Dissonance isn’t exactly the first word that comes to mind when you think about Nickel Creek. But the progressive bluegrass outfit’s latest offering, Celebrants — their first release in nearly a decade — finds the trio “embracing the friction inherent in real human connection.”
The seeds for this ambitious project were planted when the musicians and their families decamped to Santa Monica for a month of writing in the spring of 2021. For fiddle player Sara Watkins, the close quarters yielded plenty of fruitful creative moments on the heels of the pandemic lockdown.
“It was this wonderful full-circle moment … of reconnecting our families in this new stage of life,” Watkins says. “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 … 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 get in on the action. A producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in his own right — who has worked with everyone from Dr. Dre, 50 Cent and Eminem to Cassandra Wilson, Sheryl Crow and Keith Urban — Elizondo was a welcome addition to the process.
“He’s a musical monster, absolute sweetheart and a ridiculous super-successful producer,” Watkins says. “We knew that we wanted to work with [him] as our producer … he and Eric Valentine have never worked together, but they were both mutual fans of each other. We were able to meet up with Mike after that first month of writing and get his fingerprints on the album pretty early on. It would be a very different record had he not been a part of it.”
‘Celebrants,’ the fifth LP from progressive bluegrass outfit Nickel Creek, is out now via Thirty Tigers.
Reunited (and it feels so good)
Ambition runs wild on Celebrants. You’ll hear it in the rollercoaster ride of the instrumental “Going Out…,” which finds Thile’s fingerpicked mandolin jousting with Watkins’ frenetic fiddle runs, along with the rich harmonies of “From the Beach” and the dramatic dynamic shifts of “Stone’s Throw.” Watkins’ singing is often as fiery as her fiddle-playing, which Front Range audiences will experience first hand when the trio comes to the Mission Ballroom in Denver on Oct. 18.
“We’re really looking forward to the live show and are really excited about the look and feel in a way that we haven’t emphasized before,” she says. “We’re shooting to … show the cohesiveness that exists with the material that spans from whenever our first album came out [through] now.”
While the ’90s saw the onetime teen prodigies build a devoted fan base through 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 that helped spark interest in Nickel Creek when the trio dropped their self-titled Sugar Hill Records debut at the turn of the century. It also didn’t hurt that roots-music legend Alison Krauss agreed to produce the 12-song effort.
Over the next two decades, Nickel Creek released another three records, separating to pursue other projects between activities with the group. Watkins says each member’s ability to work on side projects during lengthy breaks is musical fertilizer for an album like Celebrants.
“Interpersonally, I think the breaks are important,” she says. “In solo projects, we each get to take the reins and lead it 100 percent from our individual perspective. When we are in different bands, we play different roles and there are new challenges in each band. From each of those projects, we take new skills and lessons learned. Then we come back together and have new things to show each other — new skills and new fun toys, in terms of musical and human perspective. A lot of times, when you’re only in one band, it can feel pretty monochromatic pretty quickly.”
But it seems there’s plenty of color in store for the future of Nickel Creek. With the band back together, and a new album of material in tow, Watkins says she is grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with both her bandmates and fans in a new chapter for the legendary trio.
“When we were thinking about what we wanted to say to our audience when we come back on tour, it is that sentiment people hear at the beginning of the record in the song ‘Celebrants’: ‘My god, it’s good to see you.’”
ON THE BILL: Nickel Creek with Monica Martin. 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 18, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street, Denver. Tickets here.
