Punch Brothers: In Front of God & Everyone

By: Dennis Cook

Punch Brothers

We live in a global age for music. Not only can we listen to the latest sounds from our own time, our own country, but also virtually anything since recorded music began from every time period, every continent, every culture. While we can blast the latest from Tom Petty we also have the option of turning up ’60s Turkish garage rock, Gambia music from Senegal, sweaty ’70s Dutch disco, Icelandic jazz and more and more and more. It’s overwhelming, especially if you’ve got big ears, and they don’t come any bigger than the Punch Brothers, a mind-blowingly talented acoustic quintet that got their starts in the bluegrass and pop worlds but has diligently forged into mysterious waters. Mandolinist Chris Thile (Nickel Creek), much sought after violinist Gabe Witcher, guitarist Chris Eldridge (Infamous Stringdusters) and ex-Leftover Salmoners Greg Garrison (bass) and Noam Pikelny (banjo) are sonic citizens of the world creating a unique sound that couldn’t have emerged at any other time in musical history.

“So how do you assimilate all these choices? That’s the question that we’re asking ourselves as a band. What do we do with this pool of influence? Punch (their debut released February 26 on Nonesuch) is our first crack at it,” says Thile.

Built around a lengthy four-movement suite titled “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” Punch is a mixture of high and low culture, where a lyric might be something as blunt and colloquial as “He’s still a mess” but the music strains and reaches for the stratosphere or down into the far below. There’s no judgment in these juxtapositions, and the confluence of disparate elements is charged like the power cables in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, the possibility of new life (potentially powered by an abnormal brain) hanging on the edges of each passage.

“That’s something I very consciously tried to interject into this piece, to have lots of moments where there could be a real bonehead lick in the music and something loftier in the lyric. And certainly, there’s plenty of instances where it’s the other way around. It’s just trying to find a place for awkwardness,” says Thile. “You have to be so honest about where you’re coming from. I’m not a poet. I’m not going to be able to write like Yeats – boy, that guy is a motherfucker! – and I think very few people my age are going to be able to sell that level of literacy. It’s not gonna be genuine for many of us. So, we have to struggle and I think we’re both going to benefit and suffer from this period of awkwardness and what it is to be a participant in this time. This is a strange time to be around and be a lover of music.”

Ready For Anything

“This band has made me rethink who I am as a musician. These days if someone asks me what style of banjo do I play, well, my musicianship right now is more about serving the goals of this band. Answering a question like that is hard. To be able to play music like this in an ensemble like this, to have no limitations as far as a group or song idea, is a really rare thing to have. Everybody in this band is willing to work on music where if everything goes correctly everyone’s parts will kind of disappear into one bigger thing,” says Pikelny, highlighting the vast difference between Punch Brothers and the solo-centric world of traditional bluegrass. “It’s very edifying to be part of this experience. You can only say so much when you’re trying to say it through your own instrument, your own voice. I think everyone here has been most touched by ensembles where the sum of the parts was so much greater than the individuals involved. It’s a fun and really exciting thing to be involved in. It’s what I dreamed of years ago when I imagined being part of an ensemble where everyone’s skills would serve something greater than one song or a solo.”

“We’ve been able to conquer some stuff that at first seemed impossible, technically and conceptually. It’s a willingness to work hard and take a lot of time,” adds Pikelny. “It’s a really interesting thing to play music where the return on a rehearsal is two years down the road, where we’re not necessarily going to be showcasing or nailing something for a long time. It puts things in perspective on how we should all be spending our time, and it keeps us very motivated to keep furthering ourselves and honing in our personal skills so the next time someone brings a song to the table we’re more prepared.”

Punch Brothers are developing their own way of speaking to each other in their own self-defined musical context. Each guy seems to be stretching himself and the boundaries of what can be done on their instrument, taking the banjo, mandolin, etc. outside of established corridors and seeing where else it might fit.

“It’s been a very natural musical development, the most natural I’ve been a part of,” says Thile. “Five guys is a lot of musical personalities to wrangle but everybody fits together really well. I can step back and sort of relinquish control – and I’m such a control freak by nature – which has been a wonderful learning process for me to get out of that mode. Some big personalities in this band, and one has to defer occasionally.”

During the four movements of “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” there’s a group synergy that carries the music along but also conveys a sense of shared gravity, each member’s efforts pulling the others forward and outward and inward, shifting from instrument to instrument, personality to personality, and subtly affecting the music as it moves.

“We had to learn how to do that. In a great ensemble a certain amount of that should happen naturally. If you’re meant to play music with each other then it’ll happen right away but usually only with music you’re comfortable with. We decided right from the start that this would be an ensemble that wouldn’t be comfortable unless we were uncomfortable,” laughs Thile. “Those parts are very demanding and very consuming, so we have so much individual times in our parts in this piece that it was easy to lose track of the ability to lead and follow. It took a lot of rehearsal and just talking about our approach together to allow us to be swept away. It’s hard as a musician when it’s not ‘Saint Anne’s Reel’ or some other beautiful fiddle tune, where as you’re being swept away you know this music like the back of your hand. With this, it’s like falling backwards into the arms of a buddy.”

