In the category-enforcing realm of MySpace, Punch Brothers label their music as “acoustic/bluegrass/classical.”¹  The MySpace page for the band’s short-lived previous name, Tensions Mountain Boys, suggests “hardcore/experimental/bluegrass.”²  Stephen Holden of The New York Times settled on “American country-classical chamber music” to describe them.³  Chris Thile, the group’s 27-year old lead-singer and mandolinist, bucks the constraints of genre by offering a phrase culled from the Mark Twain story that yielded the band’s name: “Almost music.”⁴

Chris Thile, center, and the other Punch Brothers. Image - Rob Lee.

The music at the heart of the confusion is Punch Brothers’ 2008 Nonesuch release, Punch, which features a four-movement, 40-minute suite entitled “The Blind Leaving the Blind” (TBLBT). Thile wrote the string quintet for the crew of musicians who would eventually become Punch Brothers: Chris Eldridge on guitar, Greg Garrison on bass, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Gabe Witcher on violin, and Thile himself on lead vocals and mandolin. His vision for the piece provided the impetus to bring them together.

The work’s technical demands—virtuosic passages, elaborate counterpoint, rhythmic complexity, and harmonic writing that pushes past the bounds of tonality—require players with complete mastery over their instruments. The 30 percent of the piece left open for improvisation calls for musicians who are at home in the worlds of jazz and bluegrass. Add Thile’s desire for a group of peers with whom he could explore new musical territory, and the unclassifiable Punch Brothers came to be.

TBLTB proves demanding for listeners as well as players, particularly for fans accustomed to the conventions of pop and bluegrass: four-minute songs of vocally-driven verse-chorus structure, in which instruments solo one at a time and harmonies don’t stray too far beyond three chords. But TBLTB is beautiful as often as it is difficult, full of gorgeous melodies and tone colors. Thile only takes the listener so far into a harmonic wilderness before offering a respite of diatonic progressions. While some passages may frustrate the would-be toe-tapper, Thile also knows how to groove.  The Punch Brothers’ dazzling virtuosity and Thile’s skill as a composer offer sufficient reward to coax listeners through an unfamiliar musical landscape.

The singing style and vocal writing of TBLTB contribute greatly to its accessibility. Atypical for a work of such scope and complexity, the Punch Brothers sing like folk or pop musicians, with a vocal style as casual as their concert attire.

One of Thile’s compositional goals for TBLTB was to write vocal music that wasn’t driven by the vocals, but instead, treated the voice as another instrument. He achieved this in the sense that the work contains lengthy instrumental passages that are important structurally and thematically, however, the voice hardly receives instrumental treatment. The vocal parts, unlike instrumental parts, display no technical feats or intricate counterpoint.

Vocal sections often correspond with the most harmonically straightforward sections of the piece. Sometimes the voice maintains a tonal melody while the instruments stray underneath. While some of this treatment of the voice may stem from the fact that members of Punch Brothers are instrumentalists first and singers second, the overall effect is to welcome listeners.

Thile’s motivation to create such groundbreaking work comes not from a desire to produce a novel combination of musical styles but from his passion for captivating music, regardless of category. In an article by Dennis Cook, Thile explains, “In folk and pop music you have people with a shocking ability to express themselves personally, and in classical music you have people wielding harmony and rhythm with such precision and force. But, it’s all the same stuff! When a folk song really succeeds musically it succeeds for the same reasons that a Mozart symphony succeeds musically.”⁵

By embracing influences as diverse as Debussy, Radiohead, and Jimmie Rodgers, Thile has made music that shakes fans out of genre-bound identities, challenges attention spans, and undermines pre-conceptions of where great music is to be found.  TBLTB can teach listeners new ways to experience music.

Describing the music of TBLTB tells only half of the story because many listeners are first captivated by the story the piece tells. Thile wrote it in the wake of a painful divorce following his 18-month marriage. He insists that the “anecdotal, conversational, episodic” lyrics should not be taken as strictly autobiographical (”I come from the school of thought that says never let the truth get in the way of a good story”).⁶  He admits however that he drew heavily from his experience in crafting a tale of betrayal and loss of innocence, dissolution and disillusionment. Perhaps more factual than the text’s details of a broken relationship is the picture it paints of a loss of Christian faith. In the press release preceding the album, Thile said,

I grew up in a very Christian household and was not a rebellious child…To run into a relationship that wasn’t honest led to disillusionment with my upbringing as well as my marriage…Ultimately, “The Blind Leaving the Blind” isn’t really about how betrayed I felt but the effect that that betrayal had on my worldview.⁷

Other statements fill in a portrait of growing doubt.  In an earlier interview with Dennis Cook, Thile discussed his song “Doubting Thomas” from Nickel Creek’s Why Should the Fire Die, a song that wonders what follows death and questions his own usefulness in light of his doubt: “For me, the more people I’ve met – and particularly artists - the less polarized and defined everything has become for me. That being said, I still feel like there’s something out there. I want there to be. If there’s not, I’d rather just be wrong.”⁸ An excerpt of an interview for The Times of London following the release of Punch shows the development of this theme: “The religion of my youth was fear-based, and I think a lot of religion is. It’s left me with an overall fear of death, which I kind of resent. I feel that’s no way to really live.”⁹

Lyrics of the fourth movement of TBLTB portray a desire to move past the fear not only of death, but of judgment:

i’m coming back my friends
from the deep and bitter end
where i was so concerned
that we would be the ones who burned
the more scared the safer
the more grateful for the grape juice and the wafer

Further on, the text speaks of a longing for inclusive welcome in the place of judgment:

i need to hear him say
you and your friends can come in
your thoughts and that girl can come in
your parents and brothers are here
i let them in
who told you i wouldn’t let you all in
you are my children

If the narrator of TBLTB is speaking for Thile here, maybe this brilliant, boundary-leaping musician can no more bear to believe that salvation is found in only one Way than he can limit his pursuit of good music to one genre. Sometimes, though, it is the bitterness of grief, which ushers in the first distaste for a sovereign Savior, whose grace and authority demand so much.

And yet, in keeping with his own relentless nature, Thile reminds the listener that these sentiments do not represent the conclusion of a journey. The passage poised between the above quoted passages leaves an opening for revision and redemption:

i sound done
and i feel done
but i’m not done
unless he’d give up on a lost son

These lines return as the work’s final words, this time in direct address to the unnamed god, the closest this piece comes to a refrain.

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¹http://www.myspace.com/punchbrothers <accessed 11/12/08>
²http://www.myspace.com/thetensionsmountainboys  <accessed 11/12/08>
³http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/arts/music/22punc.html <accessed 11/12/08>
⁴http://www.7dvt.com/2008/almost-music <accessed 11/19/08>
⁵http://www.jambase.com/Articles/13784/Punch-Brothers-In-Front-of-God-and-Everyone/0
<accessed 11/14/08>
⁶http://www.myspace.com/christhile <accessed 11/14/08> http://www.nysun.com/arts/putting-the-blue-back-in-bluegrass/71455/ <accessed 11/14/08>
⁷http://www.myspace.com/christhile <accessed 11/14/08>
⁸http://www.jambase.com/Articles/Story.aspx?StoryID=7300 <accessed 11/14/08>
⁹http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3245769.ece
<accessed 11/14/08>

Bethany Brooks is a Philadelphia-area freelance pianist and piano teacher who sings and plays keyboard and mandolin with Wissahickon Chicken Shack.