photo: Avery Brunkus

***

On May 30, 2020, Chris Thile hosted the final installment of Live From Here. A remote episode broadcast a few months into the COVID necessitated shutdown, it was a quiet end to the beloved and long-running variety show, which Garrison Keillor started as A Prairie Home Companion in 1974. Yet, as is often the case, one door closing led to another opening and the revered mandolinist and MacArthur Fellow is now a creative force beyond a new series, The Energy Curfew Music Hour. The program’s eight-episode first season was released via Audible in October.

“We had a tremendous opportunity,” Thile says, while checking in from his home in Little Armenia, N.Y., which is nestled in the corner of Dutchess County, on the Connecticut border. “The thing that people loved about A Prairie Home Companion was the rootsy nature, the back-to-the-land feeling it had. It was acoustic music. Of course, you’re playing through microphones so it’s a little bit of a ruse no matter what, but people are aware that the sounds that they’re hearing could be made sound sans electricity. And that was very rewarding.”

A show within a show, The Energy Curfew Music Hour is billed as a loosely scripted, multi-episode variety program set “in an imagined near-future where energy is rationed, and the nation tunes in to listen to this audio-only show.” Thile conceived Energy Curfew with his wife, the actress Claire Coffee, and brought in his cross-genre string band Punch Brothers as his core group for each installment. Building on the Live From Here concept, the episodes feature vaudeville-approved comedic vignettes; new, original music; and special guests that are chosen, in part, for their ability to collaborate with Punch Brothers. That list of musicians ranges from marquee names like James Taylor, Norah Jones, Jon Batiste, Kacey Musgraves, Sylvan Esso, Jason Isbell and the members of Vulfpeck to emerging acts like Tiny Habits and Haley Heynderickx.

The program is recorded at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, an intimate venue housed on a side street in New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s a few doors down from classic establishments like the bistro Minetta Tavern and Café Wa?—a relic from the neighborhood’s folk-music prime. The entire experience has a speakeasy quality to it, which Thile says was part of the point.

“We want it to be like going to an immersion bar or standing in line for a ride at Disneyland—that kind of joy,” Thile says, while noting that Keillor had long rooted A Prairie Home Companion in a similar, fictional location with an established sense of self. “There was this bar in New York that was so special to me called Milk & Honey. You’d go through this velvet curtain and get hit by the orange and lemon zest. You were transported to another place and could check the cares of the day at the door”

As Thile is quick to note, it’s a feeling that rubs off on his guest performers, too.

“The forces of the show are geared towards transporting all of us—the listener, the participants, the guests and us,” he says. “There’s such an emphasis on collaboration and an emphasis on playing acousticly, regardless of what you normally do. We wanted to run the gamut, in terms of musical approach—not just over the course of the season but across each episode. We selected guests not only based on their prowess but also because they are all very natural collaborators. Part of the plan was, ‘Let’s see if one and one can make three.’”

That through-the-looking-glass approach has already led to some unique moments. Musgraves, who recorded her 2024 release Deeper Well at the nearby Electric Lady Studios, used the opportunity to preview some of her new material and jam with Thile, whose group Nickel Creek who served as her opening act on an arena tour this fall. Another episode was billed as featuring what is ostensibly Vulfpeck founder Jack Stratton’s solo vehicle Vulfmon, but the drummer ended up roping in other members of his funk collective as well as Punch Brothers for their segment.

“Certainly, there’s plenty of vocal music in their oeuvre, but I think of them as an instrumental act,” Thile says of Vulfpeck. “It’s a joy bomb. It’s a party, and they are unashamed to enjoy themselves—not just in a performance, but in the conception and execution of the music. On that same episode, we had Haley Hendrix, who is no less of a joy bomb but also has this incredible perception and sensitivity and is so naturally expressive. On paper, that’s a high contrast but, in practice, it’s so compatible. To be the connective tissue, aesthetically speaking, and to underline both their differences and the similarities is what the show is about.”

Thile and Punch Brothers—whose current lineup also includes banjoist Noam Pikelny, guitarist Chris Eldridge, double bassist Paul Kowert and fiddler Brittany Haas, who joined last year—taped The Energy Curfew Music Hour in front of a live audience of just over 300 people per episode in late 2023 and early 2024. Like Live From Here before it, the production fell somewhere between a traditional radio taping and a minimalist theatrical performance. The Energy Curfew Music Hour’s most visible backdrop was a barometer measuring the broadcast’s energy level as the program rolled on.

