For the beloved trio's return, Nickel Creek created its own world
The opening song and title track of Nickel Creek's fifth studio album, Celebrants, poses a striking image: "Heaven's always been in this cathedral that we rebuild nightly together." The line conjures the fantastical and the spiritual, but, at its heart, the song celebrates something simple, even ordinary: choosing to come together in community.
It's an idea made quietly radical not just by its origin — the beloved acoustic band wrote the bulk of Celebrants during the isolation of COVID-19 lockdown — but also for the context into which it's being released: a time largely defined by bitter, deeply entrenched division.
Celebrants is Nickel Creek's first release since its 2014 album A Dotted Line, which itself came after another lengthy hiatus during which the trio — comprising Chris Thile, Sara Watkins and Sean Watkins — developed solo careers and other projects, all after spending their youth literally rewriting roots music.At first listen, Celebrants may seem like the trio's least accessible record, favoring musical world-building over playlist-ready singles.The gorgeous harmonies and intricate musicianship of those earlier LPs are there — in fact, the trio sounds and plays better than ever — but the album's structure doesn't lend itself to skipping around. Instead, Celebrants is the kind of album that truly rewards repeated, front-to-back listens. And that was by design — rather than focusing on individual songs, the band wrote the LP as one might write a novel, ensuring that each track helped to contextualize those before and after it.
At its heart, is a record about human connection. There's the connection found in that cathedral — the collective joy of a concert, perhaps, or the awkward but necessary small talk of a party as recreated on the dizzying second song "Strangers." But there's also the seemingly smaller ones, the relationships and friendships that ground us, that reconnect us to past versions of ourselves and, to borrow a line from standout track
