Chris Thile

Chris Thile stands out among mandolin virtuosos as a vocalist, songwriter, ensemble director, and broadcast host who helped define progressive bluegrass. Co-founder of both Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers, he has remained central to bluegrass, inventive folk, and roots music from his first appearances in the late 1980s. Solo releases such as 2004’s Deceiver and 2006’s How to Grow a Woman from the Ground further illustrate his range. Grammy recognition has come for Nickel Creek’s This Side in 2002, the 2011 Goat Rodeo Sessions recorded with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, and violinist Stuart Duncan, the 2014 duo album Bass & Mandolin with Meyer, and Punch Brothers’ All Ashore in 2018. Additional partnerships include pianist Brad Mehldau, banjo player Béla Fleck, and singer-guitarist Michael Daves. Between 2016 and 2020 he hosted NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, later retitled Live from Here, before issuing his first fully solo project, Laysongs, in 2021.

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981, Thile spent his childhood in Idyllwild within a musical household and began playing mandolin near the age of four. Regular attendance at a local bluegrass performance in a pizza restaurant led to his meeting fiddler Sara Watkins and guitarist Sean Watkins; the three formed Nickel Creek and issued two independent albums before their major-label debut, 2001’s Nickel Creek, produced by Alison Krauss. That recording entered the Billboard 200 and established the trio as rising figures in progressive bluegrass. Subsequent Nickel Creek albums under Thile’s involvement include 2002’s This Side, which earned the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, 2005’s Why Should the Fire Die?, and 2014’s A Dotted Line.

His earliest solo outings, 1994’s Leading Off… and 1997’s Stealing Second, appeared when he was thirteen and sixteen, respectively, and featured support from bluegrass figures including Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, and Alison Brown. Although rooted in traditional bluegrass, those projects primarily displayed his precocious instrumental skill. A more distinctive artistic identity surfaced with 2001’s Not All Who Wander Are Lost, which brought him the Mandolin Player of the Year award from the Instrumental Bluegrass Music Association. Later solo efforts comprise 2004’s Deceiver and the stylistically expansive 2006 release How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, the latter supported by Noam Pikelny, Gabe Witcher, Chris Eldridge, and Greg Garrison. The same musicians formalized their partnership as Punch Brothers in 2007, unveiling Thile’s forty-minute, four-movement suite “The Blind Leaving the Blind” at Carnegie Hall; the suite anchored the group’s 2008 debut album, Punch. That year also yielded a recording collaboration with bassist Edgar Meyer.

Punch Brothers followed with Antifogmatic in 2010. In 2011 Thile joined Michael Daves for Sleep with One Eye Open and, alongside Meyer, Stuart Duncan, and Yo-Yo Ma, released The Goat Rodeo Sessions, which received the Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2013. Bass & Mandolin, another Meyer collaboration, appeared in 2014. The next year Punch Brothers returned with The Phosphorescent Blues, nominated for a Grammy in the Best Americana Album category.

In 2016 Thile succeeded retiring host Garrison Keillor on the weekly radio program A Prairie Home Companion, assembling a house band that featured Punch Brothers members Paul Kowert and Chris Eldridge, fiddler Brittany Haas, drummer Ted Poor, and singer-songwriters Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. While fulfilling these broadcast responsibilities, he issued the 2017 duo album Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and, that April, Bach: Trios, an album of keyboard arrangements performed with Ma and Meyer. December 2017 brought Thanks for Listening, a set of studio versions of Songs of the Week originally written for the radio show, around the time the program was renamed Live from Here with Chris Thile. A second Goat Rodeo project, Not Our First Goat Rodeo, reuniting Thile with Ma, Meyer, and Stuart Duncan, arrived in 2020.

Following the cancellation of Live from Here in June 2020 amid pandemic-related remote broadcasts, Thile recorded a new solo album in a converted church in Hudson, New York. Comprising six original compositions plus interpretations of works by Bartók, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Hazel Dickens, Laysongs was released in June 2021.