Scott Thile

The family lived in southern California, where Chris was born in Oceanside in 1981, and Scott supported them as a piano technician. Nickel Creek played its first show at That Pizza Place in Carlsbad in 1989, with Scott on string bass behind three children; Sean Watkins, the oldest, was twelve. Through the 1990s the band worked the bluegrass festival circuit, and Scott played bass on its two independent albums, Little Cowpoke (1993) and Here to There (1997), on the second of which he was also an engineer.

He played bass on most of the tracks of his son’s first solo album, Leading Off (Sugar Hill, 1994), on which he is also credited as an engineer, and on Stealing Second (Sugar Hill, 1997). In 1995 the family moved to Murray, Kentucky, where he took a job at Murray State University as a musical instrument technician.

When Nickel Creek signed with Sugar Hill, he played acoustic bass and some electric upright bass on Nickel Creek, produced by Alison Krauss and released in March 2000. Soon after the band began touring behind it, he left to spend more time with his family; Byron House took over the bass, followed by Derek Jones in March 2001.