A pizza parlour bluegrass night launched Chris Thile's mandolin career at age eight
As a toddler, Chris Thile sat in a Carlsbad, California pizza place listening to a weekly bluegrass band. By five he was playing mandolin, by eight he had formed Nickel Creek with two friends he met there, and at twelve he won a national mandolin championship. In 2012 he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Born in 1981 in Oceanside, California, Thile grew up surrounded by musicians. His father had given up a place at the New England Conservatory and supported the family as a piano technician, while relatives on his mother's side included piano teachers, an orchestral cellist and a composer. His earliest musical memory is Stan Getz's The Girl from Ipanema, heard before his first birthday.
At That Pizza Place in Carlsbad he took occasional lessons from the bandleader John Moore, and in 1989 he and the Watkins siblings formed Nickel Creek. Festival touring meant he was home-schooled. He sent a demo to record labels in 1993 and put out his first solo album the following year, still in his early teens. Nickel Creek's self-titled album later went platinum, and This Side won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.
His restlessness shows in the variety. On the 2004 album Deceiver he played every instrument himself, from electric guitar and drums to violin and cello. After a painful divorce, he wrote a 40-minute suite in four movements, The Blind Leaving the Blind, which his new band debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2007. That band, a bluegrass quintet with fiddle, guitar, bass and banjo, briefly called itself The Tensions Mountain Boys before settling on Punch Brothers. He has also recorded duets with the bassist Edgar Meyer, played mandolin on a Dolly Parton album, and recorded Bach and Charlie Parker tunes with fellow mandolinist Mike Marshall.
Thile has spoken of how a strict fundamentalist Christian upbringing, shared by all three Nickel Creek members, had beautiful aspects but made a creative life harder, since it taught that there is one right way to do things. From 2016 until its cancellation in 2020 he was also the host of Live from Here, a variety programme on radio.
Source: Chris Thile
