Artist Spotlight: Chris Thile

Chris Thile is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and mandolin player for the bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers, as well as the acoustic trio Nickel Creek. He’s also worked on numerous other collaborations, including the Grammy-winning album “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with Yo-Yo Ma. Currently, Thile is touring with the bassist Edgar Meyer for their collaboration “Bass and Mandolin.” They will be performing at Sanders Theatre on Oct. 12 for the Celebrity Series of Boston.

The Harvard Crimson: How do you feel you’ve changed as a musician over the years?

Chris Thile: I think that when I was younger, though I was interested in everything I heard that I thought was good, regardless of textural aesthetic. I approached absorbing those things in a manner that I thought fit the style. So, for instance, if I was learning a Bach piece...I would kind of approach it with my little classical hat on. And if I was learning a fiddle tune, I would approach it with my folk hat on. And I think over the years I’ve realized that various instances of great music have far more in common than not in common and that they kind of transcend any sort of stylistic consideration associated with texture…. There are basically really just two genres that matter, and that’s good music and bad music. And the way that one goes about making good music needs to be as balanced in terms of intuition and learning as music itself…. And I think that what’s changed with years is rather than sort of approach what I consider to be learned music in a learned way and intuitive music in an intuitive way, I’ve realized that great music is both all the time and needs to be approached with both sides of one’s musicianship completely switched on.

THC: One thing I love about your music is how seamlessly the lyrics and the instrumental bits flow into each other. What’s your process like in terms of writing lyrics and then fitting them to the rest of a piece?

CT: Well, I guess I go about it the opposite way. To me, the lyrics are almost never the first thing. I think that that’s what makes a lyric a completely different animal from a poem, for instance: that it’s really only meant to be sung, not read. And so you need to sing it. It needs to be conceived aloud. So I think that there needs to be a melody…. I do think that the ambiguity and expression possible with music and even with vocal music needs to be treated with the respect that it deserves. That's one of the most beautiful parts of music, is how satisfying the inherently abstract expression gets. That separates music from other art forms.

It’s just important to preserve that ambiguity in a piece of music, and the lyrics need to not dictate a person’s experience. That’s actually sort of contrary to what music does best. You’re not telling people a story; you’re helping them tell their own story. I think that’s important to lyricists, and I think that’s also very important as a composer of instrumental music. That’s one of the reasons that instrumental music is thrilling for me...all the expression is abstract. So when Edgar Meyer and I play at Sanders on Sunday, there won’t be any singing, actually. It’ll be 100% instrumental, and that’s an opportunity to really explore the depths of the lyricism possible in completely instrumental music.

THC: How would you say that changes when you’re working with covers, which I know is something you’ve done a lot as well?

CT: When it’s just me or a group of people choosing to deliver someone else’s music, it tends to be because I wish I’d written it or we wish we’d written it, and that it’s something that we wouldn’t think to write ourselves…. Like, “Wow. How did this happen? How did this piece of music come to be?” And I do think that there’s no better way to understand what makes a piece of music tick then to get inside of it thoroughly enough that I could be able to perform it for someone and to deliver it as if it were your own…. I don’t cover everything that I love, because sometimes I feel like, “Oh, yeah, I understand it. I know how this happens”.... It’s when I don’t totally understand it that it intrigues me to the point of having to learn it well enough to play it for someone, and then I often find that that helps me understand it. You know, it’s almost roleplaying. So if Punch Brothers covers a Radiohead song, I’m sort of doing my little Thom Yorke roleplaying game and seeing if I can get into his head and figuring out where that music came from.