A Conversation with Punch Brothers’ Chris Thile – HuffPost 2.29.12

Mike Ragogna: Chris, beyond your solo material, you have quite a rap sheet including being with Nickel Creek, The Goat Rodeo, and tons of side projects. You don’t ever stop, do you!

Chris Thile: It’s so easy to get lulled into a sense of security as a creative entity and I’m doing my very best not to allow that to happen. I’m a little skittish by nature and to be capable of extreme focus, I need a lot of stuff going on to be able to do any one thing. There was a great James Thurber essay about the nature of procrastination and how actually you get things done. You’ll have a whole lot of things that you have to do, and what you end up doing as a human being is doing the least important one of them, but doing it well, focusing hard, doing the job well. For me, having a bunch of things going on does actually help me focus and do things to the best of my ability.

MR: So, before we get into your new Punch Brothers album Who’s Feeling Young Now?and a mandatory history lesson, I want to ask how much fun it was playing on the Paul Simon tour.

CT: It was amazing, it was like going to school. To see someone like Paul turn 70 last year, yet he’s still soundchecking for 2 hours every day, changing arrangements, workshopping stuff, worrying about his delivery, getting the band tight… I mean, most people in his situation, they have the guitar tech soundcheck for them, they just show up for the show, play, and they’re done. Paul is still working, and he’s toured behind a new record full of new songs. He’s playing every night in addition to a lot of the things that people want to hear. It was an incredible experience for me as someone to whom music is everything. To see him doing things at such a high level, at 70, made me feel really good. If I can get 40 more years of productivity, I’m going to be a happy man.

MR: Chris, who’s feeling young now?

CT: Not me….our bass player Paul Kowert is feeling young.

MR: Let’s get into the new Punch Brothers album and jump right into “No Concern of Yours.” Can you just give us a little insight into that recording and what’s going on in that song topically?

CT: It’s funny, I started signing that chorus at a sound check of ours. Sometimes, that’s a great headspace for me–you’re in a daze, you show up at a gig a little road weary, and sometimes, you pick up the instrument for the first time that day and you’re amplified and it already seems like you’re making music formally, despite the fact that you’re barely even awake. Sometimes, that’s a fun spot to make music from, and at home, I’ll actually do the same thing. I love waking up, getting some coffee and sitting down with an instrument first thing and see what comes up. It’s almost just like filling the void, what am I not hearing that I’d like to hear. That’s how that chorus happened and then Paul and I worked on it backstage a little bit and came up with that key change we talked about.

There are two main changes happening there. The song, basically, the way it is now, it starts in E and then gravitates towards F-sharp minor for that chorus, and then F-sharp major for the bridge, and back to E. That’s the journey the song takes. So, the music of that thing was existing with that chorus, “It’s no concern of yours, it’s no concern of yours.” I’m not sure why I’d been so secretive that day… I remember it was a post-breakup sort of thing and it was about a girl I’d been with and how she could lay no claim on anything that was happening to me post that breakup. But I didn’t want to write about that anymore, I already had some relationship songs on the record and I didn’t feel like writing about that. So, I was talking with the guys in the band, and (someone) said, “Hey, what if you wrote song about Don Draper for Mad Men?” I thought for a second, “That could be kinda cheesy,” and I thought about the approach that I could take, and it started writing itself.

MR: Right before it is “This Girl,” which seems almost like a companion piece.

CT: I was raised very religiously and I still have a complicated relationship with the idea of a God or not or whatever. So, last summer, I was pretty infatuated with this person and thought it would be funny to write a song about trying a higher authority just to cover my bases.

MR: Nice. You open the album with “Movement and Location.”

CT: That song’s a funny one in that I was at Milk & Honey, which is my favorite bar in the whole world in New York. It’s a little cocktail bar. One of the bartenders there is a good buddy of mine, and I was talking about baseball and he’s a big fan and I’m a big fan. We started talking about Greg Maddux, the former Cub and Brave and then Dodger and Padre. Maddux is one of my favorite players of all time, and his obsessive devotion to location and the control of the movement that you would get out of his pitches struck me as being exemplary manipulation of one asset. We were talking about that kind of thing, and I was thinking about that in relation to both love and work. That song just poured out all of a sudden.