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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… 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. –Chris Thile

Like a trust exercise that goes on for 40 minutes with the added challenge of making the right sounds come out of your instruments while tumbling?

“It so is! We’re only just now live getting to the point where we got in the very controlled environment of the studio. Now, it’s starting to happen live,” says Thile. “We play ‘The Blind Leaving The Blind’ in concert but not always straight through, though sometimes it’s all the way through. We’re always trying to read the audience and figure out how receptive they’ll be to it. And the other four songs [on Punch] are no walk in the park.”

True enough. The album begins with the dissonant buzz of “Punch Bowl,” raising one’s hackles with joyously dissonant notes and an ugly lyrical bent. In every way it announces this in no hay chewin’ bluegrass or folk-pop record.

“‘Punch Bowl’ is as abrasive a hello as you could ever get. I like that it’s kinda like waking up really groggy and splashing yourself with ice water. Well hell, it is about drunken infidelity,” chuckles Thile with knowing weariness. Thile has openly discussed how Punch began its life in the wake of a difficult divorce several years ago. “It was funny how it all came down. The piece was written over the course of a year and a half, and it came out two and a half years after the events in question. And I had a record come out in between with three songs written during the same period. So, on the face of it, it may seem like I just can’t get over it but the reality is all the lyrics were basically sketched or completed within six months of the divorce. And about halfway through the recording of the demo of this piece we realized we wanted to do a record more like How To Grow A Woman first rather than something this ambitious. In a way, the idea revisits things but it was really only the initial sketching that was painful. I absolutely love to work, so after that it was no more painful than practicing with calluses and practicing when you first start playing an instrument. Once you have the calluses it’s just a joy but there’s that initial stage where the strings are digging pretty far into your fingers.”

The Twain Meet

“We were rehearsing in Colorado, getting ready to go into the studio and searching for a new band name. We had gone through a few names, the best of which was The How To Grow A Band, chosen to tour behind the Woman From The Ground record. But, this was turning into a full-time project and a serious band in our lives and we wanted a new name that reflected that. We went through a million names. We had the name The Tensions Mountain Boys for a while but we had people telling us that name could limit the reach of our music. At first we didn’t agree but it became apparent it was a really difficult name. Every time we said it in a bar or loud place we’d have to repeat ourselves, explain it and it’s a really long name and the pun of it would likely get old after a while,” explains Pikelny. “There’s the song ‘Punch Bowl’ on the new record and at one point, in frustration, I said, ‘Why don’t we just call ourselves Punch Bowl?’ Then Chris said, ‘Punch, Brothers, Punch!’ He thought we were gonna pick up on it but he explained it was a short story by Mark Twain. We went and looked online and thought it was such a good story with many parallels from our lives. So, we decided to call ourselves the Punch Brothers. That was that, and we felt there was no better American artist to ally ourselves with.”

Fittingly, one of Twain’s core artistic ideas was that one could break all the rules they want so long as they’d learned every in and out of the fundamentals in their craft. Go ahead, abandon tradition but do so consciously and with a sense of purpose. This ideal of the learned maverick is part and parcel of the Punch Brothers, each of whom is a brilliant instrumentalist and singer but never in the straightjacket way most high level musicians tend to be.

“In the past few years, Chris Thile, as a writer, has made a lot of strides. It’s really interesting to watch a guy who essentially has no technical limit become an incredibly mature musician and writer. I think a lot of that is context,” observes Pikelny. “In the past he might intersperse some of these ideas we’re working with into say a solo on a fiddle tune, which was really impressive, but I think he realized he needed some sort of forum to really investigate these concepts and execute them the right way.”

Thile and the others face a mountain of audience expectations, where people come in wanting something akin to Nickel Creek or Leftover Salmon, another dose of the familiar elixir. But, as any good Buddhist will tell you, all suffering stems from desire, and desires spring from expectations. Set them aside and much is possible; cling to them and you’ll most surely be frustrated. For a group equally inspired by Bach and The Beatles, as energized by Ralph Stanley as they are by Radiohead, the old formats are bound to feel constrictive after a while. In honestly addressing their core principles, they serve music in the archetypal sense, throwing off convention like a scab and letting fresh air kiss new, pink skin.

