Photo credit: Josh Goleman

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“My family and I were renting a little place in Hudson, N.Y., while we were waiting out a renovation that slowed to an unbearable crawl because of the pandemic,” Chris Thile recalls, while tracing the origins of his first true solo album, Laysongs. The record’s six original songs and three covers feature only vocals and mandolin from the musician who typically finds himself in close quarters with adroit accompanists. (Punch Brothers, Nickel Creek and Goat Rodeo represent three of his many endeavors.)

“Soon after we arrived, I got the news that the radio show [American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile] was going to be canceled. Of course, all touring had been canceled,” he continues. “So, with the schedule yawning out in front of me, I started hunting around for a location in the area where I could make a record if I could think of a record to make. Then, someone told me about that converted church [Future-Past recording studio], which brought to mind something that Bob Hurwitz, the chairman emeritus of Nonesuch, had said to me.

“He had come to one of the radio shows where the vague theme was God. And he said, ‘I’m not a religious person but I like what happens when you are contemplating religion. Why don’t you just lean into it once and see what happens?’ The same guy, Bob Hurwitz, also suggested that I take a snapshot of the pandemic. So I conflated those two thoughts of his. And the fact that there was that church in Hudson—combined with the fact that the pandemic was facilitating some serious late night existential stewing— pointed me toward making the record that turned into Laysongs.”

When you were writing the material on Laysongs, were you trying to address the wider world or were you trying to initiate a dialogue with yourself?

If you look at any song, it’ll have a unique genesis story in terms of the intent behind it and who it’s for, exactly. To a certain extent, though, they’re all for me. When I was in my early twenties, I received some advice from a wise and worldly friend who was maybe in his late twenties. [Laughs.] He had just read a book in which it said that you had to be true to your audience of one.

He was passing that on to me while I was in the middle of the promotional cycle for the Nickel Creek record Why Should the Fire Die? and had just started working on the first through-composed piece of music that I’d ever worked on. I think I was worrying that some people wouldn’t like it, and that’s when my buddy dropped that one on me. And, clichéd though it might be, it rang true.

Nothing I do is going to do anybody any good if I’m not satisfied by it. I think the initial impulse for writing a song is typically one of two things: Either I want to hear something that I’m not hearing out in the world, or I’m sort of humming mindlessly to myself and I stumble across something that pleases me or intrigues me in some way.

It doesn’t always please; sometimes it just confuses, but in an exciting way. I love being confused by music because I feel like, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And, if I’m confused by something, chances are I have something to learn from it. I would say most of my writing comes from that perspective. Even my lyrical writing often comes from being confused by something and wanting to get in there, as opposed to having something definitive to say about a particular topic. Every now and then, I go into the songwriting process with something definitive to express, but I would say that’s rare. More often, it’s that I am definitively confused and intrigued by something.

When you take that song to the next stage and record it, will you think about the context in which it is going to be received?

Even if you’re true to your audience of one, you would be pretty damn self-absorbed to not wonder how this thing might be experienced by other human beings. But I tend to populate that sort of theoretical audience with real people that I know. So when I’m thinking of an audience, they are made up of very clearly defined faces. I think of people whose music has meant a lot to me who might run across this thing at some point. I think about how they listen to music because I often am intimately acquainted with the way that they do so.

I also think about my closest friends and family because I know who they are and, again, I know how they listen to music. Then, sometimes, I think about these people who come to a lot of shows—maybe I’ve had a conversation with one of them after a show about something that had an impact on them.

So I do think about all those things but, first and foremost, I have to love the finished result. The way that I listen to music is with a cocktail at the end of the night—the lights are down and I’m in my little earbud world so as not to wake up the family. I take everything out for a test drive there and often I realize what’s wrong with it. Then, I’ll keep working until it’s ready for the rest of those folks that I’m thinking about.

This album came together while you were recording in an Upstate New York church. To what extent does the locale where you write or record material impact its final form?

I live in New York, specifically Brooklyn, and some people find the energy of the city suffocating and some people find it inspiring. I’m one of the latter. There’s all that human energy swirling around, whether it’s directed toward the visual arts or the stock exchange or tech or medicine or whatever it is. I generally find that there’s a lot of gas in the tank when I’m in a big city like that.

But, conversely, right now I’m staring out the window at a very pastoral scene about 30 or 40 miles outside of Nashville. I’m working on another record, and I’m finding these environs to be equally stimulating in a very different way. There’s a chance to take a deep breath and hear yourself think while you write in that space. Both are of equal value and equal excitement for me, but they’re different.

