The Catalyst interview: Nickel Creek’s Chris Thile

Chris Thile plays mandolin and is also a composer, a singer, an arranger … and a collaborator.

Because this master musician’s roots are in bluegrass, he and his bandmates in Nickel Creek – siblings Sara and Sean Watkins on guitar and fiddle, respectively – were part of the 1980s and ‘90s movement to take the classic Appalachian acoustic music into dazzling and ambitious new directions.

Nickel Creek performs Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. The band went on “extended hiatus” in 2006 to focus on solo and side projects. There have been reunions both minor and major (they cut a new album in 2014), but during most of the down time, Thile’s reputation – and his star – were on the ascent.

He played with acoustic heavyweights like Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, David Grisman and Mike Marshall, and young artists including Sarah Jarosz, Billy Strings and Norah Jones.

Thile wrote, recorded and performed classical music, worked with Yo-Yo Ma, and with his “other group,” Punch Brothers, changed the stale definition of “string band” to something vibrant, exciting and wildly unpredictable.

He took over from Garrison Keillor as the host of A Prairie Home Companion on NPR; it was later renamed Live From Here and ran through 2020.

But Nickel Creek, as you’ll read in this interview, was never far from Chris Thile’s thoughts. The band is touring behind a new release, Celebrants.

St. Pete Catalyst: With all the wildly eclectic directions you’ve gone in, with all the success you’ve had, why is it important to you to return to Nickel Creek?

Chris Thile: I think anyone who has family members that they’re close to could probably wrap their heads around it. And how it’s also easy to take the relationship for granted, and not maintenance it for a while, by accident. It’s like, we know that we’re gonna be there for each other by and by, and I think occasionally forget to prioritize it.

You consider Sean and Sara family, in other words.

We are family. We’re every bit as much each other’s family as our actual family is. We’ve been in this band since I was 8 years old, Sara was 8, Sean was 12. And originally my dad was the bass player. Once my dad left the band, it was still very much a family affair for me. And I think that explains both why we come back, and why we sometimes accidentally take more time away from it than we mean to!

We would have little impromptu reunions and it just felt so good, so easy, to make a unique sound. It was just the 25^th anniversary of the band that provided the excuse to get back together the first time. And then life, kids, I had this radio show that I started doing – which made everything even more complicated for me. I didn’t do a whole lot of Punch Brothers during that time, either. It was really demanding, and kind of hard to see past the next Saturday live broadcast. And Sara and Sean both had tons of stuff going on as well. So we definitely didn’t mean for another nine years to go by.

On the plus side, by the time we got back together it felt like a volcanic explosion of ideas, both musical and lyrical. It’s been a pretty euphoric state of collaboration since we dove into Celebrants, and it continues on the road.

Everyone has progressed over time. But to play devil’s advocate, isn’t this like taking a step backwards, musically, for you?

I would say Celebrants is the most ambitious record I’ve ever been a part of, structurally speaking. There are themes that get introduced early on that re-appear multiple times throughout the record. All of the songs are talking to each other thematically in a way that I’ve fantasized about but have never pulled off on record.

Even with the Punch Brothers?

I think Phosphorescent Blues was pretty intentional, related thematically, but there was still a patchwork quilt aspect to that one. The song “Magnet” had nothing to do with anything else. The Debussy cover had nothing to do with anything else. It was fun stuff, and I’m super proud of it. But in terms of the structural integrity of the new record, that’s unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of before.

You know, I wrote a real long piece for Punch early on that was very ambitious. A 40-minute strong quintet, basically. With words, and the words certainly told a story. But I was in my infancy in terms of being able to develop a theme over a long period of time.

I would caution people against looking at the amount of notes in a chord, or the amount of chords that exist in a song. That’s one way to measure the ambition of a given piece of music – but by no means the only. You know, how many time signatures per square minute of music?

These are various ways to measure ambition or complexity. But listen to Gillian Welch’s The Harrow and the Harvest and you’ll hear a whole other way that you could measure subtlety, complexity, nuance.

I think Celebrants has a little of everything in that regard. But only for the sake of what emotions it can dredge up. As opposed to getting one’s music geek rocks off.

As a musician, do you have your projects lined up years in advance? Do you know what you’re doing next? Or just ‘Whoever calls me’?

You know, it’s a delicious combination of things. I have projects that loom as far as four of five years in advance, longform narrative pieces, a couple of those kinds of things swirling around. And then there are fun little collaborative things that spring up out of nowhere. And that’s just the way I like it. If it were all one or the other, I think they would have to put me in a rubber room.

I love the contrast – things that are going to take a long time and a lot of elbow grease, and then all of a sudden Billy Strings and I are on CBS Saturday Morning, playing a couple songs that we hadn’t ever played together before that day.

Sara, Sean and I make a record for two years, or Billy and I play together for 15 minutes in the morning, and then on TV later that day. I love it.

Find tickets for Saturday’s Nickel Creek show here.