Laysongs

Nonesuch Records releases mandolinist, singer, and songwriter Chris Thile’s Laysongs. 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 contextualise and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs’ centrepiece 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 modelled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.