Nickel Creek: Three-Part Harmony

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Of this three, it’s Thile who’s maintained the highest and most consistent visibility, with his dapperly attired, chamber rock string band Punch Brothers, his high-concept detours into pre-bluegrass brother-style duets and Bach interpretations and his beyond-prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. He’s well aware, by the way, of the headier turn his output has taken. “Certainly on the heels of Nickel Creek,” he says, “I swung pretty dramatically in the other direction, of, like, basically making music for musicians and musicians only … And I’ve since tried to find the balance.”

If Punch Brothers is all about the eminent interplay of instrumental voices, Nickel Creek is a haven for harmony singing that Thile has come to appreciate more than ever.  “I love to sing,” he says. “I’m a player first and a singer second. But I love to do it. I notice when I sing with Sean and Sara I feel better at singing, and I like that feeling a lot. That was certainly a primary motivator.”

Never at any point in the history of Nickel Creek could you have reasonably confused their singing with that of any other group, and that’s as true as ever as A Dotted Line enters an indie folk landscape colored by extremes – gang vocals versus whisper-singing. Sean, Sara and Chris’s vocal arrangements have the harmonic precision of bluegrass, plus a bit of the cinematic scope of West Coast studio wizardry – or, you know, Radiohead. They’ll gracefully drape their voices over one another’s, then swell to a taut crescendo, united in conveying ardor or angst.

Aside from the vocals, and Valentine’s return as producer, there are plenty of departures on the new album, from Sara’s compositional fingerprints on the galloping, goodbye-and-good-riddance number “Destination” to “Hayloft,” a Canadian indie rock cover with the piecemeal construction of a hip-hop track, and “21st Of May,” Sean’s satire of Harold Camping’s doomsday prophecies. The latter is worlds away from the straightforwardly devotional tone of “The Hand Song,” co-written by Sean in a different lifetime.

After seeing Camping’s ominous billboards around Hollywood, Sean says, “I was like, ‘That’s totally what I need to write about.’ The melody and the guitar part that I had were sort of old-timey. And that whole idea, the rapture, all the stuff he preached, seemed very old-time religion, but in a modern context. I felt like that was ripe for the picking.”

Thile has had the angular alt-rock song “You Don’t Know What’s Going On” in his back pocket since the Fire Die sessions, around which time his brief, first marriage was disintegrating. “It was functioning as something too emotionally cathartic to be of use to anyone but me,” he explains. “I think the music was neat already, but the lyric was far too personal at that time. So I kinda dialed that back a notch, and also updated it. I love the idea of one’s past relationships standing in the way of one’s present or future relationships, and someone using the result of a past relationship as evidence against your ability to function well in a potential relationship.”

Perhaps, though, it’s not the relational carnage itself that Thile loves so much as the opportunity to delve into knotty emotions with profoundly sympathetic musical partners. “I think one always changes as one grows and develops as a musician,” he begins. “But I also think that there’s a certain innocence inherent in Sean and Sara and me collaborating. And I think that that’s returned on this body of work, despite the fact that there’s darkness to it. I feel like it’s darkness that the three of us are sort of observing together from a cozy place.

“It’s natural to feel comfortable with people that you’ve spent so much time with. You can examine some fairly distressing material if you’re comfortable.”

 This article appears in our May/June 2014 issue. Buy it here or download it here. Or better yet, subscribe

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