It has always been hard to pigeonhole Punch Brothers. They are an all-star bluegrass band, five virtuosos led by Chris Thile, the mercurial mandolin player, but their songs smash the three-chord harmonies and blazing march rhythm of bluegrass.
They write dramatic, labyrinthine pieces that straddle genres. Sometimes they sound like a progressive art rock group going acoustic, sometimes like an avant-garde jazz combo with an Earl Scruggs-style banjo mixed in and sometimes like down-home pickers at a county fair. Above the music floats Mr. Thile’s clear tenor, singing deeply personal lyrics, usually about love’s collateral damage. It is restless music, by musicians so preternaturally talented they get bored easily with fiddle tunes. “We take a lot of delight in various music tricks,” Mr. Thile said. “Above all we like music that surprises even as it satisfies.”
On Thursday, Punch Brothers will headline Town Hall for the first time, as they tour to promote their third album, “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” (Nonesuch), which made its debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s bluegrass chart on Feb. 14 and has remained in the Top 3 for nine weeks. Their set list not only includes songs from the new album and bluegrass standards, but an eclectic bunch of covers, among them Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Cars “Just What I Needed.”
Mr. Thile, 31, and the band’s banjo player, Noam Pikelny, also 31, spoke by telephone the other day about how they have matured as a group since they all moved to New York five years ago. Back then, they slept on the floor of Mr. Thile’s East Village apartment while putting together their debut album, “Punch” (2008). Now, says Mr. Pikelny, whose nickname is Pickles, “we go home and sleep on our floors.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Is this the first time you are playing Town Hall as a headlining act?
Chris Thile: We’ve only played it as part of “Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor. This will be the first time any of us have done it as a headliner.
Are most of the songs in the set from the new album?
Thile: We get bored if the set list doesn’t change. So there is a focus on a new record, but we keep our second album “Antifogmatic” in the mix. We’re not doing much from “Punch” these days. Then we have a revolving cast of covers we employ.
Including, I understand, Radiohead’s “Kid A.”
Noam Pikelny: That’s part of our musical outreach though, when we try to give back and give the unheard songwriters of our world a chance to be appreciated.
Thile: Even now because of our graciousness Radiohead might get some long overdue ink.
How has your music and songwriting evolved since you released “Antifogmatic” in 2010?
Pikelny: It is in the same vein in that “Antifogmatic” really represented the beginning of Punch Brothers becoming a true collaboration. In the band’s infancy we gathered to work up this piece of Chris’s — “The Blind leading the Blind” on the album “Punch.” It was really his brainchild. But we started to see this as a career and as a band that we wanted to be more than just a side project. Ever since, musical ideas and the seeds for all the songs have been coming from the entire band. It comes from all of us living in the same city for the first time and actually being able to explore writing music together.
These songs are extremely complex. It’s hard to imagine you writing them together in the studio.
Thile: There are as many processes as there are songs. We could go through all 12 things on the record and have a story for each one. One of the songs came from Pickles, who was just jamming by himself after a show in Canada, playing this lick and kept moving it over and over again and we said, ‘Dude what is that? That’s pretty good.’
Pikelny: That kind of thing happens a lot. We spend so much time together, and we’ll be warming up for a show or winding down and playing music in various corners, and possibly not latching onto something that is actually a cool idea, something worth pursuing. Then somebody else hears it out of context and all of a sudden is envisioning all these possibilities. It’s a really neat brain trust.
Who is the audience for this music? Your songs chart on the bluegrass and folk charts, but the music is way out there.
Thile: I think we are honestly looking for ears that don’t really distinguish between genres that in my mind are only distinguishable by aesthetics, by things that don’t really matter that much. We live in an era where the world’s record collection is at our fingertips and to curate it in a similar manner to a Barnes & Noble or something just doesn’t make sense to me: to say this is bluegrass, this is classical and this is pop. It’s only helpful commercially really. Not artistically.
What are these songs about? When I listen to this record, I feel as if I’m wandering around the Lower East Side on a Saturday night and entering into people’s dating dramas.
Thile: You’re not far off there. Wandering through the Lower East Side on a Saturday night, getting a glimpse of the way people behave badly in the hopes it really won’t leave a mark on them or anyone else. It’s folly to act thusly. And that’s what the record is about. The title is “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” There is a sense when you’re young that you can just take a Mulligan all the time, and the more things that happen to you and the more you cause things to happen to others, the more you realize the things you do count. You can do hurt to people that can’t be undone.
Pikelny: I would defer to Chris on the meaning of the lyrics, since he is the chief lyricist of the band. These are all things we have been witnessing hand in hand as we spent the last six years around each other. “Movement and Location” was one of the most unexpected songs. We put that song together quickly. We rescued this one rhythmic idea that Chris had on the mandolin and surrounded it with a stable and formidable guitar and bass part. Chris kind of wandered off and the next thing we knew we had these lyrics, and the title of “Movement and Location” is a reference to the great Cubs pitcher, Greg Maddux. Chris and I share this torturous passion for the Chicago Cubs.
That song is inspired by Greg Maddux’s pitching?
Thile: My favorite bar in the whole world is called Milk & Honey and one of the bartenders there is a big baseball fan. He and I were talking about pitching and I was extolling the virtues of the simplicity of Greg Maddux’s approach, his ability to coax the exact location out of a pitch that was moving fantastically. And I went home that night, a couple rounds in, and started writing the lyrics right then and there.
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