MR: And the instrumental “Flippen” features some pretty sophisticated musicianship despite its simplicity.

CT: That one is not even our song. It’s a song from an instrumental trio out of Sweden called Väsen, and we learned that song to actually play it with them when we were having them sit in with us at a set we played. We learned that song, and after we played it with them, we loved playing it so much that we started to work it up to do it in our own sets. It would go so well and it was such a fan favorite that we decided to record it. It was a happy change for all of us, and it felt like it had a place on the record.

MR: Can you tell me what the creative process is with Punch Brothers, even from the songwriting perspective?

CT: There are as many processes as there are songs. Every single song has a unique evolution. My favorite thing that happens is when someone will have a little idea and we get to develop it amongst the band, and lyrics suggest themselves. Lyrics actually spin out of the melodic gestures, naturally. I love when that happens. I mean most of our songs developed that way, but there is always going to be some intense backroom revising and that kind of thing. You want it to resonate emotionally and physically every bit as much as it resonates intellectually. I think we’ve been guilty in the past of veering towards intellectual resonance, and I think we’re finally striking a good balance.

MR: I wanted to ask you, after all your years of playing, being the musician’s musician, what advice would you have for new artists?

CT: I meet a lot of aspiring musicians who are so worried about their careers, worried about their professional advancement, getting discovered and getting a break and all that kind of thing. My advice would be if you spend that much energy just working on your music and practicing, you’ll become undeniable, there’ll be no need for a break or for being discovered. At this point, there are very few secrets in terms of things that are really good. With the internet and everything, if you just worry about being as good as you possibly can be, people will find you. It may not seem like people like good stuff sometimes because of what we’re constantly being bombarded with on the radio, etc., but they really do. There are going to be enough people out there for you to be able to sustain your career as long as you’re kicking ass. But kick ass you must. I would advise people to spend as much time as they can working on their craft and not worrying about how that craft is going to be showcased.

MR: Chris, I want to ask you for just a reflection or two about each of your other incarnations starting with Goat Rodeo.

CT: It’s an incredible opportunity to interact with a wide array of musical personalities. The four of us don’t look really connected on paper except for Edgar (Meyer) and I, but in practice, because of the willingness to listen, to conform, we came up with an idea of how it might work, the four of us playing. Everyone was flexible enough to, I think, make something really good.

MR: Yeah, we were lucky enough to get interviews from Yo-Yo Ma and Stuart Duncan, so we corralled three of the four goats. Chris, what about Nickel Creek?

CT: Nickel Creek was an incredible way to grow up. I started Nickel Creek with Sean and Sarah (Watkins) when I was 8 years old. We put it to bed when I was 26, so a ton of my development as a human being was created by Nickel Creek. I’m grateful to Nickel Creek’s success and appeal for having a platform now. I have a built-in audience as a result of the success of that band, and I’m very grateful for that. It can be tricky or frustrating to be primarily associated with something that you did when you were just barely escaping adolescence.

MR: Yeah, and that formative bonding as musicians was such a good thing for you all, right?

CT: Oh yeah, it was really fun. And actually, even as an adult now, we’re proud of the third Nickel Creek record. I think by that time, we were starting to mature a little bit and do something substantial. It’s funny that that was the least successful of the three records. I feel like the better Nickel Creek got, the less people liked it.

MR: And there’s a tour?

CT: Oh yeah, we’re on it…we’re all over the place. I’m thrilled, I’m really excited about how things are sounding. The energy of the band is really good.

MR: Chris…so, Who’s Feeling Young Now? I’m feeling young now, sir! Thanks for all of your time, it was fun.

CT: Thank YOU!

Transcribed by Narayana Windenberger