Friction and dissonance aren’t exactly the words that come to mind when you think about Nickel Creek.
The trio of siblings Sean (bass) and Sara Watkins (fiddle), and longtime friend Chris Thile (mandolin), made their musical mark crafting a canon of expertly wrought progressive bluegrass dating back to the trio’s origins as teen prodigies who eventually caught the eye and ear of Alison Krauss.
The trio’s latest outing, “Celebrants,” finds the threesome coming together in the studio for the first time since 2014’s “A Dotted Line.” The resulting 18-song effort is steeped in what they describe in the album’s liner notes as being “…a record about embracing the friction inherent in real human connection.”
The seeds for this ambitious project were planted when the trio and their family units decamped to Santa Monica for a month of writing in April/May 2021. For Sara Watkins, the close quarters yielded plenty of fruitful creative moments.
“It was really incredible,” she said in an early April phone interview. “We were able to bring our families together and it was special symbolically for us because Chris has a son that’s almost as old as Chris and I when our band started. It was this wonderful full-circle moment on a personal level of reconnecting our families in this new stage of life. Meanwhile, we still feel like the kids we always were, and to be able to reconnect, which ended up being what a lot of this album was about, not even specific to the pandemic, but specific to this time in our lives where we find ourselves choosing things and deciding what relationships we really want to dig into. Chris had said that there’s a lot written about the beginning of a relationship—I love you, you’re perfect. And the end—I hate you and I never want to see you again. Most of our life is the middle. For me there is a mundane that we all experience once we get into a job. If we create anything solid, it becomes repetitious. There are benefits and drawbacks to that kind of thing. It was a special experience to be able to sort through that together and to talk about it in real conversation.”
Reconnecting with producer Eric Valentine, Nickel Creek also invited longtime friend Mike Elizondo to join in the fun. Elizondo, a producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist in his own right who has worked with Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Cassandra Wilson, Sheryl Crow and Keith Urban, among others, made a significant impact.
“We were able to meet up with Mike after that first month of writing and get his fingerprints on the album pretty early on,” Watkins said. “He had a tremendous effect on the album. It would be a very different record had he not been a part of it, especially the early writing and arrangement process that happened.”
Ambition runs amuck from the rollercoaster ride of the instrumental “Going Out…” which finds Thile’s fingerpicking parrying and jousting with Watkins’ fiddle runs, to the world-weariness of “From the Beach” and its rich abundance of high lonesome harmonizing. Elsewhere, “Stone’s Throw” uses major dynamic shifts to add drama to the questions of separation and unification within the day-to-day of a relationship. The sparkling interplay found on “Celebrants” will be a major part of the group’s live shows, Watkins said.
“We’re really looking forward to the live show and are really excited about the look and feel of the show in a way that we haven’t emphasized before,” she said. “We’re going to be trying to play what everyone wants to hear. The set lists will obviously vary. We’re shooting to have our live shows be cohesive with this new record and show the cohesiveness that exists with the material that spans from whenever our first album came out and now.”
While the ’90s saw these up-and-comers build a fan base via a combination of stellar live shows and a pair of independent releases —1993’s “Little Cowpoke” and 1997’s “Here to There,” it was the crossover success of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack and how it made old-timey mountain music accessible that helped spark interest in Nickel Creek when the trio dropped its self-titled Sugar Hill Records debut in 2000. It also didn’t hurt that the Watkins siblings and Thile converted Krauss’s interest in the band into her agreeing to produce that 12-song effort.
Over the next two decades, Nickel Creek released another three records, briefly separating to pursue other projects between activities with the group. With the band back together, Watkins is grateful to be able to reconnect with both her bandmates and the group’s fans.
“I will say that when we were thinking about what we wanted to say to our audience when we come back on tour is that sentiment that people hear at the beginning of the record in the song ‘Celebrants’ — ‘My God, it’s good to see you,'” she said. “That’s what we want to convey.”
This article appears in Source Weekly July 6, 2023.
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