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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.
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