Nickel Creek
This Side (Sugar Hill)
With recent talk of the resurgence of bluegrass and traditional music, one would think that any up-and-coming band with even a hint of the “high, lonesome sound” would jump on the bandwagon, eager to ride the rising tide of the music’s popularity. Not so with progressive acoustic act Nickel Creek, whose members include mandolinist Chris Thile, fiddler Sara Watkins and her brother, guitarist Sean Watkins. The trio released their second album, This Side, in August, and Thile finds that the band, who’ve been nominated in two categories at this Thursday’s International Bluegrass Music Association awards, are in a perplexing position.
“People who don’t come from bluegrass think we’re bluegrass, and people who are bluegrass definitely think we’re not,” Thile says. “There are some people who, for some reason, think that we’ve betrayed ourselves, in that this album is not as bluegrass as the last one. [They think that] its greatness is somehow exactly equal to how bluegrassy it is. And so, some people think that we tried to go make a bluegrass album and failed miserably.”
Nickel Creek found perhaps unexpected success with their self-titled debut album, which went gold—a real coup for a new band who cut their teeth on bluegrass and continue to incorporate key components of the music into their original material. Country Music Television (CMT) got behind the group’s videos, aggressively placing them in regular rotation, which served to familiarize a new audience with their music.
Nickel Creek’s latest record pursues a more contemporary direction, freely mixing elements of pop, rock, Celtic music and jazz with their virtuoso picking. Many of the new album’s songs are originals written by Thile and Sean Watkins, in contrast to the traditional fare and standards often associated with the bluegrass repertoire. The new songs are fresh takes on universal themes like love, betrayal and doubt. They also do a few well-conceived covers, including a version of Pavement’s “Spit on a Stranger” and a melancholy turn on the song “Sabra Girl” by the contemporary Irish band Planxty. There’s just one traditional song on the record, the angst-ridden ballad “House Carpenter,” which gets a sparse new arrangement.
Thile says the band remained true to where they are musically at this point in their careers, and that he doesn’t understand the need to categorize their sound. “I love bluegrass, I totally love it, and I think that we are more a bluegrass band than anything else,” he says. “If there was a pie chart, it’s a bigger slice of bluegrass than there is a slice of anything else. However, I think it would be dishonest to market ourselves as bluegrass. We’re a lot different than that, just like I think O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a lot different than bluegrass.”
The album of which Thile speaks, of course, is the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers movie of the same name, a multiplatinum phenomenon that has taken on a life of its own, spawning the ultra-successful “Down From the Mountain” tour and catapulting roots music into the consciousness of mainstream record buyers. Some recent converts to the music have lumped the album into the bluegrass category, even though it contains many different types of music, including field hollers, blues, old-time and traditional songs. While Thile can identify with the album, he says that what Nickel Creek are creating is “not even remotely similar.”
“We are trying to push on things and certainly we want to have context, and we want to have something to stand on, and we feel bluegrass is a huge building block—kind of a cornerstone of what we do,” he says. “But we’re not interested in having a genre. We’re really not interested in limiting our options musically.”
To some extent, Nickel Creek’s musical journey parallels that of New Grass Revival, the genre-busting acoustic band who raised the ire of many bluegrass purists back in the ’70s. New Grass’ longhaired image and occasional use of electric instruments seemed to challenge everything their bluegrass forebears had established during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Other progressive bands also emerged at the time, including The Seldom Scene and The II Generation, but New Grass attracted perhaps the most devoted following, and “newgrass” is now considered a derivative style of bluegrass. Former members Sam Bush, Bela Fleck and John Cowan have continued to experiment with the form with their own bands, pushing it beyond preconceived musical boundaries and gaining legions of younger fans.
Bluegrass is still highly resistant to change, its followers often opposed to the hybrid styles that have branched off from the main tree. That mind-set is frustrating to younger players like Thile, who believe it quashes creativity. “Bluegrass purists are always extremely worried that the music’s gonna die, that the music of Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs and The Stanley Brothers and those kinds of bands is dying out,” he says. “But if it’s dying out, it’s going to be because of people like them who don’t allow the music to expand and grow. Because something that’s not growing is not healthy, and it’s going to die.
“I really don’t know what it is that offends them,” Thile continues. “I’ve just never had a grip on why people decide to exclude themselves from other music. All three of us in the band listen to anything.”
Despite their progressive leanings, Nickel Creek don’t forsake the pioneering accomplishments of their bluegrass elders. The band obviously feel a strong musical kinship with Bill Monroe, and they have great respect for what the Father of Bluegrass accomplished. “He didn’t just drop out of the sky playing bluegrass,” Thile says. “It comes from a lot of different other music and is a product of the melting pot, just like everything else. We feel just as related to that as we do to newgrass. I think that Monroe was blending all kinds of things to get bluegrass, and bluegrass is one of the things we’re blending into our recipe.
“It just feels like we might be actually where we need to be right now, if nobody knows what to do with us,” Thile adds with a laugh.
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