Punch Brothers frontman Chris Thile and New York guitarist Michael Daves clearly enjoy playing together. You can tell by their onstage banter, shared love of classic bluegrass and almost family-like interaction. You can also tell by their interviews, which sometimes come off like a shtick from late night TV. For many years, Thile and Daves’ collaborations consisted primarily of small bluegrass shows around New York’s Lower East side, but earlier this year the duo released an album of covers, Sleep with One Eye Open on Jack White’s Third Man Records. Below, Thile and Daves discuss their project’s continued evolution.
Could you start by just giving us a little background on when you first met and started playing together? I heard it was at a jam session at New York’s The Baggot Inn. Is that correct?
Chris: I was just moving to town, and I was actually staying in a hotel room. People told me it was the worst time to go to New York—I did that on purpose to make sure that I could handle it. It was sweltering humid heat, and the trash was piled up everywhere. I sort of kept it together by going to these bluegrass jams at the Baggot Inn that Sheriff Uncle Bob put on at that time. It was what one would expect from a local bluegrass jam—and then Michael showed up and it was just insane. We’ve been playing ever since.
At that point did one of you ask for the other’s numbers as they say?
[Laughter.]
Chris: Something like that. We were a little drunk by the end of the jam, so the details get fuzzier as the evening went on [Laughter.] I think we did the number exchange at that time?
Michael: I think so…
Chris: I have no recollection of that part.
Michael: I remember we hit it off. We both had the feeling that we were going to do more playing one way or another, whether Chris moved to town or not. We both found it quite fun.
Chris: We were just talking about this, actually, and we both wanted to find someone who would play old bluegrass songs as if they weren’t old—like it was a brand new experience. A lot of the times, you play with good musicians who know this body of material and it’s sort of an act of curatorship—like you’re a couple of archivists sitting around swapping tales about the golden days. I think when Michael and I played bluegrass for the first time, we played these songs as if we were a couple of guys who sort of miraculously knew this brand new song that had already been written. And I think there was sort of a mutual excitement in this shared sense of ownership of that material. It had nothing to do with going back and digging up musical fossils—it was more just like the discovery of a new breed.
Michael: In New York it is rare to find people who know bluegrass music as well as Chris does—and who have grown up with it. Around New York, a lot of people have discovered bluegrass music in college or whatever. Chris grew up with it like I did, so it was refreshing to meet someone here in New York who had that experience. I grew up in Atlanta going to a lot of jam sessions with people who would come out of the hills and were very much of that culture and community. The thing that I found a lot of down there is that you have a lot of great musicians who know the music like the back of their hand but they’re not necessarily doing anything new or interesting with it. So for me to find someone in New York—who both knew it very well and was interested in doing something new and interesting with it, combined with how accomplished Chris was—made me have a feeling that we really stumbled on something unique.
Michael, Chris mentioned how when he got to New York he was kind of testing the waters. How did you get from Atlanta to New York?
Michael: At first, I went to college in Western Massachusetts and stayed around the Pioneer Valley area for a while after I graduated [playing with musicians like Gordon Stone]. I loved it up there: it’s a great place to live, but it was starting to feel a little small, and I needed to get somewhere where there was more going on. I can’t really think of anywhere that has more going on than New York, so I kind of drifted southward about three hours, and I made it my home in 2003. I think Chris showed up maybe two years later.
Sleep with One Eye Open is a collection of covers. Did you every try to write new material together?
Chris: You know, I don’t think we’ve ever really had much of a drive to write material together. I don’t think there’s a master plan of “we’re gonna revamp bluegrass music.” We just go with what happens when we get together and play. It’s really natural and there’s not a lot of planning and forethought. The project is about how our experiences and musical sensibilities line up and that’s what makes it fun for me. It’s almost like it drives itself.
Moving towards the present, you have been playing together for several years and now you have a new album out which is recorded with the help of Jack White. How did he get involved in the project and end up bringing you to Third Man Records?
Chris: Well, that was interesting. Mike and I both had Jack at the top of our list to record with for this project for a variety of reasons. I think one is that he has a similar approach: He’s almost entirely writing the material that he puts out but he’s also tapping into sort of an old sound at the same time. He makes it current just through force of will and ability. Everything he does sounds urgent and powerful and even revelatory at times.
I think we both thought, “What a great guy to get involved with something like this, where it’s old material that we’re feeling as new.” So I e-mailed him and he got right back saying, “Well, I don’t have time to produce a whole record but I could do a couple songs.” So we did two songs with him for Third Man and then sort of parlayed that into actually cutting the whole record there with his engineer. He was in and out—listening to takes and sort of sprinkling his vibes all over the place. It was an incredible experience. His studio is an amazing place to make music, and I think we were really lucky to get that to happen. Vance Powell deserves a lot of credit for how the record turned out. He had an old school approach, where we would bang into the same old Ribbon mic. from the 1950s. It’s kind of vintage-y in a way but it’s not like anything else either. He just had a sound for what we were doing that we both feel was perfect. He taught an old dog new tricks, which may be a good way to summarize what we’re trying to do.
Actually, I think he’s trying to teach a new dog some old tricks!
Chris: Absolutely!
Do you feel that this shift towards music that is inspired by the blues, bluegrass or folk is a reaction to some of the more electric sounds that have crept into mainstream music in the past 10 years?
