As enthusiastic fans stood and clamored for an encore, Chris Thile ran on stage, kicked his heels in the air and began speaking of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boy who had died earlier in the day and whose music, the Punch Brother said, “changed my life.” 

“If impact isn’t proof of existence, I don’t know what is,” Thile said. “He’s here forever.” 

With that and flanked by fiddler Brittany Haas, guitarist Chris Eldridge and banjoist Noam Pikelny at a shared mic, Thile and his musical siblings played “Surf’s Up” in Wilson’s honor. Together, they recreated the song’s five-part vocal harmonies and intricate music while bassist Paul Kowert chimed in from the back on a microphone of his own. 

It was a unique ending to a unique Punch Brothers show that had begun two hours earlier when Thile ran on to the Southern Theatre stage, kicked the heels of his white shoes in the air and launched the June 11 performance with the timely ballad “This is the Song (Good Luck).” 

“I said good luck, good luck, good luck/these are tough times/but we’ll get by/good luck,” the Punches sung to – and with – an otherwise-pin-drop-silent audience that filled about two-thirds of the ornate Columbus, Ohio, venue’s 900 seats. 

Though they exploded in rapture between songs, the big-eared concertgoers benefitted themselves and the band, as the balky mic that served as the only amplification and riddled the first 50 minutes with low volume, finally petered out altogether. This left the Brothers to come to the lip of the stage to perform intimate renditions of “My Oh My” and “All Ashore” with the audience singing along and Thile asking if it sounded OK. 

“It could be louder!,” a woman in the second balcony shouted.

“It can’t – that’s the problem,” Thile shouted back before the band took an impromptu, 10-minute break to address the issue. 

Once resolved, Thile ran on stage, kicked his heels in the air and, with the sound hugely improved, rocketed the band into the unrecorded “Saturn, Pogo Ball of the Gods.” Esoteric even by the Punch Brothers’ standards, it found Thile knocking on the body of his mandolin, Kowert thrumming his bass near the headstock and Haas slapping her leg to create the atmospheric soundscape. 

The Southern’s acoustics rendered such light-touch experimentation audible, something Thile marveled at while lamenting the band hadn’t played there since 2019. On a stage as simple as the music was complex, with only four Persian rugs and three LED light bars adding to the ambiance, the Punch Brothers’ two-hour performance found them spanning their career, playing music both rambunctious (“Rye Whiskey”) and somber (“Julep”) while never allowing things to get too serious. 

The dark-suited Pikelny acted as comic foil, narrating faux commercials for the Green Grass Ethical Rodeo and Bad News Bearers – which included Thile as Dave Matthews telling Haas in song she was pregnant with multiple babies.

When he wasn’t acting, Thile hopped about the stage like a rabbit loaded with caffeine, the stoic Eldridge played and sung in support, Haas sawed on her fiddle with a red flower on the headstock and Kowert, sporting a tie, but the only male in the band without a jacket, busied himself playing the bottom end when he wasn’t bowing his instrument.

Back to Wilson, Thile celebrated the “extraordinary gift he gave us.” Given the crowd’s standing, full-throated celebration of what they’d just received, the sentiment applies to the Punch Brothers as well.