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Why albums matter: Chris Thile

Our two weeks of magazine production usually telescope into one week of exhaustion, but a lot of music gets listened to along the way. Mostly I work through stacks of incoming discs, and usually get to the bottom of one or two. But in the late hours, needing strength, I tend to revisit old favorites (Peter may still be reeling from the long-ago shock of early Gary Numan at high volume; at one point I was tempted to write here an argument that the Talking Heads' Little Creatures is their finest moment because it's the one time they weren't trying so hard).

And, occasionally, I visit the shelf filled with albums that I should know but have never had occasion to play and ingest. Having reached the bottom of another toppling tower of tepid music, I succumbed to that temptation, and quite randomly put Chris Thile's How To Grow A Woman From The Ground on.

Not quite randomly. I been drawn to the cover artwork (designed by Loren Witcher), and particularly to its gutsy rehabilitation of the typeface Bookman Swash (probably by Kate Mrozowski, credited with "typography assistance"). Bookman Swash is a kitsch face now, hard to use without irony; hard to use at all. It works nicely with the cover collage to create the sense of early 1960s romantic innocence, which plays -- consciously or not (and I hope consciously) -- against the album's title and theme, which more than suggests Mr. Thile's loss of innocence and the dissolution of his marriage.

Thile is still young and good looking and ungodly talented, and so it's hard to feel too bad for him. But he also seems an impossibly nice guy, despite his success, or at least that's how he carries himself. Sometimes his work with Nickel Creek reminds me too much of Journey, and some of How To Grow A Woman seems headed toward the energy, at least, of prog-jazz stars Weather Report; I even wondered if Jon-Luc Ponty might lurk in the wings, and that's not meant as anything more than a sense of where Thile's need to be challenged by equally strong players may yet take him. Where I would follow willingly, but only for one very focused album.

But I came here to argue for the importance of the album as a form, and to draw particular attention to Thile's song "I'm Yours If You Want Me," carefully placed in the next-to-the-last position odd or failed songs are typically lodged. It is an unusual song, and perhaps the single best thing I've heard Thile do. It is sparse and vulnerable and strikingly open, and I'd bet there was an open bottle of very good Scotch in the studio when he recorded it. Here he conceals nothing behind a thicket of notes, for he plays simply, single strings plucked firmly in vague, dissonant meditation. And not even the occasional vocal and violin support of Gabe Witcher disturbs the solitude, the anguish, the tentativeness, and then the certainty of the song.

It is a bold, brave piece of work. I should think it unlikely that Thile's career will take him regularly in this direction, but I will watch and listen to him far more carefully now, for he has revealed a capacity for depth and emotion which his prodigious instrumental skills do not necessarily leave room for most of the time.

And this is why albums matter to me. That song cements the whole work, from its Strokes cover to its Jimmie Rodgers nods to everything else. That song makes the album, for me. It is the centerpiece, the closer (in sales parlance) to Thile's 14-song and quite ambitious musical essay. I'm sure you can go download it somewhere, and it'll stand nicely on its own. But it belongs in context, right where it is at track 13.

Posted by grant on June 5, 2007 11:24 AM | Permalink