Chris: I think people are desperate for things that smack them as being sincere. I think that it’s a pretty natural step to look at some older things. from what we consider to be a simpler time—at least musically speaking…
Michael: And the format…
Chris: Yeah, as far as the actual format is concerned. But I think that saying, “God, everything sucks right now, I’m going to go back to when things didn’t suck,” is a dangerous proposition for creative musicians because it quickly turns you into an archivist. The point is to make good music—now. That’s what those people were doing. They were thrusting forward: they were trying to come up with new things, and I think you do have to operate under the naive assumption that there is something new under the sun. But sincerity is why people yearn for progress, and why they say things like, “I just wish things were the way they used to be.” You have the whole Oh Brother [Where Art Thou?] thing that happened a while ago and the folk wave that happened in the ‘60s. I think these things happen over and over again. That’s why I feel like it’s such a dodgy thing to sort of involve yourself in those ways. I think they’re sort of fickle and predictable. I think you really need to approach music as a product of your time and just listen to everything that’s available and see what kind of reaction that elicits in you.
Michael: In college, I was studying jazz and getting into the understanding of theory and composition, but I was also studying musicology. Part of moving to New York for me involved leaving the jazz world behind and leaving academia behind. I feel like the one thing in New York is that there’s an expectation that you do something fresh and interesting with music. It’s kind of across the border in all genres because it’s a place where people come to really be as good as they can at what they do and it just so happens that bluegrass is part of my upbringing and that’s a part of me that I like, so I chose that as a vehicle. I enjoy singing high and loud and playing fast. [Laughter.]
The tradition means it’s kind of integral and cathartic to me, and I came to New York hoping to really put as much of my own experiences and emotions in the music as possible. My goal was to not be playing something as a museum piece, which is something I had been more interested in when I was younger. You have to live your life and have experiences, and you realize you have to do something with what you learned. If you can put your own experiences in the music then it’s going to be a lot more valuable than mimicking something, even if you’re skilled at it. And so I developed the desire to do that with bluegrass music and when I met Chris, I could tell he wanted the same thing and that he had done a lot of different things already in various projects. I sensed that he also would be willing to set everything aside and express what he was going through in his life and I felt like, “great, we’re on the same page, let’s do it some more.” I think it’s still like that. Chris is not one to get lazy, so I trust that he’ll continue to be of that mindset. [Laughter.]
After meeting at that initial jam session, did you ever think about putting together a band or did you always envision this project as a duo?
Chris: I think it really developed naturally over time. The most fun we had playing music together was generally when it was just the two of us. The real spark was there when we could kind of flex together and sort of twist and turn at the drop of a hat. At this point—when we play live—the arrangements can change dramatically from night to night. All it takes is a look or a gesture of the instrument or even just a musical suggestion. We can easily change everything. That’s hard to do in a setting of more than two people. It was funny: when we did these jam sessions at the Baggot Inn where we met, we put in our time with the group. The Baggot Inn has all these nooks and crannies, and we’d find one and then just play as the two of us. That was when things really would come alive. We’d get a group of people watching us and then invariably someone would join in and we’d still have fun but it’d lose a little steam with each person that joined.
Michael: It’s always been about this particular music conversation between the two of us because our experience and sensibilities wind up in a particular way that balances each other out. When you add other elements, it kind of loses the balance that there is naturally with just the two of us.
Chris: It wasn’t that we said, “We need to do a duo like the great duos of the days before.” It just ended up being the most fun and when it came time to say, “Hey, we should actually do an informal show together.” There was no question of adding anyone else to the show. What was exciting to us was playing with the other dude and that was what we wanted to do in front of people.
Michael: And just like Chris said, it’s so flexible. We rearrange things on the spot all the time, and the fact that there’s so little involved in changing course makes it fun for us.
Chris: Also, we’ve got a new rule for ourselves. If we play on Sunday, which is the Lord’s day, we shouldn’t work, so we don’t write a setlist. So we just figure out what happens on stage, and it’s very difficult to do that in front of people— especially if they’re paying for the show. But I think we had one of our best shows on the last tour that night. We completely freestyle it.
Michael: You just got to respond more to the moment.
You mentioned the idea of not playing music as if it is a museum piece. On the flipside, many fans probably know many these traditional songs from more recent covers—the Grateful Dead’s version of “Cold Rain and Snow” for instance. Did any artists’ covers in particular influence your version of the songs on this record?
Chris: Speaking just for myself, I actually had no idea that the Dead did that song until we were at the Relix office and they requested it. I actually didn’t know, when I heard Michael sing that song I was like, “That is badass, let’s record it.” I think that’s as far as our choices of material goes, it really has nothing to do with the recorded history of any of them. It‘s like, “Do you dig this song? Let’s do it!”
Michael: With the possible exception being The Louvin Brothers—we’re both very crazy for them. We’ve had to kind of put our fandom of The Louvin Brothers aside and really figure out, “Oh well, is this song really working?” “Do we like it?”
Chris: Right, exactly.
Michael: We do tend to try to force The Louvin Brothers into our setlist, with varying degrees of success. “Running Wild” seemed to work well, and this other one we do, “The First One to Love You,” I think works pretty well. We’re working on trying to get some of the faster Louvin Brothers songs into our sets but we’re having a difficult time trying to do so. We’ll figure it out.
Now that you guys have successfully built this up project from a jam session to a full album with an accompanying tour, what’s the next step? Do you plan to go back to the studio or just continue to jam informally between your other projects?
Chris Probably a new album—I think it’s coming up with another group of tunes and not making the same album with different tunes on it. We don’t want to do that. There needs to be progress, and we’ve played more together this year than we ever have. I think with every show we’re having more fun and feeling like a “two-headed being.” I anticipate the next one will be a little like this one, only more so.
