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Anything I can dream up there's a fairly high likelihood it'll be realized. It's not that there's no other musicians that could play this sort of thing, but it's a blessing to find a group of guys roughly the same age and with the same willingness to take risk and be this uncomfortable musically. I'm just proud to know every one of them. -Chris Thile |
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A Blue Trip Slip
Punch is not autobiography or a simple bloodletting session. It's more complex than that, and the catharsis within it speaks to the piece's broader reach. It's an album of deep, often fierce and frightening emotions, and anyone who's ever felt life on that level (meaning all of us) could well be touched by it. If one takes the full journey from "Punch Bowl" to "It'll Happen," they'll discover a survivor's hymn that'll find you "loosening your grip on the throat of a bad dream."
Gabe Witcher
"I wouldn't want anyone for a second to believe that what exists [on Punch] is my story verbatim. You take parts from everyone you're close with, and there's just a desire to tell a good story, which is far greater than the desire to purge," says Thile. "Because I love to work so much and I suddenly had something so large to work on there was this sense of glee. There were times I was composing this stuff, where I'd get a line and then a bit of music, that I was just beside myself with happiness, just so pleased to be a musician and have something to write about and have music just falling out – not that it ever came easy but it did come steadily, which was a new thing for me."
At the risk of overstatement, the album has freaked some people out. It bangs against a number of traditions, and does nothing to reduce the anxiety and uneasiness inherent to the tale being told.
"Though not the intent it wasn't a totally unforeseen byproduct of making this record," says Thile. "I came up with the idea for this almost exactly three years ago. The idea sprung from the divorce I was going through, and I had to rearrange all my priorities. It went from my immediate family and closest friends and then to music and then a BIG drop-off after that [laughs]. So, the music of the piece is basically a chronicling of that realization of how important music is to me. I actually feel its creation is the second highest calling of my life behind making sure I'm a decent family member and good friend, and I felt I should really try and max myself out and make sure I'm doing as good of and as interesting work as I'm capable of.
When much of the press describes Punch it tends to stop at Thile's divorce as the core idea but that emotionally cataclysmic event was merely the enzyme that got his fertile imagination digesting something much larger, a philosophically and musically supercharged journey. In the rush to label and contain any artistic output in the modern age, there's a tendency to dumb things down into easily understood soundbites, and there's nothing easy or dumb about Punch.
Chris Thile
"In your typical newspaper article they have to reduce things to what's most eye-catching right off the bat, like hearing about heartbreak and that sort of thing. The piece doesn't really focus on the divorce so much as the results of it. The deeper we get into the life of the record, the more I feel people are relating to it. It's starting to seep into the right cracks, and that's what it's designed to do. It's not something I expect people to enjoy the first or second time. The kind of music I enjoy the most is the kind I don't understand the first four or five or six times through," says Thile. "I don't want to sound like I accomplished everything I set out to do. I definitely didn't, nor will I likely ever, accomplish exactly what I set out to do. But, I'm happy with it, and I guess that's kind of a new feeling for me."
"I started being happy with my work on the last Nickel Creek record [Why Should The Fire Die?], that has some nice things on it, and I liked How To Grow A Woman From The Ground [the first outing for the Punch Brothers lineup], though that was a relatively safe record as far as it being right in my wheelhouse. With Punch, I really took some risks for the first time, and God, the boys really took some risks, man! I've found a group of guys to collaborate with that honestly the piece couldn't have come out without them," continues Thile, who told me when the band first formed that he no longer felt anything was impossible musically now that he'd met them. "Now, anything I can dream up there's a fairly high likelihood it'll be realized. It's not that there's no other musicians that could play this sort of thing, but it's a blessing to find a group of guys roughly the same age and with the same willingness to take risk and be this uncomfortable musically. I'm just proud to know every one of them."
I'm Yours If You Want Me
Punch Brothers
Adapting this challenging music to the real time live setting has been another hurdle, but one they've cleared with almost unnerving grace. To watch them unfold these elaborate tapestries in concert is a gorgeous, intense thing that requires an attentive and patient audience to fully succeed. The bruised heart inside many of Thile's compositions - which hold the lion's share of their catalog alongside diverse, well chosen covers like The White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," "Jimmie Rodger's "Brakeman's Blues," Radiohead's "Morning Bell" and The Band's "Ophelia" – flinches a little at the incessant chatter and clink of barrooms. The circuit flows best when the crowd surfs the whoops and whispers of their shifting moods with real care.
"Right now, we're really starting to get comfortable playing this music live, and the comfort level we're at onstage can easily be detected by the audience," says Pikelny. "Early on when we started touring and playing this music we were all up there just wondering if we were going to pull it off. I think it was still enjoyable for audiences but I think our nervousness maybe made people a little uneasy so the show wasn't as enjoyable for them. They saw it as something so extremely serious that was either on the verge of being great or a train wreck. We've now played the whole new record in its entirety 30 times or so. So, we're able to be up there, playing in a more assured way and feeling more carefree, without sacrificing anything. I think it's a much more enjoyable experience for people coming to see us."
Continue reading for more on Punch Brothers...
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