Epic New Nickel Creek Project, Montecito-Born, Hits the Granada

Epic New Nickel Creek
Project, Montecito-Born,
Hits the Granada

Chris Thile Talks Bach, ‘Hamilton,’ and
Montecito Music-Making

By Josef Woodard | September 14, 2023

Read more of the Fall Arts & Lectures preview here.

By now, the witty wizard of mandolin mastery Chris Thile has appeared often enough in Santa Barbara to be granted the keys to the city. But part of what makes his return visits so welcome are his innate eclecticism and artful blurring of musical identities. Which project/hat will he be wearing this time in our town? Let us count the ways.

Over the past two decades, Thile has appeared at the Lobero Theatre with his groundbreaking new-grass band Nickel Creek (with Sara and Sean Watkins), his acclaimed prog-grass band The Punch Brothers, and in solo Bach mode. Recent years also have found him on the 805-concertizing rebound via the hosting umbrella of UCSB Arts & Lectures, including a soothing House Calls streaming performance during the 2021 COVID lockdown.

Fast-forward to October 8 in the big house of The Granada Theatre, when Thile returns in a significant, epic form, with Nickel Creek performing music from their stunning and most venturesome album to date, Celebrants, which was literally conceived and home-cooked as the three Creekers and their families hunkered down in a Montecito house during lockdown.

Coincidentally, two weeks ago, Thile’s big summer project found him on another mythic Southern California property, giving the West Coast premiere of his cheekily titled ATTENTION! A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. 

That topic seemed a logical jumping-off point during a typically articulate phone interview last week with The Man with the Mandolin and a steady flow of big ideas.

You just performed your new music at the Hollywood Bowl, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic attached. How was that experience?

That was really, really fun. To do it with L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl was just a total dream. You worry, of course, that you’re not gonna be able to scale up to that sort of an environment. But it all ended up working out wonderfully. I think that’s owing to the L.A. Phil and to Teddy Abrams, who was conducting the performance. The Phil, of course, does this all summer, so there are no nerves about it on their account.

The piece is just this big old 45-minute bit of zaniness, with playing and singing, talking and choreography — though not actual dancing. I’m acting throughout, and my wife is the director of the dramatic aspect of the piece. It’s a whole thing.

You have all these different aspects of who you are, so it’s hard to say that this or any project is a “detour,” as such.

Just a lot of areas. Yeah. Just a lot of areas of obsession, I’m afraid.

So you’re multi-obsessive?

Yes, indeed.

I believe I’ve seen pretty much every show you’ve done in Santa Barbara, going back to the days with Glen Phillips at the Lobero and your great solo Bach project there. Is Santa Barbara a special spot for you?

It’s exceedingly special. And I’m not just brown-nosing you. It was a place that I would go with my folks occasionally. My dad had a good friend that lived up in Santa Barbara. There’s actually probably one of the first recordings of me making music was singing things like “It ain’t gonna rain anymore no more.” This guy had like an early four-track [recorder] or whatever. My folks would’ve been in their maybe mid- to late twenties when this recording was made. It’s just me singing various things like “Frosty the Snowman,” performing into a toilet plunger as a microphone. So I think the very first recording of me that exists was made in Santa Barbara. [Laughs.]

Our sort of unofficial apprenticeship with Glen [Phillips] was hugely influential to all three members of Nickel Creek. We made a record in Santa Barbara, at Glen’s house, with the great Ethan Johns producing.

When we spoke last, we were holed up in this incredible house in Montecito writing the record that would become Celebrants — a kind of coming together. It was not just the three of us, but our families as well. So all three families were living in this big house on the hill in Montecito, looking out over the Pacific and getting reacquainted after the A Dotted Line tour [their 2014 album]. We didn’t mean to take so much time off, but one thing led to another. There was so much going on for me, with [his inventive public radio show] Live from Here and for them all this Watkins Family Hour activity.

We’ve had so much fun making the record. It’s, by far, the most ambitious thing we’ve written, and the most collaborative thing. And playing it live now feels great — collaboration is starting to feel fully consummated. That’s when a project really starts to take flight. You have the recorded version, and now the live version is off the blocks and out onto the racetrack.

And it feels amazing to be out there performing at night in and night out. And it is extra special to do so in Santa Barbara, where we have such wonderful memories, impactful experiences, besides the fact the record was conceived in Santa Barbara.

It is such an ambitious album, with 18 tracks and these overarching themes. I don’t know if the term “concept album” resonates here.

Yeah, I’d say so. Obviously, there are cringey aspects to that idea. But there are plenty of brilliant concept records out there that you can point to. I think it’s fair to apply the term to this.

Your Hollywood Bowl piece is identified as a song cycle. Is Celebrants a song cycle, in its own way?

Yeah. And I think, increasingly for me, there’s some ornery sort of self-defeating anti-capitalist streak with my artistic instincts. [Laughs.] Of course, things have gone in the opposite direction from anything long-form or acquiring attention, beyond what a person is able to take in while they’re chopping carrots for dinner.