“Like minds and a similarity of approach are enabling a sort of swirling of this beautiful mess of influences [laughs]. I’m 27-years-old and there’s so much to listen to that it would be so silly to cut anything out of the equation. It’s not that I’m trying to blend this with this for the first time. That’s a horrible goal to be the first guy to combine say punk, bluegrass and classical. I feel there’s a lot of things out there like that. That’s not really new because there’s really nothing new under the sun. That’s an important thing to realize when you have so much at your fingertips. With the Internet you can go download the Mahler #9 [Symphony] and then the new Of Montreal EP – two click on iTunes,” says Thile. “What I’m trying to figure out is what’s the same about all this good music, what makes it good. You have these areas where certain things excel in each. In folk and pop music you have people with a shocking ability to express themselves personally, and in classical music you have people wielding harmony and rhythm with such precision and force. But, it’s all the same stuff! When a folk song really succeeds musically it succeeds for the same reasons that a Mozart symphony succeeds musically. And when a classical libretto is successful it’s often touching for the same reasons as a Dylan lyric is touching. It’s all the same stuff, and the higher your sampling rate the more true your product will be.”

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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

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.”

“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.

“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

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.”

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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. –Chris Thile

“Complex music can be appreciated in so many ways. We played some performing arts series where I think people are used to seeing a string quartet or classical music where they appreciate the composition and try to dig into the form of the music. But we’ve also played clubs where people are standing nose-to-nose and it’s been as enjoyable if people get into it. That’s a testament to the music we’re playing. I think if people come with an open mind and are signing up for a real listening experience then they’re going to enjoy it, regardless of what level they’re listening on,” continues Pikelny. “The only times we haven’t felt connected is when people showed up expecting to hear a bluegrass band or something more like Nickel Creek or where we’re presenting the music as something too serious. This music can be so intense that we try to make our show a relaxed and fun event. It’s really promising to me to see young people really getting into it, being attentive and really loving it. They may not be fans of classical music or jazz or traditional bluegrass but they’re just appreciating it as guys playing music and trying to do something new. For us, playing a Jimmie Rodgers tune is necessary relief after playing something like ‘The Blind Leaving The Blind.'”

It’ll Happen

“It feels right with the five of us. Early on, we felt everyone was going after the same type of thing. We all saw eye-to-eye on how we like to play music and what our goals were and how we could realize them. It’s definitely the most unified vision of any ensemble I’ve ever played in,” says Pikelny. “It’s kind of a special situation. Chris Thile has written this four-movement string quintet, where on the surface if you hear about someone writing out parts for the rest of the musicians you might wonder, ‘How is that a band?’ It’s been an evolving, natural thing, and he really kept that in mind and wrote music that could be interpreted and changed by us, leaving room for improvisation and restatement. If anything, ‘The Blind Leaving The Blind’ has given us an opportunity to be even more focused as an ensemble and align ourselves and set our musical clocks to each other.”

More nuances emerge in the suite over repeat spins, where you continually feel the players living in the moment captured on tape.

“At first it was kind of a daunting technical task to learn the music on ‘Blind’ but it became an amazing spring training experience for us to get in there and spend a couple years working on something that was essentially way over our heads, to turn it from something that at first seemed impossible into something that’s the centerpiece of the record,” says Pikelny. “It forced us to get to know each other musically and establish a work ethic at the get-go that’s healthy. There was no shortage of camaraderie in this band but it was probably a good idea for us to take ourselves to the limit as soon as possible.”

Most musicians don’t hear or approach music in neat genre classifications. Attempts to box and order something as unwieldy as music always falls short of any real truth. Music that hits you, music you love, goes way beyond words. That central indefinability can be uncomfortable for some, especially those that treat music as a lifestyle accessory, but that doesn’t erase the bedrock truth of music’s unnamable essence.

“That confuses people so much these days! The people we’re looking for are those who hear the continuity between things,” says Thile. “I’m perfectly comfortable to lose people who need things to fit more readily into the boxes. And there’s wonderful music being made in those boxes! But, the amazing music that’s being made by those people is being made totally honestly. They’re not changing themselves to fit into those boxes. With the Punch Brothers, we’d have to change ourselves fundamentally to fit into any of those things.”

“To those people unknowingly asking for the impossible – be it Nickel Creek fans or the bluegrass community – I’d hope they’d think about it differently if they’d realize we just can’t do that,” continues Thile. “I wish anyone for whom this is too much the best. I want them to continue to have a great time listening to music but I get so frustrated that people aren’t dedicating their time to music – discovering it and increasing their understanding of it – in the way they do with movies, for instance. People are fairly able, as a general rule, to enjoy some of the best movies ever made coming out today and really get something from them. Whereas, the best music being made right now, the music made with the most care, is just gonna seem like some gobbledygook to many,” observes Thile. “We were just talking about this in the van. How do you succeed professionally when you’re not willing to cater to the scenester, who really, more than the music, is concerned about the sorts of people attending the concert with them? We’re in such an awkward time. I’m not sure if society is in adolescence or what.”

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