhard might put things best in I'm a Stranger Here's "Hallelu" when he sings “They say Jesus is coming/He must be walking he sure ain’t runnin’/Look how we done him." 

Since coming together in 2002, the Devil Makes Three has proven to be fine purveyors of apocalyptic Americana. Bernhard’s fixation on the dark side is partly because he spends a fair bit of time thinking about death. For the curious, he’s not afraid to die, mostly because he’s too busy living.

“Once you're dead it’s over,” says the East Coast-raised, California-based frontman. “That makes me think about why we’re alive, what we’re doing here, and what is actually important. That’s a big part of what’s inspired both of these records especially the Redemption and Ruin thing. It’s about thinking ‘Are the things you consider to be important really that important?’”

After an adolescence filled with underground punk rock records and all-ages shows in Boston, Bernhard moved across the country to Olympia, Washington. Intending to join a band with a childhood friend, he’d instead start hanging around with fellow transplanted Easterner McBean, the two eventually abandoning punk and alt-rock for acoustic folk. Following a move down the coast to Santa Cruz, the two impressed Turino  enough that she decided to learn to play standup bass just so she could play with them. 

Starting with an independently released full-length in 2002, the Devil Makes Three has spent the past decade mixing vintage bluegrass, throwback country, and old-timey folk with the spirit of community-hall punk.

The trio has also taken a grassroots approach to building an audience, touring  constantly. The upside of road-dogging it for years is that the Devil Makes Three is now at a point where, through endless hard work, it ends up packing rooms like the Commodore not just one but two nights in a row. The downside , though, is having something resembling a normal life is impossible. 

“At this point in my life, I’ve sort of lost contact with more people than I can count,” Bernhard reveals. “That’s the nature of being a touring musician. And we started doing this so young, I don’t thing we were really aware of making the choice to this. I started playing in front of people when I was a teenager. This isn’t really an easy thing to do, or obviously more people would be doing it.”

Devil Makes Three is okay with the sacrifices, though, the excitement noticeable in Bernhard’s voice when he talks about the work he and his bandmates are putting into Redemption and Ruin. 

“It will have a lot of stuff that inspired us,” he says. “Half of it  will be songs about partying  and drinking and drugs—both the good  and the  bad  side of that. And the other side of it  is gospel songs. Both of those things have been big  inspirations  to us obviously. We love the old blues songs about partying, but we also love the  gospel music of Bill Monroe and Doc Watson and Hank Williams.”

Redemption and Ruin is also likely to include songs by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Townes Van Zandt. And yes, the record, which doesn’t have a release date yet, will find Devil Makes Three not only exploring subjects like what happens after you die, but also having a great time doing it. 

 “As usual with us, it’s  coming out as a darker album, but that’s just something that we can’t help,” Bernhard says. “Those are the songs that we like the best.”

The Devil Makes Three headlines the Commodore on Tuesday and Wednesday (January 19 and 20).