Chris Thile

Chris Thile – Thanks for Listening (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 43:06 minutes | 861 MB | Genre: Folk, Singer-Songwriter
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Thanks for Listening is a collection of new studio recordings, produced by Thomas Bartlett, of ten songs originally written as Songs of the Week on A Prairie Home Companion. Thile manned almost all of the stringed instruments on the album and is joined by guest singers Sarah Jarosz, Gaby Moreno, and Aoife O’Donovan. “Right now, with how easy it is to be the talker on social media, how hard it is to maintain focus or give something enough attention to appreciate it, we’re in a place where listening is a precious commodity,” says Thile. “Thanks for Listening is a celebration of people who haven’t switched off, despite being given every reason to do so.”

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Chris Thile – Laysongs (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:46 minutes | 705 MB | Genre: Pop, Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 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’sThe Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’sSonata 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

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