When we last left the Telluride Bluegrass Festival with the Planet’s report from the first day and a half, the grounds were being cleared suddenly for the first of back-to-back
Mandolinist, singer, and songwriter Chris Thile’s Laysongs will be release on Nonesuch Records on June 4, 2021. The album is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs’ centerpiece 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 modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major. Nonesuch S
“I want to give you an assignment,” writes Mighty Poplar’s Chris Eldridge. The challenge is to listen past the top layer of an album and find the playfulness of the musicians that gives the tunes their magic.