Chris Thile – HuffPost 9.23.13

Mike Ragogna: Chris, what advice do you have for new artists?”

Chris Thile: Oh, let’s see. My chief advice right now would be to have periods of both voracious listening and complete silence. Listen, listen, listen, listen, be so honest with yourself about what you love and what you don’t love about what you’re hearing and then, in those periods of silence, think about what it is really that you want to hear yourself do and actually be informed both by the things that you love and the things that you don’t love. With the things you love, be like, “Why?” and with the things that you don’t love, why do you not love them? What would you have done differently? Often in that amalgamation of the learning process of why you love this and why you don’t love that, often times, those are the two primary ingredients in a unique sound. The reason that you love all of the various things that you love, I guarantee you that you’re the only person who loves all of those things for that reason and also on the negative side of that, all of those things that you don’t love, you’re the only person who doesn’t love them for all of those reasons. I think if you’re really paying attention to how music makes you specifically feel–and granted, you learn so much from other musicians and from observing other people’s cases and having deep discussions about music you can learn a lot–but I think the most important thing is to be really, really in touch about how music makes you feel.