I’ll write in different ways and I think that’s an argument for a long gestation period. That way, you can place this musical object that you’re making in the center of your life’s room and walk all around it. How is it hitting you in the middle of New York City? And how is it hitting you in rural Tennessee? You’ll learn more about the thing that you’re making if you consider it from these different vantage points.

Maybe a certain piece of music might be more apt to arise from a certain environment, but that piece of music is going to become its most vibrant and satisfying self if the gestation period is long enough for you to consider it from the vantage point of a lot of different environments.

Do you always prefer that outcome rather than creating something that is the product of a particular time or place?

Even if music is of a certain place and time, my personal preference is for music to exist outside of it—just for perspective’s sake. Although I should add that some of the things that I’m proudest of as a writer have come out relatively quickly, to where there wasn’t time to consider them from multiple vantage points. Those are very much related to improvisation.

There’s not a different process for me when it comes to improvisation as opposed to composition. It’s just the pace and the time that you have to dot your I’s and cross your T’s. You’re still creating stuff; it’s just how fast. When you’re improvising, you haven’t turned off all critical thinking, you’re just doing it at a breakneck pace. It’s not that you shouldn’t be subjecting yourself to a certain amount of scrutiny, you just have to get it over and done with really fast.

There’s room for a lot of shades of this kind of activity. But probably the majority of what you’re hearing that I composed on Laysongs is stuff that was composed over a long period of time.

Having said that, “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth”— which is probably the most “ambitious” piece of music on the record and might have taken me the most total time to write—came together over the shortest period of time. Whereas I started something that was far more intuitively arrived upon, like “Dionysus,” in 2010 and finished it in 2018 or 2019. Of course, it’s not like I was working on it that whole time. I started something, abandoned it, and then it popped back into my head due to a set of circumstances that brought to mind a very old piece of unfinished music.

I guess it just runs the gamut. As a writer, you shouldn’t be oblivious to the processes that lead to a piece of music you’ve written that you like. However, it can lead to writer’s block if you fixate on the idea that “I wrote this thing that I love this particular way, and now I need to write something else and I’m going to try and do it that way again.” You’re begging for writer’s block to do that because songs are like people. No two are alike and no two have gotten to where they’ve gotten the same way.

As a practical matter, how will you store away and then re[1]access pieces of music, like the one you just described?

I’m a compulsive voice memo-er. It’s just like when comedians say, “Is that something? Is that something?” If that little voice inside of me goes, “I think that might be something,” I usually will get the voice memo out and chronicle it. Then, as a need arises, I’ll go rummaging around in that bag of voice memos on my phone or on my computer. Usually, they’re little sketches that remind me of all the things that I was thinking might be contained within this little first gesture, which, by the way, is often not the first thing that gets heard in a song.

We shouldn’t be confining our process to any sort of regimented parameters—I do this, then I do this and then I do this—and we also should not be constricting gestures to the order in which they come to us. There can be a first moving gesture that by no means is the intro of the song. They can be secondary or tertiary gestures, but they just happened to be the first mover, the way that a paleontologist might uncover a dinosaur bone. They might just find the knuckle of a little claw and realize, “I think this is a Tyrannosaurus knuckle,” then continue digging it and eventually find the far more structurally important parts of the dinosaur.

Sometimes it’s tempting, as a songwriter, to envision the first thing you think of as being the first thing in the piece of music. But you can’t confine gestures to the order of discovery. So having this jumbled bag of ideas is helpful in that regard.

In the case of “Dionysus,” there was a very practical need to have a song by the end of the week for the radio show I was hosting. Then the feelers go out and you say, “What do I want to talk about?” We were going to be in a wine region, so it was like, “Well, maybe I want to get wine in there somehow.” [Laughs.] There also was a theme of mythical creatures on that episode of the radio show, and since I was going to be in a wine region, I started thinking about Dionysus. Then, I turned the word Dionysus over and over in my head and came up with that bridge in the middle of the song. The scansion of that word “Dionysus” suggested the melody to me. Then, when I hacked away at that little piece of dirt, there was a little Tyrannosaurus claw sticking up out of it.

Despite the fact that there is an ancient voice memo somewhere from 2010, I didn’t go back through my old voice memos in search of something for the song. There was something about working on that little bit of music that suggested it to me. So I trotted it back out in my mind and it was still there somehow. Then, I went to work, trying to figure out the connection.

You’ve got the claw and then, all of a sudden, it’s: “We found a femur back there in that other part of the dig.” And then you go, “Oh, maybe that might be the same dinosaur.”

The bridge of “Dionysus” wanted to be at a different pulse. It’s in a different key and, yet, they were indubitably connected in my mind. So then I go about finding what the connection is.

That’s just one process in a nutshell, and it’s nothing like any of the other songs on that record in terms of the process.

