Nickel Creek

Nickel Creek

BOTH SIDES NOW

Nickel Creek Tackle Bluegrass Tradition and Pop Innovation on This Side
If Nickel Creek's second album, This Side, ruffles some critics' feathers, then the band figures they're just doing their job. This Side is not a reprise of the youthful bluegrass virtuosos' startling debut smash, but rather a bold step forward that adds influences from Irish reels and indie rock to their high-lonesome repertoire. In their song selection, in their strong originals, and especially in the splendor of Alison Krauss's roots-pop production, Nickel Creek show no signs of the sophomore slump -- even if bandmates Chris Thile, Sara Watkins, and Sean Watkins are barely old enough to be college seniors. Ever articulate and enthusiastic, mandolin prodigy Thile took time while en route to New York City to speak with Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee about Nickel Creek's latest musical statement -- and the enduring influence of the Beatles.

Barnes & Noble.com: This Side might surprise fans of your debut. It's not a repeat or really even an extension of it.

Chris Thile: We're not content to just go a little further. It's been three years since we recorded the first album, and I think people are forgetting that because all the attention has come in the last year. So the response is almost like, "Well, is it a concept record?" It certainly isn't; it's just who we are. People who ask that question have no concept of what we were like three years ago, before the first album came out. They also need to understand that [because of our youth], three years in our lives is a much larger percentage of how long we've lived. So there's going to be more change per year. We're growing and we're together all the time, so we're constantly trying to figure out new stuff.

B&N.com: There's a line in the song "This Side" that, in my twisted theorizing, sums up the album for me: "There's no place to hide/and I don't think I'm scared." My theory is that you put the album out -- you can't hide. But it takes courage to make a musical departure after you'd struck such a positive note with your debut.

CT: Yeah, we really don't ever want to make a record with the idea of appeasing any kind of commercial expectations. We certainly have our fans in mind when we make a record. I think music is an art form that has to be received before it can be completed. These are things that are very near and dear to us, whether it's the writing, the arranging or the production -- all those things are what we consider to be our art. We don't want to be dishonest and make a record that's safe or commercial or whatever. We just needed to make it. In the end we're happy with it, and so far the response has been great. I'm so proud.

B&N.com: Joe Ely said the first song on the new Flatlanders album, Now Again, represents the end of the band's first album, while the second song takes you to where the group is now. The same thing could be said about Nickel Creek: The instrumental opener on This Side, "Smoothie Song," would be right at home on your first album. But the next song is the cover of "Spit On a Stranger" by indie-rock group Pavement -- immediately you're thrust into new territory.

CT: Right. "Smoothie Song" is very much a typical Nickel Creek instrumental. We love the instrumental side of music, and [we] seem to have a pretty constant take on how we like our instrumentals, which is pretty energetic and pretty arranged, but still with lots of possibilities for improvisation.... I thought it was really fun to think of starting a drastically different record in the same way we did the first album. You start from where you were, and you go from there.

B&N.com: I thought as producer, Alison Krauss did a really good job of letting the band stretch out but then pulling you back in before you got too far out on a limb.

CT: Exactly. That's what a producer's for, and I think that's why we'll never do a self-produced Nickel Creek album. Just as a good novelist would never write a book without a good editor; a novelist is so inside the work that he or she could leave out some sort of descriptive detail, but the editor is there to provide that other perspective that keeps that from happening. So that's what a producer should be for a band.

B&N.com: So have you guys been listening to the Beatles a lot in the past couple of years?

CT: Of course, of course. Plenty of Beatles and certainly more so than we were when we recorded the first album.

B&N.com: I thought it was interesting, and kind of funny, that you did that Carrie Newcomer song called "I Should've Known Better," which is the title of a Beatles song...

CT: It is!?

B&N.com: Yeah, an early Beatles single; they perform it in A Hard Day's Night.

CT: I didn't know that! Oh, my God!

B&N.com: But yours is the Carrie Newcomer song, not the Lennon-McCartney song. But the production has all kinds of Beatles touches in it.

CT: Yeah, the production on that is a little on the schizophrenic side, and I kind of wanted it to sound like one side of the song's personality was trying to kill the other side -- kind of a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. You have this laid-back, funky, heartbroken blues song going on, and then there's the ear-splitting strings that sort of force themselves into the song.

B&N.com: Well, those ear-splitting strings could've come off a mid-period Beatles album.

CT: Right! Well, that is cool.

B&N.com: And you did the Stephen Malkmus song, "Spit On a Stranger," [from the Pavement album Terror Twilight], and it has little production things that sound to me like you might've been listening to "I Am the Walrus" before you recorded it.

CT: Well, you know, the Beatles -- there'll never be a pop band like them again. I think when you listen to any good band these days, there's gonna be Beatles in there. Like in religion, for instance, people get certain things regardless of what religion they follow. There's accounts of the flood in tons of different religions.... People arrive at things that just kind of seem to be true. Even though we're a very different band than the Beatles, we kind of arrive at the same things. But we never went, "Oh, a Beatle harmony part would be great here!" Instead it was, "I think the song needs this." And I think that sometimes it's necessary. Even though Beethoven was writing right in between the Classical and Romantic periods -- which was basically the Beethoven period -- he would all of a sudden break into a fugue, which is a very Bachian move. I think there are times when things call for something that the big boys -- like the Beatles or Bach -- would've done, and everybody goes, "Oh, they're tipping their hats to that." When really what you were doing was unavoidable; the song called for it. But yeah, you're right, we've certainly been listening to a lot of the Beatles. I pity the man who's not listening to the Beatles.

B&N.com: What drew you to "Spit On a Stranger"?

CT: I've written a couple of songs lately that are along more frivolous lines, but that song to me is completely ridiculous. I love it because of that. You're going along and the words are kind of mushy, they're not special at all: "Whatever you feel/whatever it takes..." It kind of rhymes and it's fun and it's a really great melody. And then all of a sudden he just broadsides you with, "I could spit on a stranger," and the effect is so much greater than if the words had all been interesting before you got to "I could spit on a stranger." It surprised me a lot. I actually played it for Alison without ever thinking we would cut it. I just wanted her to hear it. And Alison really liked it. She said, "We have to cut this," and I said, "Heck, yeah!" Steve [Malkmus] didn't sing it falsetto; he sang it real low, or a lot lower than I do. I thought it would be so much fun to take that melody up and have to go into falsetto for the high notes.

B&N.com: There are more traditional Nickel Creek-type songs on the album that seem thematically connected, like "Hanging By a Thread" and "Young." Do you see those two as bearing any similarity to each other, perhaps coming from the same point of view?

CT: Absolutely. "Hanging By a Thread" is not one of our songs, but yeah, there are a lot of similarities between the two. Both sound very young. To me, "Hanging By a Thread" is a standard "I'm great when she's here and I suck when she isn't" song, and it's very well done, a really, really nice melody. "Young" could almost be a prelude to "Hanging By a Thread." I actually wrote "Young" about my brother. The lyrics are along the lines of "Spit On a Stranger" in that they're definitely not going to set the world on fire, because I wanted it to sound like the way my little brother would write about girls. He was having a horrible time trying to talk to girls. I was feeling his pain, because he really wanted a girlfriend. But he's a safe guy to be around, and I think girls just feel comfortable being a friend around him, and he wanted a girlfriend! So that would kind of set it up, and "Hanging By a Thread" I feel a lot more deeply because I'm engaged now, and being away so much I can sing it with a tear in my eye and a lot of feeling.

August 16, 2002