Musicians can be forgiven
for feeling a twinge of envy when it comes to Chris Thile, Sean Watkins,
and Sara Watkins—aka Nickel Creek. Growing up in southern California,
they started playing their instruments practically as soon as they were
big enough to hold them. They hit the bluegrass circuit (backed by Chris'
dad, Scott, on bass) well before Chris and Sara reached double digits,
and within a few years they'd won a shelf full of trophies in mandolin,
guitar, and fiddle contests and released their first album. Chris, already
causing quite a buzz in bluegrass circles with his lightning touch on
mandolin, released his solo debut at the ripe old age of 13. As teenagers,
the trio began merging the string band sound with pop song craft, and
with the help of producer Alison Krauss, they reintroduced themselves
in 2000 with a self-titled "debut" that went gold and landed them two
Grammy nominations, a slot on The Tonight Show, and heavy rotation
of their videos on CMT.
And the projects and kudos
keep coming—with sophisticated instrumental albums from Chris and
Sean in 2001 (and more coming soon) and a new band release, This
Side, that takes a bold step past Nickel Creek in songwriting
and arranging. This Side brilliantly connects Celtic melodies,
stark mountain ballads, and even chamber music with the rock sensibilities
of Elliott Smith, Counting Crows, and Pavement—all with just three
voices and impeccably played acoustic mandolin, guitar, fiddle, and
bass (plus some inspired studio trickery).
That's quite a journey for
three musicians still on the short side of their 20s. Backstage before
a show at the elegant Ravinia Pavilion in Highland Park, Illinois, where
the band's soaring harmonies and high-wire improvisation brought the
multigenerational crowd to its feet, the trio took some time to consider
how they got to This Side.
When you were all starting
to play, did you choose your instruments and drive the process, or were
your parents nudging you?
Chris
I told them I wanted to be a mandolin player when I was two.
Do you remember what
the attraction was?
Chris
It was the coolest thing I had ever heard. I wanted to be just like
John Moore [of Bluegrass Etc.]. The look of an f-style mandolin is so
different. It was little and high-pitched, like me, and I could totally
relate.
Sara
When I was four, I wanted to play fiddle and I asked my mom, but she
tried to talk me into playing flute for a couple of years. When I was
six, I started taking Suzuki [violin] lessons, because there was not
really much in the way of fiddle teachers.
Sean
I just knew I wanted to play music. I started playing piano when I was
six, and then mandolin when I was nine. I actually wanted to play guitar,
but my hands were a little bit too small. John Moore, my teacher, said,
"I really think you should start on mandolin." I am glad I did, because
it helped me get my right-hand/left-hand coordination. I switched to
guitar when I was about 12 or 13.
How did your first repertoire
come together?
Sara
We did a lot of fiddle tunes, and we copied songs that Bluegrass Etc.
did. That was the band we tried to emulate.
What kind of guidance
did Chris' dad give you?
Chris
My dad never dictated songs for us to do. He was the bass player, and
he had a bass player kind of role in the band. A lot of people think
he assembled this little kid band for his own amusement, but the drive
came from us. Every now and then they'd have to make us focus on practicing,
but we wanted to be the band. We were picking the songs and figuring
out the arrangements and everything.
Was it easy to get up
onstage at that age?
Chris
Yeah. Totally.
Sara
We always really enjoyed [performing], because they were small events—little
bluegrass festivals in California—and most of the time we would
play around the lunch hour. Everybody would be dying in the sunlight,
and there'd be a couple of nice people out there, like grandparents
and family friends, watching us. It wasn't big crowds or anything.
Kids who develop a lot
of technique often have a hard time restraining themselves from playing
flashy stuff. Did
you always think about focusing on the music instead of your chops?
Sean
We knew about the concept, but we didn't do it.
Sara
Every song was fast.
Chris
Anything critical that was written about us at that time was aimed at
that.
Sara
Unfortunately, there wasn't nearly enough criticism.
Chris
Yeah, people were too nice to us, but we got the idea eventually.
Sara
Or we think we do now. We'll look back in ten years and think,
"We thought we were tasteful?"
Chris, I understand you
grew up without TV. Did that help channel your energy into music?
Chris
Oh, yeah. TV forces you to react to whatever they want you to. The very
best shows allow you to come to your own conclusions, but most of it
is just forcing you to sit there mindlessly and be entertained. There's
absolutely no participation. It's a brain killer if ever there was one.
I'm really glad we didn't have it.
And in the Watkins house?
Sara
We didn't watch it much, but we had one. We did watch musical things—Austin
City Limits and things like that.
Sean
We have always liked to do outdoor stuff. I think it's just because
our parents raised us to appreciate actually doing things.
Sara
I remember going to my friend's house one time before school, and they
were sitting around watching morning cartoons. That was such a novel
concept to me, because I always got up and practiced in the morning
before school.