“Minetta is this cool off-Broadway Theater, and that contributes to that feeling,” Thile says. “There’s something so other about it. You walk in there, and you’re already transported, before you even see the set on the stage. You can’t see that while you’re listening to it on the various streaming services, but you can feel it.”

***

Thile has long felt like a natural variety-show host, even before he scored the A Prairie Home Companion gig in 2016. In addition to appearing on that show multiple times as Nickel Creek and then Punch Brothers grew into progressive roots-music torchbearers, his creative spirit has always hugged the worlds of quick-witted comedy, PAC-level discipline and, yes, craft-cocktail sophistication. Along with Punch Brothers, he played a key role creating both the music for Inside Llewyn Davis and the 2013 movie’s concert celebration and has curated events at storied spaces like New York’s Carnegie Hall. Likewise, his list of past collaborators ranges from Béla Fleck to Dolly Parton, Yo-Yo Ma, Brad Mehldau and The Dixie Chicks, as well as orchestras across the country.

“Live From Here ended due to COVID, though who really ever knows when corporations are involved,” Thile admits. “I had so much fun making that show. There were certainly aspects of it that were really challenging, but, by and large, it was immensely rewarding. And I have always loved the variety format. I was raised on A Prairie Home Companion and, to a lesser extent, the Grand Ole Opry. I was literally on A Prairie Home Companion when I was 14. And when they shut Live From Here down, there wasn’t another program like that in this country.”

The mandolist pauses to call out the exciting English program Later… with Jools Holland and to note his enthusiasm for Austin City Limits, yet both of those programs lacked the collaborative nature he was looking for. After Live From Here shuttered, Thile harnessed some of that super-jam spirit for The 65th Street Session, a live concert series on the campus of Lincoln Center that weaved in guests like Billy Strings, Cory Wong and Meshell Ndegeocello. And he admits that a few people approached him about reviving the program. But none of those pitches had any real momentum until he connected with producer Sam Britton.

“He actually had the kind of funding that could make it happen,” Thile says. “They weren’t shutting Live From Here down because it was so inexpensive to make. A variety show takes a ton of resources. And, even still, I was very wary because the things that were challenging about Live From Here were aspects of it that I was obliged to do. Some of the demands put on us seemed, to me, very counter to what makes the show special. I was always pushing for Live From Here to be less and less about the prevailing musical aesthetic out there.”

The Punch Brothers frontman explains that, especially in a modern world where there is instant access to music, he didn’t want to simply host a traditional program that focused on current pop bands or electronic acts, simply because he could book them. So he and Coffee started working on Energy Curfew’s narrative elements, fleshing out the “show-within-a show” concept.

“The stuff that Sam missed the most about Live From Here is exactly what I missed the most, so that got the wheels turning,” Thile says. “We wanted this to be music you don’t generally hear on the radio and late-night TV or in the grocery store. It is music that is not well represented and also happens to be the thing that I understand the best.”

Their story arc was both simple and meta: There is a power outage and the only thing that can keep Thile and the Punch Brothers from transmitting their show is a battery-operated microphone.

“We envisioned it as willfully suspending our disbelief,” he says. “Maybe the power goes out or maybe we’re in a near future where we’re having to ration energy or something like that. Maybe it happens in the old Lake Wobegon spot, where Garrison would do his show. That always felt like a trip in a time machine— and not always backward. I never had this sense that it was all throwbacky. It seemed vaguely utopian in a way. Claire and I started dreaming. There is this back-to-the-land feeling. It’s far-fetched in a variety of ways, and very silly in some ways, but there’s also some aspects of it that are not so silly at all. We kept fleshing out the story. Maybe there is a series of weather events and the whole country pulls together. Are these things mandated? There were fun little flights of fancy we thought of—or maybe there would be something like the non-essential electronics buyback program, wherein the only music that could be responsibly and sustainably made is acoustic music. It didn’t all have to be ‘Dueling Banjos’ or ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ either.”

However, there was still the question of how Thile and Coffee would be able to bring there program into the world. Yet, in another unexpected turn of events, the Punch Brothers ended up having a direct line to Bob Carrigan, who took over as CEO of Audible in early 2020.

