First Truly Solo Album from Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers Founder!

Chris Thile's Laysongs 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 features the three-part "Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth," which was inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters; a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a selection from 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; and a Hazel Dickens cover. "I went in there to look at the space and instantly felt so at home," Thile recalls. "I loved the amount of sound around the sound. I had two sonic collaborators on this record: the tremendous engineer Jody Elff and that church."