Chris Thile

He was born in Oceanside, California, on 20 February 1981, into a musical family; his father supported the household as a piano technician. When Chris was two the family began going to That Pizza Place in Carlsbad to hear John Moore’s band Bluegrass Etc., and when he was four they moved to Idyllwild. He started on the mandolin at five, taking occasional lessons from Moore, and at twelve he won the mandolin championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. It was at the pizza place, in 1989, that the Thiles met the Watkins family, and Chris, then eight, formed Nickel Creek with Sara and Sean Watkins, with his father Scott on bass. The young band played California bluegrass festivals through the 1990s, and the children were home-schooled to keep up with the schedule.

Thile sent a demo tape to Sugar Hill and Rounder in 1993 and chose Sugar Hill, which released his first solo album, Leading Off, mostly his own compositions, in 1994. In 1995 the family moved to Murray, Kentucky, where his father took a job at Murray State University; Chris released Stealing Second in 1997, the year of Nickel Creek’s Here to There, and studied music at Murray State in 1998 and 1999. He also played on True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, whose “Scotland” was nominated for a Grammy and which was the IBMA’s Album of the Year for 1997, and in 1996, at fifteen, he made his first appearance on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion.

Nickel Creek broke through in 2000 with its self-titled album, produced by Alison Krauss, which went platinum and drew Grammy nominations for Best Bluegrass Album and, for “Ode to a Butterfly,” Best Country Instrumental Performance. Thile played mandolin on Dolly Parton’s Little Sparrow, released his solo Not All Who Wander Are Lost (2001) with Stuart Duncan, Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Jerry Douglas and Bryan Sutton among the guests, and was the IBMA’s Mandolin Player of the Year in 2001. Nickel Creek’s This Side (2002), again produced by Krauss, entered the Billboard 200 at No. 18 and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Why Should the Fire Die? (2005) reached No. 17 and topped the bluegrass chart. Thile also made a duet album with Mike Marshall, Into the Cauldron (2003), and played every part himself on Deceiver (2004). In 2006 Nickel Creek announced an indefinite break, closing with its Farewell (For Now) Tour in 2007.

By then Thile had a new band. In 2006 he brought together Gabe Witcher on fiddle, Chris Eldridge on guitar, Noam Pikelny on banjo and Greg Garrison on bass to record How to Grow a Woman from the Ground (Sugar Hill), and in 2007 the group became Punch Brothers. On 17 March 2007 it gave the premiere at Carnegie Hall of Thile’s forty-minute, four-movement suite The Blind Leaving the Blind, which became the centerpiece of Punch, its first album for Nonesuch, in February 2008. Paul Kowert took over on bass late that year, and the band’s Nonesuch albums ran through Antifogmatic (2010), Who’s Feeling Young Now? (2012), The Phosphorescent Blues (2015), All Ashore (2018), which won the Grammy for Best Folk Album, and Hell on Church Street (2022), which covers Tony Rice’s album Church Street Blues in its entirety.

Thile has recorded widely in duos. He has sung bluegrass duets with the guitarist Michael Daves since they met at a New York jam in 2005; their Sleep with One Eye Open (Nonesuch, 2011), recorded at Jack White’s studio in Nashville, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and White produced their single “Man in the Middle” for his Third Man label. With Edgar Meyer he made an album in 2008 and Bass & Mandolin (2014), which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. The Goat Rodeo Sessions (2011), with Yo-Yo Ma, Meyer and Stuart Duncan, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album, and the four followed it with Not Our First Goat Rodeo in 2020. With the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau he released Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau in January 2017.

Alongside the bands he has composed for the concert hall and played Bach. His mandolin concerto Ad astra per alas porci, commissioned by a consortium of orchestras, had its full premiere with the Colorado Symphony on 17 September 2009. Nonesuch released his recording of Bach’s first three sonatas and partitas for solo violin in August 2013, and the remaining three, as Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2, in November 2025. In 2012 he received a MacArthur Fellowship, and for the 2018–19 season he held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall.

After guest-hosting A Prairie Home Companion in 2015 and 2016, Thile succeeded Keillor as host; his first show was on 15 October 2016 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, the program was renamed Live from Here at the end of 2017, and its last show aired on 30 May 2020 before it was canceled that June. He made the solo albums Thanks for Listening (2017) and Laysongs (2021), rejoined Nickel Creek for A Dotted Line (2014) and Celebrants (2023), and since 2023 has toured ATTENTION!, a narrative song cycle for mandolinist and orchestra. With Claire Coffee he created The Energy Curfew Music Hour, a variety show featuring Punch Brothers, released through Audible and as a podcast.