All three of you had
some home schooling. Did that also help keep you focused on music?
Chris
Of course. School comes with so many social expectations. For a guy,
you're supposed to be in baseball and hang out with all your friends
at the arcade afterwards—that's what all my friends did. A lot
of people think that when you're home schooled, you're socially isolated,
but that depends entirely on the kid.
Sara
And on what the parents let the kids do.
Sean
We were having so much fun, and we had so much of a social life musically,
that we didn't really need another social life.
I want to fast-forward
a little and ask about your classical studies. Chris, what were you
looking for when you decided to study violin and composition?
Chris
I went to Murray State University for about a year and a half and studied
composition and theory—as much as I could soak in during that time
before Nickel Creek became too overwhelming to do both. I thoroughly
enjoyed it and learned so much, and I'm trying to keep going. It's all
in the interest of being a well-rounded musician. I especially admire
the composers—they have so much control over their ideas and how
to reproduce them with an orchestra, string quartet, solo piano, or
whatever. It's a completely different thing than a jazz-style arrangement,
where you direct but the musicians have a lot of control over their
own parts. Now Sean and I both compose using Finale [music notation
software] and have our little string quartets and things that we work
on.
Had you used written
music much before your classical studies?
Chris
Not really, no. I did everything by ear.
Sara
I started with Suzuki for a couple of years, but that just got me through
Book 2 and basically told me how to hold my instrument and the most
elementary bits of reading. But when I was 14, I went to Mark O'Connor's
fiddle camp. He has teachers of all different styles; for the first
45 minutes you go to a Celtic teacher, and then you move on to the classical
teacher, and then the old-time and jazz and improv teachers. I remember
loving the classes with Paul Peabody, the classical teacher, and I just
stayed there all day one time. I realized that I was missing a lot of
technique. So when I got home, I started taking Suzuki again, and it
really helped me figure out what I wanted, how to analyze what I was
doing wrong.
Bluegrass has given a
lot of players a technical grounding that helps them zoom off wherever
their imagination leads. Has it done that for you?
Chris
You won't ever find music where you play such fast consecutive eighth
notes for so long. In early bluegrass, the consecutive eighth notes
were often the same note, but as it developed, you have people like
Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Mark O'Connor—great,
great musicians who were adding the jazz elements. So yeah, that definitely
leads to developing some pretty intense chops, but the one thing you
fight coming from bluegrass is that you fill up all the space—you
are used to every eighth note being full. Not so much with fiddle, because
you can sustain a little bit more, but with guitar and mandolin and,
of course, banjo. When you are playing that fast, it's almost like a
train. Once you are used to it, it's easier to keep going than it is
to stop.
The bluegrass instrumental
influence is much harder to hear on your new record than it was on Nickel
Creek. Was it a conscious decision to concentrate on poppier vocals?
Sara
Nothing is really a conscious decision. It's not like we've been playing
exactly like the Nickel Creek record for three years, and then
all of a sudden it's time to record a new CD and we're thinking, "OK,
it's time to change."
Chris
That's a rock band kind of thing: "Here's our new concept album."
Was it easy to adapt
to vocal-oriented music? The song structures are totally different than
in something like a fiddle tune, which uses such long and complicated
phrases.
Sean
It happened a long time ago. The first year we were a band, it was probably
more than half instrumental, but people like hearing vocals, and we
started realizing that. Chris and I started writing songs five or six
years after we had been in the band, and that made things take off.
Getting an emotion that
you have inside of you into someone else's ears is a pretty cool thing.
You are not just singing someone else's song. Our new album has one
instrumental and 12 vocals, but that's not to say that we like the instrumental
side of our music any less. Our goal has always been to combine instrumental
stuff that we like with pop-oriented vocals or storytelling vocals.
Chris
The instrumental ["Smoothie Song"] sounds to me like a vocal, and some
of the vocals, like "Speak," for instance, sound like instrumentals.
There are words and everything, but the melody is jumpy and you could
just hum it and be perfectly happy. It was really fun to play with all
this stuff. There are some strange things going on. There's whispering,
we stuck a bit of Dylan Thomas prose in there. It was really anything
goes.
Sean
The way we used the instrumental side on this CD has more to do with
a classical way of thinking. It's a little more arranged.
Sara
Like on "House Carpenter," you are not thinking, "mandolin solo." You
are thinking about what just happened in the song. It's like a pause.
Chris
It's trying to create settings for the words. And then it works the
other way sometimes. On [Carrie Newcomer's] "I Should've Known Better,"
there are these insane string parts that have 20 or 25 [layers] of me
playing these crazy parts.
It sounds a little like
the Kronos Quartet knocked on the wrong studio door.
