Chris Thile – Laysongs

Vinyl LP pressing. 2021 release. 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 an original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach's Partita for Solo Violin in E Major."

1. Laysong
2. Ecclesiastes
3. God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot
4. Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 1
5. Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 2
6. Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 3
7. Sonata for Solo Violin, SZ. 117: IV. Presto
8. Dionysus
9. Won't You Come and Sing for Me

Label: Nonesuch

Catalog: 654086

Genre: Country