Chris Thile is an American mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and radio personality, best known for his work in the progressive acoustic trio Nickel Creek and the acoustic folk and progressive bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers.
He was born on 20 February 1981 in Oceanside, California, USA, as Christopher Scott Thile. He is currently 40 years old. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
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Net Worth And Career Of Chris Thile
With his years of efforts in his professional career, Chris Thile has been involved in several projects in the music industry and gained a large amount of wealth. According to CelebrityNetWorth, he has an estimated net worth of $3 million.
Thile has been at the forefront of the music industry since the late 1980s. He formed the three-member band at the age of 8 named Nickel Creek and released their first album, Little Cowpoke, in December 1993. Later albums included Nickel Creek and This Side, which went platinum and won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 2005, Nickel Creek released Why Should the Fire Die?, which received critical acclaim and sold 250,000 units. In 2007, Nickel Creek called an “indefinite hiatus,” although they reunited in 2014 and released A Dotted Line (Nonesuch Records).
He has also released a number of his solo albums, including Deceiver and How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, to name a few. On his own, at the age of 13, with the album Leading Off... and then released Stealing Second when he was 16. Thile began to come into his own as a solo artist with 2001’s Not All Who Wander Are Lost, for which he took the title of Mandolin Player of the Year from the Instrumental Bluegrass Music Association.
Chris has won Grammy Awards a few times for his work with Nickel Creek (2002’s This Side), his genre-bending collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, and violinist Stuart Duncan (2011’s Goat Rodeo Sessions), his duo album with Meyer (2014’s Bass & Mandolin), and with Punch Brothers (2018’s All Ashore).
He has also collaborated with the likes of pianist Brad Mehldau, banjo player Bela Fleck, and singer/guitarist Michael Daves, among others. Between 2016 and 2020, Thile hosted NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion (later titled Live from Here), and in 2021, he released his first entirely solo album, Laysongs.
Other albums he has worked in include Deceiver, Live: Duets, Sleep with One Eye Open, Thanks for Listening, and such. He has also had a fair amount of involvement in singles and EPs such as Why Only One?/Tarnation, Laysongs, Scarlet Town, and many more.
Chris also made his appearances in Prairie Home Companion at the age of 15, as the broadcast showcased remarkable young artists. Since that early APHC booking, Chris, recipient of a 2012 MacArthur “genius” grant, has certainly made his mark. He was among 23 people awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In the fall of 2016, Chris took over at the helm of A Prairie Home Companion (which is known by the name Live from Here), a public radio favorite since 1974.
Chris Thile Announces His Tour And Concert For Fall 2021
Chris Thile recently released his first truly solo album, Laysongs, and has decided to hold Laysongs tour beginning this fall 2021.
The tour will kick off in the Midwest, heading next to New England and New York, then down to the Southwest.
When the world went into COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020 and the public radio Thile had hosted, Live from Here, ended its run, he finally had time to contemplate his idea for his own solo album seriously. His new solo album, Laysongs, features new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality.
Laysongs album explores Thile’s relationship with religion as an evangelical Christian and his divorce from it. It’s a moment he’d been moving toward for years. Recorded in a converted upstate centerpiece is the three-part Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, 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 Bela Bartok’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.
Chris Thile Laysongs fall tour 2021 (©: Instagram/Chris Thile)
A full schedule and ticket information of his Laysongs tour have been released on the site nonesuch.com/on-tour, which is listed below.
June 10 – Telluride, CO @ Sheridan Opera House
June 11 – Telluride, CO @ Telluride Bluegrass Festival
June 18 – Williamsburg, VA @ Virginia Arts Festival
June 24 & 25 – Vienna, VA @ Filene Center, Wolf Trap
June 26 – Chautauqua, NY @ Chautauqua Amphitheatre
June 27 – Montgomery, NY @ City Winery Hudson Valley
August 2 – Lake Placid, NY @ Open Sky Arts Festival
October 3 – Nashville, IN @ Brown Country Music Center
October 5 – Cincinnati, OH @ Memorial Hall
October 6 – Flint, MI @ The Capitol Theatre
October 7 – Skokie, IL @ North Shore Center for the Performing Arts
October 9 – Lexington, MA @ Cary Hall
October 10 – Rockport, MA @ Shalin Liu Performance Center
October 15 – Waterville, ME @ Waterville Opera House
October 16 – Troy, NY @ Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
October 22 – Tarrytown, NY @ Tarrytown Music Hall
November 18 – Charleston, SC @ Charleston Music Hall
November 21 – Durham, NC @ Carolina Theatre
November 22 – Atlanta, GA @ Atlanta Symphony Hall
November 23 – Rocky Mount, VA @ Harvester Performance Center
February 5 – Houston, TX @ Cullen Theater, Wortham Center
Following this publicized release of Chris’s tour, Rocky Mount’s Harvester Performance Center has announced a newly scheduled one. It noted that Chris would be coming to the venue on 23 November, for which the tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. this coming 11 June 2021. A news release about the performance did not include ticket prices, nor did the venue’s website.
Chris also joined wbur.org to talk about becoming more reflective as a result of the pandemic. And, for many, it’s been tough to shake the grief that COVID-19 has caused. He noted during the appearance that Laysongs is the ‘song of remembrance’ for those in the grief of the losses of their loved ones during the pandemic.
Chris Thile Married Life With Wife Claire Coffee
Chris is a married man. He tied the knot with actress Claire Coffee on 23 December 2013, after two and a half years together. His wife, Claire, is an American actress, best known for her role as Adalind Schade in the NBC fantasy drama Grimm.
The couple first met in New York in 2011 at a dinner party in Brooklyn through their mutual friend, Alex Boling. After hit off well together, and began a long-distance relationship until the spring of the following year.
The pair later married at the end of 2013 at Blackberry Farm in East Tennessee in an intimate ceremony with about 20 people total in attendance at the wedding. Coffee’s sister Abbie officiated the ceremony, which they wrote themselves, aside from the traditional Irish vows they used to swap “I do’s.”
Chris Thile with his wife, Claire Coffee (©: NY Daily News)
The bride told PEOPLE she wore a 76-year-old vintage lace gown, purchased alongside her vintage veil at Xtabay Vintage Bridal Salon in Portland, Ore. The groom donned a dark brown wool suit custom-made by Against Nature in New York City.
They later went on to have delicious culinary dishes in the wine cellar at Blackberry Farm’s The Barn at Blackberry Farm. The couple also shared that they did not have much time for their honeymoon. They still “spent Christmas with our families at Blackberry after the wedding.”
Chris and Claire welcomed their first child together on 11 May 2015 in Portland, Oregon, PEOPLE reported. They named their son Calvin Eugene Thile – whose middle name is in honor of Coffee’s late grandfather. Claire took to Instagram on 16 May 2015, with an adorable photo of herself embracing her son as she sleeps, captioning, “GRIMM Season Finale! @christhile & I had a baby! I DON'T KNOW WHAT’S MORE INTENSE!! JK, it’s definitely childbirth, but watch tonight anyway! #buryingthelead @nbcgrimm”.
Prior to his marriage with Claire, Chirs’s first marriage was in 2003 when he took Jesse Meighan for his wife in a grand marriage ceremony. Unfortunately, their marriage lasted only 18 months, and the two divorced in 2004.