Nickel Creek Is Still Redefining Bluegrass

After 34 years together, Nickel Creek is more of a family endeavor than ever before, according to members Chris Thile – whose father played string bass during the bluegrass group’s first-ever show in 1989 – and siblings Sara and Sean Watkins.

“I often will think about our relationship as like your family that you grew up with. We were literally kids growing up together,” Sara, Nickel Creek’s fiddle player, says from her Southern California home, where she takes time to sweep up some sand between questions. “We operated like a family.”

She credits that special bond to “spending so much time together” on the road, particularly up until a seven-year hiatus beginning in 2007. The group re-formed in 2014; the temporary pause allowed the trio to “diversify our musical and life experience in a way that every time we come together, there’s new things to share and learn about ourselves and each other,” she adds.

Those “lovely surprises and delights in each other’s developing musicianship is what fuels the band,” Sara explains. “There’s this immediate familiarity, but years may have gone by since we’ve actually worked together.”

For its new record, Celebrants, the long-awaited followup to 2014’s A Dotted Line that released in March, Nickel Creek spent even more time together, coming up with eighteen songs that resulted in the group’s most cohesive album yet. Of course, that means it’s chock-full of the band’s blend of traditional and progressive bluegrass.

“When you’re writing a record like this, which is more like a through-composed piece than a random collection of hopefully complementary songs, there are things that keep coming back, both instrumentally and lyrically, that develop throughout the record,” says Thile, the group’s mandolin maestro.

“You often are not finishing a song to the point where it’s been evaluated as to whether it fits or not. They’re all coming up together as a unit,” he continues. “Maybe you get to about 60 percent finished, and you look at everything before realizing that this section of this song doesn’t fit.”

The newfound process ended up leaving a “bunch of scraps on the cutting-room floor,” he adds.

It didn’t happen by accident, either. Celebrants, with songs such as hit singles “Strangers” and “Where the Long Line Leads,” was intentionally Nickel Creek’s “most ambitious” project to date, Sean explains.

“We knew that we wanted to take a big swing, so we talked about it early on before we got together to write,” the guitarist says, adding that Thile drove across the country from his New York home to California during the pandemic so they could all be in the same room (late-night hangs over drinks helped, too). “In doing that, it’s tough to show up with songs that are ambitious songs already pre-made,” Sean adds. “We knew we’d have to cook it up while we were together.”

Such a “foggy pursuit,” as Sara describes it, allowed Nickel Creek to create a truly unique and complete collection that captures “the function and feelings” the members hoped to express, which has become the trio’s calling card in a genre of music that’s rooted in old-school customs and forms.

“Whenever you are trying to do anything that feels new to you, which as musicians we try to do, it’s impossible to point at something and be like, ‘I want to do something like that,’ because as far as you know, it doesn’t exist yet,” Sara shares. “You really are shaping it. It’s not like these songs existed and we just decided to do them. It was a lot of collaboration and working together and living with them for a while and then tweaking them and adjusting and making it something that did what we wanted it to do. … It became something that we were very, very proud of.”

Nickel Creek is now busy playing Celebrants, as well as tried-and-true fan favorites, on tour. The band performs at Denver’s Mission Ballroom on Wednesday, October 18. Monica Martin is the opener.

“We’ve had such a long history with that city and area,” Sara says of Denver’s healthy appreciation for bluegrass.

“It’s a vibe, and it’s a good one,” her brother adds.

Still riding high from the Celebrants sessions, Nickel Creek is firing on all cylinders and the live show is “better than it ever has been,” Sean says.

“We feel like we accomplished what we set out to do,” he adds.

As professional musicians with equally successful solo careers at this point, the three string players clearly take pride in the fact that they were able to push themselves and each other, while once again redefining what their longstanding band can do and be within the bluegrass scene.

“The goal was to figure out what this band means now sonically and how can we come together and make a new statement that felt completely sincere coming from all three of us using the textural palette that has evolved over the first thirty-four years of the band,” Thile explains.

“It was an incredible process. I’ve never made a record like this before. I can’t imagine it working under any other circumstance,” Sara oncludes. “It was all hands-on deck the whole time.”

Nickel Creek, 8 p.m. Wednesday, October 18, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $49-$160.