In the Cathedral of Change
Nickel Creek’s latest revival refuses to preach to the choir.
Review by Charlie Clark
Nickel Creek is a few months older than I am. That is, for a little longer than I’ve been alive, Chris Thile and Sean and Sara Watkins have been making music together. In my experience, three decades is about how long you can sustain an identity before you have to do some serious reckoning with your false starts and dead ends. It takes about that long to accumulate the twists of failure and misapprehension—the unexpected good turns, as well—to spin your narrative out of control, to watch it come apart. Like any relationship, a band has a life of its own, its own story to lose in the telling. On Celebrants, Nickel Creek’s co-authors pick up the loose threads and knit them together into a loving, faithful reevaluation of their friendship, their creative partnership, and the Christ-haunted musical territory they’ve been prospecting for thirty-odd years.
I’ve been listening to Nickel Creek for about half their time together, since the release of Why Should the Fire Die? in 2005. Five years earlier, their self-titled Sugar-Hill debut had included two songs—“Reasons Why” and “The Hand Song,” both written by Sean Watkins—that would have been at home on a contemporary Christian album. By contrast, the religious overtones on Why Should the Fire Die? were doubt-inflected, especially on the songs written by Thile, whose short-lived first marriage had broken up the previous year. “Doubting Thomas,” for example, is a song written from within a faith on the wane, a first stage along the way toward the wistful agnosticism of Thile’s 2021 solo album, Laysongs. Sharing as I did much of Thile’s and the Watkins’ cultural and religious background, as well as their apparently growing doubts, I could hardly wait to hear where they’d go next.
As it happened, Why Should the Fire Die? was the last album of new Nickel Creek material for nine years. Those of us interested in charting the trio’s musico-spiritual pilgrimage—up from their 90s-era bluegrass traditionalism and Christian fundamentalism—would have to follow three separate strands, as the members embarked upon a dizzying number of solo projects and collaborations. And apart from Sean Watkins’s piquant gospel-pastiche, “21st of May,” 2014’s A Dotted Line offered little new fodder for the religion beat. Nine more years, and like a rare breed (rare brood?) of cicada, Nickel Creek emerges with a new record.
Two insistences hold Celebrants together.
Newgrass, the genre Nickel Creek has helped define, is all about the creative repurposing of the past. Celebrants turns this sensibility on the artists’ themselves: “Listen to us trying to listen / To more and more life in these eddies / In our water under the bridge / Celebrants / Of the dissonance.” The album celebrates the productivity of friction in all its forms, especially the feeling of (dis)continuity between the present and past self, but also the settled, almost familial tensions between longtime collaborators. Domestic strife itself is a source of inspiration, as on “Thinnest Wall” and “Stone’s Throw,” and even the political surfaces occasionally, as on “To the Airport” and “New Blood.”
Two insistences hold Celebrants together. The first is “nothing left behind.” The past cannot be escaped or discarded. The people and places and practices that have shaped us demand attention and care. But the second is “nothing left unchanged.” Art is not preservation and life is not repetition: both are continually reimagined. Lead single “Strangers” is about committing to relationships sapped by overfamiliarity, to the awkward silences and small talk of people who have known each other too long to have anything new to say to each other: “To life with old friends / Droning on.” This song, like several on the album, has a fugal quality, with melodies layered over one another, like the pages of a history or like voices overlapping and intersecting in conversation. It’s a stunning marriage of meaning and form as one friend mourns that there is nothing between them but “a memory / to move beyond” while the other asks whether it might instead be “a memory / to build upon?” Ultimately, the song insists on loyalty to these “dry wells”: “Hit rock bottom / And get to shoveling.”
If the emphasis in “Strangers” falls on continuity—a stubborn loyalty to old friends—the emphasis in “Goddamned Saint” is on change. It’s a conversion story, a testimony. Thile sings about a man who was “a sinner / As far as I could understand / From the front pew of my choir.” Confronted with Thile’s “parables,” the sinner “listened with an openness / I heard / As clear as any words / He could’ve preached or prayed.” This encounter leads to a changed heart for Thile: “And the other three walls I’d built / Around what I thought I felt came tumbling down / And a torrent of light shone in.” If the song ended here, we might have another Enlightened Deconversion on our hands, but instead, it returns to the theme of continuity, drawing out the tension. Thile talks about being tempted by a new dogmatism—“I won’t even have a drink / With anyone who disagrees”—but remembers just in time, “That the well I’m drawing from / Springs from disagreements / With people who believe / That we can only change someone as much / As we’re willing to be changed.”
More could be said—about the album’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic (not entirely cringe), about its relationship to bluegrass (The way on “The Meadow” their voices mimic a Scruggs tuner: does it make up for Newgrass’s unleashing Stomp and Holler on the world? No. Is it delicious? Yes.)—but this is the heart of what Celebrants has to offer: a mature perspective on what happens after After. On “Goddamned Saint (Reprise),” Thile sings, “I look down my nose to see / A kid like I used to be / Praying in the dark to keep from poking around.” He reaches out with love, with self-forgiveness, and with a willingness to yet be changed, “And the shiny, new wall comes tumbling down.” This was worth the wait.
