Chris Thile (Punch Brothers) Announces UK & Ireland Tour
Chris Thile will embark on an extensive tour of Europe this October and November in support of his acclaimed new album, Laysongs.
The 19-date run includes five UK shows in November (Bristol, Coventry, London, Manchester and Glasgow), and ends with a concert at Dublin’s National Concert Hall on 15 November. Tickets are on sale now. See nonesuch.com/on-tour/chris-thile for more details.
Chris Thile is the founding member of Punch Brothers, which a Boston Globe reviewer has called “the tightest, most impressive live band I have ever seen”. The group’s six Nonesuch albums are Punch, Antifogmatic, Who’s Feeling Young Now?, The Phosphorescent Blues, Grammy-winning All Ashore, and this year’s Hell on Church Street, the band’s reimagining of and homage to Tony Rice’s landmark solo album, Church Street Blues.
Thile’s other Nonesuch releases include a duo album with guitarist Michael Daves, two records with bassist Edgar Meyer (one of which won a Grammy), a Bach album with Yo-Yo Ma and Meyer, a duet album with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, and the T Bone Burnett–produced soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis.
As a soloist, Thile has released six albums – most recently an album of his songs of the week from Live From Here called Thanks for Listening. He spent his formative years as a member of the Grammy Award–winning, multi-platinum selling band Nickel Creek, which reunited in 2014 for its highest-charting album to date, A Dotted Line, and an extensive tour. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favourite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion).
Laysongs is Thile’s first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualise and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, the album’s centrepiece is the three-part Salt (In The Wounds) Of The Earth, which was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’ Won’t You Come and Sing for Me; and an original instrumental loosely modelled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.
Chris Thile – UK & Ireland Tour
Wed 9 Nov – Bristol, St George’s
Thu 10 Nov – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre
Fri 11 Nov – London, Queen Elizabeth Hall
Sat 12 Nov – Manchester, RNCM Theatre
Sun 13 Nov – Glasgow, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Tue 15 Nov – Dublin, Ireland National Concert Hall