Chris Thile
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Chris Thile

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“I’m bring a boatload of excitement,” Thile says when asked what he’s bringing to Australia. “I’ve only gotten to play in Australia once before and I had such a great time and, yeah, I know this comes at the risk of sounding like I’m brown-nosing. I really did though. It’s always fun for me, at this point in my career, I mean I know I’m not that old but I have been doing this for a long time and you start to get a sense that you’ve seen a lot of things, and so the experience there is truly different.”


His set is sure to be as jarringly eclectic as ever and for Thile, performing is as much about a re-education of audience assumptions as it is about just having fun. “I feel like we need to be reminded that great musicians like Bach should not be listened to with our superior ear on,” he says. “I feel too often when people go to the concert hall to hear Bach I’m surrounded by people who are prepared for a night of improvement. It’s like they’re sitting down to read an improving book and they think they’re gonna be better people. I feel Bach or any great musician, the reason why they stood the test of time is that their music was always meant to get your feet tapping as quickly as it was meant to get your brain moving. I’ve constructed the program so that people are ready to listen to Bach with their fun-loving ears as well as to listen to music that they only approach with fun-loving ears with a more serious perspective. We often approach the hallowed halls of great musicians with such reverence that we deprive ourselves of a real, human, red-blooded experience.”

From American late night talk show spots to country fairs and orchestral compositions, Thile is constantly reinventing what he does and who his audience is. There must be a fair degree of pressure for him to maintain the high standard he has set alongside his furiously diverse projects? “I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself,” he laughs. “It’s like I’m never comfortable unless I’m a little uncomfortable but the one thing I’ve learned is that these potentially uncomfortable dinner parties end up being the most comfortable thing in the world. In cooking there is such an importance in balance opposite flavours when handled by an expert chef and the same thing goes for music. When you start to combine these seemingly disparate pieces of work though, the more you start to realise all the things they actually have in common. But hell, if it were easy I’d be bored.”

Still riding the financial freedom afforded by the 2012 MacArthur Fellowship, Thile admits that with such a great honour comes even greater expectation. “I tell you what, that award certainly didn’t help things,” he laughs. “They make a lot of the fact that it’s no strings attached but I’ve felt the fire that I lit under myself get a lot hotter. I was so honoured and several heroes of mine are fellows and when I found out about it I actually had difficulty breathing. I mean, I don’t want them to take it back but, yeah, it’s created an intense path.”

BY KRISSI WEISS