I still consider listening to music sans any other activity. I tend to be drinking a cocktail while I listen, and I write music and collaborate on music that is meant to be consumed thusly — which means it’s gonna be relegated to obscurity. [Laughs.] That’s a pretty esoteric approach at this point, to make music that demands one’s entire full attention. And I’m so lucky to have band mates that feel the same.

As we were in that house all together, talking about what this would be, we were very unified in, in the desire to take a big swing and make an actual record that was to be heard from start to finish. It was meant to be experienced that way and ultimately will give you more and more the more and more you give it.

I have no beef with folks who prefer to listen to music in the background or whose lives are such that that’s really all they have time for. I fully understand and approve of any relationship that anyone chooses to have with music. But I think that the music that moves me the most requires my full attention, requires time and is not digested instantaneously, and doesn’t reveal everything it has on the first listen.

I also like music that doesn’t just affirm your existing suppositions about music, but rather challenges them. That’s what lights me up inside — a piece of music that tells me, “Actually, you might not know everything about this” [Laughs.] I love it when a piece of music gets in there and needles me a little bit and actually contradicts things that I hold to be true about music. It might annoy me on the first or second listen, but I’ve learned over the years to count that as a good sign of a piece of music — that it might be because it has something to teach me. And so, it would follow then that I strive to make music that can do that for other people.

“…the music that moves me the most requires my full attention, requires time and is not digested instantaneously, and doesn’t reveal everything it has on the first listen.”

Thinking about that song cycle idea, it can range from Schubertian examples to the modern work of such composers as Gabriel Kahane, and you, as well. Is that a rewarding path to continue following?

Gabe is a master of musical narrative. Traditionally speaking, narrative musical activity has not always been a fringe pursuit. Think of musical theater. That world, in essence, relates to the concept of narrative song cycles. We’re not far removed from there being a whole freaking phenomenon of Hamiltons sweeping the entire world. All any musician heard about for a little while was, “Have you seen Hamilton?”

People still love music. That sounds like a platitude, but people still have the capacity to give their full attention to a big old helping of it. I mean, [with Hamilton], you’re in for two-and-a-half hours. Of course, there are many people who feel like “I’m gonna sit down for an hour and listen to this record and not do anything else.”

But my mom tells stories about her friends getting together to just listen to the new Beatles record, and that’s what you were gonna do. That is what the day was gonna be. Your friend was gonna come over, and you were gonna listen to the new Pink Floyd. You were gonna listen to the new Miles Davis, or whatever it was. That’s what you were gonna do. I love that thought so much. The way people get together now is to watch a TV show.

As human beings at this point, do we have to have all of our senses engaged to pay full attention to something? My increasing suspicion is that we’ve grown accustomed to a level of stimulation that kind of precludes giving our full attention to recorded music, that comes without any sort of visual stimulation and where you have to make your own visual fun inside of your brain.

That makes us oddballs then, because I’m in your camp. I can sit down and listen for long periods of time.

Well, and I suspect that many of your readers are in that camp as well and will be going, “Hey, that’s me too.” Honestly, people who would read an article about a musician like me or a band like Nickel Creek, as opposed to another think piece about the [Taylor Swift] Eras Tour. I think I’m probably preaching to the choir here.

But that’s okay. Hey, the more energized the base becomes, the greater the chance we have at impacting our friends and family who maybe have forgotten that they actually love listening to records.

That’s right. And you were able to do that sort of evangelism through the amazing forum of your adventurous — and probably destined to be temporary — public radio experiment Live from Here. That must have been an exciting opportunity for you.

The whole experience was really magical. It also was also a handful. It was like running a marathon at a sprint every Saturday. It was sad when I got the call that it was canceled. But it’s been more sad in the aftermath. Since the Clinton/Trump race, public radio has just become news, news, news. So I don’t know if the show would’ve lasted. It was a lot of work, but it was so fun, and I miss it terribly at this point.

I could use some musical catharsis, and then I suspect that others could too. I really miss having that opportunity to come together with a bunch of compatible musical friends and make music for a very large audience and feel like we were all sort of gathering around this, this mythic campfire [laughs], carrying this tradition of people listening to the radio, and not just talking about the stuff that happens, but rather making a bunch of music about it.

Lastly, your wondrous album of solo Bach sonatas and partitas, Volume 1, came out a decade ago. Is Bach still a grounding presence in your life, in your daily existence?

Oh, of course. [Laughs.] There is something so foundational about that — like a yoga routine almost. It’s like a reminder to breathe in and out. I think Bach feels that way to so many people. And talk about the truth in music — not that more truth hasn’t been discovered since that time, but we get the sense that nothing about Bach has ever been disproved. [Laughs.]

I actually do think that it’s time to start seriously thinking about getting volume two of the Sonatas and Partitas on record. I’ve let volume one hang out in the breeze for a long time.

I approve of that message.