Chris Thile and Sam Amidon

MacArthur Fellow and Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter Chris Thile, who the Guardian calls "that rare being: an all-round musician who can settle into any style, from bluegrass to classical,” and NPR calls a "genre-defying musical genius," is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favourite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, Thile creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving the listener “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty” (New York Times).

Most recently, Chris recorded Laysongs, out June 4, 2021 on Nonesuch. The album is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs’ centerpiece is the three-part “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’ “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me,” and “Ecclesiastes 2:24," original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.

An experimental folk musician specialising in guitar, fiddle, and banjo, Sam Amidon is known for both his original songs and his often-ambitious updates of traditional folk tunes. While he sometimes combines the two on his albums, two of his most celebrated releases, 2007's All Is Well and 2010's I See the Sign, are almost entirely comprised of folk standards. At another extreme, Amidon's first album of all-original material, 2017's The Following Mountain, found him working with veteran jazz musicians to create a darker and more experimental vision. Regardless of song sources, his reliably textured, atmospheric arrangements include a singing voice that's gentle but evocative. His latest, self-titled album was released in 2020, which Amidon considers the fullest realization to date of his artistic vision, and comprises his radical re-workings of nine mostly traditional folk songs performed with his band of longtime friends and collaborators.