Chris
Yeah, it's like a song in civil war. And also with the vocals, Alison
[Krauss] had this idea for me to just sing part after part after part.
I wouldn't listen to what I had just sung. And then we put them all
together, and they would make these crazy cluster harmonies.
What have you learned
from working with Alison as a producer?
Sara
Well, it was really great working with her again right after the last
album. We had a dynamic going. We had an understanding. But some things
changed. The songs that we had to work with were hugely better, and
our interpretation, I think, matured. She was coming from some different
influences, and we had some gigantic musical influences over the last
few years especially.
Such as?
Sara
Elliott Smith, songwriter-wise. But there were also a lot of new production
ideas—we were just open to a whole lot of new options.
It's great to hear rock
energy channeled through acoustic instruments on a song like "Young."
Chris
Right on. You express whatever energy you are feeling through whatever
instrument you feel the most comfortable on.
Sean
The thing about playing acoustic instruments is that if you want to
express a more aggressive feeling, it tends to be a little more honest
sounding. You feel more connected to the emotion. You play an E-minor
chord with an electric guitar through a couple of Marshall stacks, and
it sounds like you are mad. But it takes a little more thought to do
it on an acoustic.
How did you do all those
sneaky percussion parts?
Sean
We made our own loops with things that we found in the studio. A lot
of it is little hits on our instruments. There's deadened bass strings.
On one song I slapped the guitar case. One song Chris used an apple—
Chris
No, nectarine—
Sean
—nectarine on the guitar case.
Sara
It must have looked so ridiculous! We put coffee grains on paper, bow
hair on wood, whatever.
No temptation to just
bring in the trap set?
Sara
No, no, no. We wanted to do it all ourselves. We had to line up all
the noises, and that took a good day, just lining them up and making
loops.
Chris
We wanted to create a new sound, something to rely on aside from a click
track.
On "Young," is that several
guitar parts?
Chris
There are three or four guitar parts. I play the big strummy open-G
tuning, and then Sean played a couple of different parts and did a fingerstyle
thing over the chorus. At a certain point, there are as many as five
mandolins. The loop on that track has some mandolin chop on it, and
I added another track of mandolin chop later, just to blend in with
the loop.
The subject matter is maybe
the most poppy on the record. It's about my brother, who can't really
get the nerve up to talk to girls most of the time. It was something
that was weighing heavily on my mind, seeing that it was my little brother.
But it was so pop, so I wanted to kind of parody the situation. The
song is so fun to sing, and I get to scream a little bit.
In general, your lyrics
veer pretty far from the pop music norm.
Sean
The bands that inspire our pop lyrics are like Counting Crows, Toad
the Wet Sprocket, and Elliott Smith, and their words don't have much
to do with other popular lyrics. For one thing, hardly any of them say
the word love in them. The bands we listen to deal with all areas
of life. Obviously the biggest area is relationships with people, but
they are also open to lots of other subjects.
Sean, your role as guitarist
in this band seems very open-ended.
Sean
In bluegrass, the role of the guitar player is mainly for rhythm. But
in this band, Chris has the dominant role rhythmically when he's not
soloing. I can do more stuff with texture and focus more on chord voicings,
things like that, while doing rhythm. We all have responsibilities,
but because we know each other really well, we can switch roles easily.
You use a lot of modal
chord voicings and suspended chords and such.
Sean
It's amazing how much cooler it gets when you change one note in a chord.
And your songs often
have irregular meters and little breaks that go a beat longer or shorter
than expected. How do you work out that stuff as a band?
Chris
The odd time signatures feel natural to us, because we've grown up with
music that screws around with time signatures. It feels perfectly normal
to play a bar of seven or five or 11 or whatever. It's not like anybody
is sitting there counting stuff out. I think if you can't really feel
it, there's not much point playing it, because it's going to sound like
you are counting.
After 12 years of playing
together, what's the communication like in this band?
Sean
It's great. We're kind of like a family, but we probably get along better
than most families. There's a lot of nice camaraderie, and decision
making is pretty easy because we all come from the same place—spiritually,
the way we grew up with our families, where we grew up. And our musical
backgrounds are similar—we listen to the same type of stuff. A
lot of people want to find out the dirt on us, but there's not really
much. We are all just best friends and have a good time playing together.
How has your audience
changed as you've broken into the pop scene?
Chris
It's really diverse now. It's a lot younger. It's really fun to see
kids who pretty much think they are coming to a pop show, and nothing
that we do changes their mind. They have a great time and afterwards
treat us like we are rock stars. They are all surprised when we come
out and talk to everybody and sign autographs.
Sean
We'll see a junior high kid next to a grandpa with his kids and their
kids. It makes us feel like what we are saying through our music and
words is real, like we are connecting with people who have seen all
sorts of things and all different phases of life.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, December 2002,
No. 120.
