I can still remember the exact circumstances of my first listen to Nickel Creek. A high school friend sent a few songs via MSN Messenger, and I downloaded them on the family PC that sat on a combination ping-pong/pool table in our basement. “Doubting Thomas” was one song. “When You Come Back Down” was another.
These were complicated, surprising tracks about belief and steadfast love, with lyrics that still feel like gut-punches (“Oh, me of little faith”). Into my Winamp playlist they went. (It was 2006, okay?)
Formed in 1989, the group consists of siblings Sara Watkins (fiddle) and Sean Watkins (guitar) and Chris Thile (mandolin). When its first album came out, the genre boundaries of American roots music were fairly hard and fast; bluegrass, folk, gospel and country operated in separate lanes, and it was rare for any to cross into mainstream pop success.
Then Nickel Creek came and turned everything upside down. It covered rock songs. It pulled sonic threads from classical, jazz and whatever else suited its fancy. It blurred lines between pop and folk. It garnered regular GRAMMY nominations and paved the way for later pop/country/folk breakouts like Kacey Musgraves (with whom they’ve been performing this year; I beg you to look up its cover of SZA’s “Kill Bill”).
While it’s not the only band that crosses boundaries now, its music is still innovative. Its chord progressions feel like discoveries even to a seasoned listener, taking unexpected turns and swelling in sudden, emotional crescendos that buoy their crystal-clear harmonies.
Oklahoma Gazette spoke with Sara Watkins ahead of the band’s Tower Theatre show on Nov. 25.
Oklahoma connection
I wanted to start at the beginning and how they figured out how to play creatively. Sara Watkins credited the efforts of other artists they grew up with in California. Bands around them performed The Beatles and The Byrds alongside old cowboy songs.
“There were some other parts of the country where bluegrass instrumentation was reserved pretty much for the bluegrass sound, that wonderful identifiable sound,” she said. “But the California version of it that we grew up in was playing all kinds of stuff.”
They also happened to have a mentor many Oklahomans might recognize: Byron Berline, the three-time national fiddle champion who owned the Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie.
“He was a huge influence on us at a formidable age,” Watkins said.
The band went on hiatus in 2007 to tackle a variety of solo projects. The members reconnected in 2014 for the album A Dotted Line.
“I think that we really value the connection and the history that we have, and I think one of the things that keeps us coming back is being excited by what each of us is doing individually outside of the band,” Watkins said.
Their younger years were extremely “intertwined,” but time apart allowed them to stretch in new ways.
Familiar friction
“When each of us goes in a new direction musically, we learn new things and we bring those things with us to our next project,” she said. “Every time we take a break and do a solo project or play in a different band, we learn new skills, our musicianship develops, and then when we come back together as Nickel Creek, we can apply those new things, those new little tools and new skills that we can bring into the writing process for Nickel Creek.”
The band’s latest album, Celebrants, is about the familiarity of knowing someone for a long time and the complications that can come with it. It was written during the pandemic.
How personal was the album for them?
“One of the things we were noting is at this stage in our life, there are a lot of relationships that have come and gone,” Watkins said. “Also, it takes a lot of work to keep relationships around.”
She said it’s not a bad thing.
“A phrase that kept coming up was the friction that is inherent in growth, and how important it is to not receive friction or resistance as sign of something that is bad, but instead to embrace it as proof of life and evidence that there’s something to be learned and strength from varying opinions and perspectives,” she said. “‘Standing on one leg, you’ll lose your balance.’ You need to have the various pillars of perspective. All of that went into a song like ‘Strangers’ and then also found its way into other songs.”
The band lived together for a period to write the album. Chris Thile wrote on Instagram of the “many trips across the country to write and make demos” and the “constantly evolving shared-note of lyrics.” Watkins said it was a unique time for another reason.
“This was definitely the most collaborative writing process,” she said, “because I think we’re all better at collaborating as we’ve had more and more experience and we’re less precious about any given idea. We’ll fight for our opinions and state our case if we feel strongly about something, but there’s always this understanding that this song is going to be better if the three of us find something a musical or a lyrical choice that’s going to be satisfying to all of us.”
It’s another way they’ve grown and matured together.
“On Why Should the Fire Die?, we were just learning how to co-write. On A Dotted Line years later, we didn’t have a lot of time to co-write. We came together with some pretty intact song starts,” she said. “We finished it all together, but we didn’t get to really get in the weeds the way we wanted to. It just simply wasn’t the time.”
I had to ask, as a fan, would we have to wait nine years for the next album?
“We definitely don’t want it to be that long. Time just kind of gets away from you,” Watkins said, adding, “We all have enough projects going on that the timing is a very real part of it all. But we intend to come back as Nickel Creek sooner than later and not have it be quite so long between albums.”
Nickel Creek’s show at Tower Theatre will be its last of the album cycle. She promised a crowd-pleaser of a setlist.
“I think we’re going to be in a very celebratory kind of mood that night,” she said. “It’s going to be very special.”
Nickel Creek plays 7 p.m. Nov. 25 at Tower Theatre, 425 NW 23rd St. Tickets are $49.50-$79.50. Visit towertheatreokc.com.
This article appears in Queen of Oklahoma.