With Laysongs, I had this desire in the midst of the pandemic to make something that was a meditation on the religious impulse and all the different ways that it is expressed. Going back through my own unresolved work, I realized that there was a throughline of religious-impulse questioning and, all of a sudden, the shape and structure and loose narrative form of Laysongs started coming into focus.

That’s also when a couple of non-original music fixations I had all started to make sense in that context—the Buffy Sainte[1]Marie/Leonard Cohen piece “God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot,” as well as that Hazel Dickens song [“Won’t You Come and Sing for Me”] and the Bartók [“Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117: IV. Presto.”] Again, kind of like that dinosaur dig, they started suggesting the shape of a very real beast to assemble in that little church in Hudson, N.Y.

What led you to The Screwtape Letters at this point in your life? [Editor’s Note: C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters in 1942, after his conversion to Christianity and eight years prior to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.]

I find The Screwtape Letters to be an endlessly intriguing piece of work. I grew up in a very fundamentalist Christian environment, and C.S. Lewis is typically a pretty big part of someone who grows up in a Christian environment’s life. There’s at least going to be the Chronicles of Narnia and, chances are, there’s going to be Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. So in my sort of post-Christian period of life, I surprised myself by wanting to get back into The Screwtape Letters.

I think the device is so intriguing. It’s the intercepted correspondence between two demons who are wreaking havoc on a particular individual’s soul. Regardless of what our spiritual lives are like, sometimes we feel external forces at work. And sometimes, despite the fact that I consider myself an agnostic, I feel external forces—a current of some kind in my life. There’s the part of you that feels like you have a certain amount of control over your actions and there’s the part of you that doesn’t.

So I loved putting myself back into a place where I was thinking about these external sentient forces attempting to make our lives less fulfilling, less satisfying and less productive. Rather than whatever Lewis imagined them being up to, I imagined what I thought they’d be up to. That’s what “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth” is. That’s where it’s coming from.

I could envision this as a full-fledged musical or even an opera. Did that ever occur to you?

It didn’t, but I am currently pursuing a couple of things that would potentially go in the direction of an evening-length followable narrative, as opposed to my generally abstract narrative. So I do wonder if “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth” was sort of a study for something larger that’s coming.

You created Laysongs while looking for a creative outlet following the cancellation of Live From Here. I imagine that, in making the show, you experienced all types of inspiring new music. What is the first example that comes to mind?

The first thing that pops into my head is Haley Heynderickx. One of the reasons for this is that she was on the very last episode before the lockdown, which ended up being the last episode of what the show was built to do, although we made a couple of remote episodes afterward.

Someone told me to check out Haley, and it’s the kind of thing where I may not have done so had I not been the host of a variety show. If I did, it might have taken me a long time and maybe I would have listened and gone, “Cool” and that would have been it.

But as the host of a variety show, if someone tells me to check someone out, then I’m going to check it out because there were 26 of those things to book. So I listened to the first thing that Spotify showed me from Haley Heynderickx and lost my mind. At the end of this very sweet song, she’s yelling, “I think I need to start a garden! I think I need to start a garden!” So the top of my head’s blown off and I’m like, “Yes, book her!”

But, when she came on the radio show, she got it into her head that she wanted to use a brass quartet for the first time. This was not a way in which she was touring or a way that her record was being promoted. She just decided, “I’m going to go on this radio show and I want it to be special.” So she hired this brass quartet called The Westerlies, who I also was not familiar with, and they were amazing together.

Without the radio show, I wouldn’t have come into contact with Haley in such an impactful way.

The thing that I miss the most about the radio show is being externally compelled to be an audience member and listen to music for sheer pleasure and edification, as opposed to the way that musicians often listen to music—or at least the way this one does, which is almost like an athlete who goes to the gym to work out certain things. It’s like I’m pumping iron. I need to improve my grasp of counterpoint, so I’m gonna go to the gym and listen to a bunch of Bach today. Or I’m dissatisfied with the scope of my harmony, so I’m listening to Debussy and Thomas Adès. Or I need to be a more free-flowing improviser so I’m listening to Coltrane. That’s how I would listen, and, of course, those things would also give me immense pleasure but I’m sitting there sweating and the creative muscles are contracted.

So Live From Here put me into a position to ask myself, “Am I enjoying this? Is it making my life better?”

That’s what I miss. I have retained a certain amount of it, thankfully, where I do just listen for sheer pleasure, more than I did before the radio show experience.

Do you think your radio show might resurface in some way?

I do think that it will resurface. I don’t know how similar it will be, but I really enjoyed the experience and I think there’s a reason to seek it out again. I wouldn’t be interested in it if it were exactly the same because I never wanted any of those episodes to be the same as the last. But I bet it will come back in some form.