Punch Brothers

And he's sort of bluegrass acoustic adjacent.

He has a couple of duet records with Chris Eldridge from the Punch Brothers and has kind of been around that world.

But his main wheelhouse is jazz.

And he put out a really beautiful record the beginning of this year, I guess.

So like some smaller like quartet kind of ensembles, maybe a couple of duos and then like some larger five or six piece like kind of full band kind of things.

So yeah, something with Daryl.

I'd love to play something with Chris Eldridge from the Punch Brothers.

And there's this really beautiful fiddle player out in Vancouver called Trent Freeman, who I love to play music with.

And yeah, like anything

when there's cameras or like a high pressure, like TV thing or, um, Doing something, you know, like I just went out and did a thing with the Punch Brothers and Chris Dealey and playing with cats like that that are just amazing, you know, it's just, it's like, can be scary, you know, but I guess I always just try to get into the music and that kind of saves me from the fear.

Right.

Yeah.

Turn to X-rays.

Ben, on the December thing, do you fuck with the Punch Brothers? Or just Punch Brothers rather? Punch Brothers.

Do you fuck with the Punch Brothers? Drop the V.

Someone says before they hit you.

Is it just Chemical Brothers or The Chemical

Brothers? Yeah.

Punch Brothers.

They're doing like modern bluegrass stuff.

I do, I do.

I mean, New York had a real renaissance moment when the Punch Brothers lived there.

I mean, there were lots of people heading that way.

It's just so expensive to live there.

And I just literally stopped and I go, I done lost it.

In this interview, I sat down with Grammy winner and founding member of the Punch Brothers, Chris Eldridge.

He shares the story of the train wreck performance that led to one of the most valuable lessons in his musical career.

He unpacks the bizarre practice habit that he picked up from his studies with Tony Rice that completely changed the way that he approaches tone and touch.

But at that time, it was such a struggle to kind of just rise to the level of being able to read a book.

I wasn't rocking it on that level.

But over time, after we started Punch Brothers, I was playing all this really, really complex music.

And my natural intuition and natural musicianship, I reached the ceiling at some point in the first couple of years with Punch Brothers of what my natural intuition could do.

I became a fan quite early on and always thought of this as closer to jazz than bluegrass, although many jazz and folk critics seem to disagree with me.

Mandolinist Chris Teely, the leader of the Punch Brothers, became part of that tradition.

I became a fan after hearing Teely as a 13-year-old mandolinist in 1993.

His delicate tone really did something for me.

He seemed to have the ability to caress the strings rather than pluck them.

So when this new Punch Brothers album, their seventh and the first one that's all instrumental, was released this past July, I was interested in hearing it.

And it's great.

Is it jazz? I would say so.

There's a couple other things going on.

The Friday kickoff show is with the Punch Brothers.

I know Fred Armiston's doing something on Sunday, I believe it is.

So there's all sorts of things.

Yes.

It's like when I saw the Punch Brothers and the entire band, five members, were all around one mic.

Yep, exactly.

One more thing, guys.

So what was it like to work with Dolly Parton? Chris Thile joins me now.

He's a Grammy Award-winning mandolin player and singer-songwriter, founding member of the bands Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers.

He played mandolin for Dolly Parton for a couple of years.

Chris, literally you pulled yourself away from practice and rehearsal to talk to us.