Nickel Creek Comes to Overture in February

Get ready to jam to classic American bluegrass music that brings people together in celebration and community. Overture Center and True Endeavors present Grammy-award winning trio Nickel Creek with special guests The Staves on Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Overture Hall. Tickets ($54.50-$104.25) are available at overture.org.

 

Nickel Creek is mandolinist Chris Thile, violinist Sara Watkins and guitarist Sean Watkins. Together a sum of more than their staggering parts, the trio revolutionized bluegrass and folk in the early 2000s and ushered in a new era of what we now recognize as Americana music.

 

After a nine-year absence, the Platinum-selling, Grammy Award-winning trio returned in 2023 with the highly-anticipated album, “Celebrants”—a bounty of 18 disparate but loosely connected songs written collectively during a creative retreat in Santa Barbara in early 2021. The result is perhaps the most audacious yet accessible release of the Grammy-winning trio’s 34-year career. The entire enterprise is, naturally, shot through with the trio’s virtuosic picking and shiver-inducing harmonies. The lyrics—addressing love, friendship, time and the universal travails of travel—combine the poetic and plain-spoken, hitting a sweet spot of ethereal and relatable as bridges are built, crossed, burned and rebuilt. “Celebrants” has received a Grammy nomination this year for Best Folk Album.

 

The upcoming show adds to a landmark year for the group. In addition to releasing “Celebrants,” Nickel Creek recently received the Lifetime Achievement Trailblazer Award at the 2023 Americana Music Association Honors & Awards and performed on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “CBS Saturday Morning” earlier this year.

 

Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio A, the album was produced by longtime collaborator Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Grace Potter, Weezer) and features Mike Elizondo on bass. Reflecting on the project, the band shares, “This is a record about embracing the friction inherent in real human connection. We begin the record yearning for and pursuing harmonious connection. We end the record having realized that truly harmonious connection can only be achieved through the dissonance that we’ve spent our entire adult lives trying to avoid.”

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