“I first met Bob at Béla Fleck’s Blueridge Banjo Camp in 2018 or 2019,” Pikelny says. “He’s an excellent banjo and guitar player and he was in some of my classes at the camp and then continued studying as part of my online banjo school at Artistworks. In December 2022, Punch Brothers was playing in New York as part of our American Acoustic tour. Bob and I met for a drink across the street before the show just to catch up, and as they say the rest is history. I explained that Chris and Claire had dreamed up this concept of The Energy Curfew Music Hour, that Punch Brothers was going to be the host band and I was going to help develop and write the show. Bob immediately expressed his desire to bring the show to Audible, as they were producing more and more music and theater-related programming and had the perfect venue for the live tapings, Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater. Bob and his entire team were a dream to work with.”

“Something that Sam had let fly was that Audible had actually pitched carrying Live From Here when it was cancelled, but they never heard back,” Thile adds. “The poetry of this is pretty fun. It was a chance for them to put their money where their mouth is. So much of what Audible does is books on tape, so part of what we had to do is conceive everyone that this was not just an acoustic variety show. There is a setting. It’s a vehicle for storytelling.”

***

Audible dropped the first season of The Energy Curfew Music Hour on October 10. Despite being recorded live, with minimal edits, the series feels like an audio storybook, with the cross-generational cast fittingly in snuggly as characters in the world Thile and Coffee conceived.

“All the guests were briefed on the setting,” Thile says. “There are very few spell breakers during the season. We didn’t have to do much editing to keep it all within the frame.”

As part of the creative process, Punch Brothers also used the program to drop the “song of the week,” a brand new piece of original music. It offered a rare snapshot into the quintet’s creative process.

“It doesn’t have to be finished—I think it’s actually fun for it not to be,” Thile says. “It’s a version of it but it hasn’t undergone the various stages of revision that we often subject our music to. And what, ultimately, happens is it assumes a form that it had early on in the process. You realize that you’ve revised it back to its original self.”

“We would batch two or three episodes at a time while we were in New York—two in a week or three shows in about 10 days,” Pikelny adds. “We would hunker down and work furiously under the deadline to get all the new music, arrangements, the comedic bits and sketches ready by showtime. It was a small writing team— Chris, Claire, myself and Rachel Axler out in LA working remotely. It was a real juggling act staying focused on the music and the non-musical bits simultaneously. After a two or three-show run, we’d all go back home for 10 days or a couple weeks before coming back to the city. We had one four-day writing retreat in New York in the summer before the show began and another in Southern Vermont around Christmastime. And, at that point, we were halfway through the season. Those writing sessions were a chance to take inventory of ideas for new music and we’d get as far as we could. We’d then develop and finish the new songs and arrangements in more detail as the episodes drew near. It was intense, honestly, but also incredibly rewarding. It reminded me of the earliest days of the band, when we were doing a regular show at the Living Room on the Lower East Side. We’d work up new originals and tons of covers for each show, as well as a bunch of shenanigans on my part. It captured a lot of that same energy and has led to some of the most productive times the band has spent together in years.”

Chris hints that Punch Brothers have continued to work on that batch of song ideas and may even end up making a record to house them. “I love the weird surrealism of a record coming out of this material in a different state, in the next couple of years, because the show is from the near future,” he says with a laugh, clearly amused by the Back to the Future twist of it all. “It’s such fun for us, writing wise, to imagine how we would sound or write in this world. The original material is very much conceived in character. You might pick up in the lyrics that there are certain things that are slightly askew. We’re really trying to exist in this near future or a parallel present. We think, ‘How would we sound, think or write?’”

Looking ahead, Thile is already marinating on the program’s second season. He plans to dive in more after Nickel Creek wraps up their current run with Musgraves. Adding to the tricky time element, he chuckles that, though the first season of the program was released during the outing, it features music that was recorded before anyone had heard it. And he hopes it’s all the beginning of a long-running, continuous creative outlet for Punch Brothers.

“We’re trying to make beautiful things,” he says of The Energy Curfew Music Hour, which has turned into both an escape and a commentary on current times. “We’re trying to delight in the human experience. And we are gonna keep cranking them out.”