Mandolinist Chris Thile snaps to ‘ATTENTION!’ for his narrative song cycle

Little about Chris Thile could exactly be called conventional. So it’s hardly surprising that the mandolinist, singer and composer has written what he calls a “crazy” combination of mandolin concerto and song cycle, in which he serves as narrator as well as vocal and instrumental soloist.

He debuted this work, whimsically titled ATTENTION! A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra, in 2023 with The Knights, the New York-based chamber orchestra, at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. 

Since then, he has performed it with some 20 other ensembles, and he will be featured in it on June 8 when he makes his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a special one-night only concert with guest conductor Eric Jacobsen. “I talk, I sing, I play, I move around,” Thile said with a laugh. “There’s a lot.”

The musical chameleon is best known for putting an innovative and very personal stamp on the worlds of bluegrass, folk and roots music through his touring with the popular groups Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers. But he also ventures regularly into the classical realm, taking part in both solo and orchestral concerts. “It’s a challenge, but it’s also a necessary one,” he said of his multifaceted, non-stop activities. “I really love it. I feel that all the stuff that I’m into benefits from all the other stuff I’m into. There is a lot going on, but I thrive on that kind of fugue of musical activity.”

In ATTENTION!, he tells the story of his meeting “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher in a rooftop bar in San Diego when he was 24. “It’s my big story, I tell when it gets to be that time of the evening when we’re all breaking out whatever the craziest thing that ever happened to us was,” he said. “That is mine, and I decided to musicalize it, and with orchestra, no less.”

It’s his first piece for orchestra since his 2009 mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci, which he has since largely disowned. “I feel like I didn’t really know what I was doing back then,” he said, believing that it mimicked too closely the music of other composers, especially Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. “When I listen to that piece, I’m still proud of moments of it, but I also hear me putting on an orchestral composer costume.”

So he waited to make a second attempt at such a work until he felt completely ready. “It had to be something unique to my voice as a creative person, and then figuring out how to really make the most of the opportunity to work with an ensemble with a symphony-sized amount of human beings in it.” In that mandolin concerto, he feels like he was trying to rub shoulders with the great composers, and now he sees his writing as much more “personal” — an opportunity for him to collaborate and make music with the members of an orchestra.

“I’ve written a piece that really necessitates their creative involvement as members of the symphony and utilizes their humanity in the telling of this very silly story of me meeting Carrie Fisher at a rooftop bar in San Diego,” he said. Thile credits Jacobsen, music director of the Virginia Symphony (the lead commissioner, along with the Virginia Arts Festival) and artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, as a major impetus in the creation of ATTENTION!

“He was persistent,” he said. “I kept going, ‘I’m not sure if I really want to write anything for orchestra again.’ And he’s like, ‘You gotta!’ ” Unlike his mandolin concerto, which he stopped performing, he is enthusiastic about how this latest orchestral essay turned out. “I feel great about it,” he said. “I love how it goes down, and when we get to the end, I feel properly wrung out, and I really love the experience of playing with the orchestra and showing it to audiences. “Sometimes the audiences are more familiar with me, and sometimes the audiences are more familiar with the orchestra, and I like it in both contexts. I’m happy with it, and I’m going to keep doing it.”

Thile’s first contact with the CSO came around 2000-01, when famed bassist Edgar Meyer played him the ensemble’s 1956 recording of Bartók’s famed Concerto for Orchestra with then-Music Director Fritz Reiner. “It completely blew my world open — musically but also aesthetically,” Thile said. “Just hearing that many musicians pull together in such a profound way to deliver something that beautiful just changed my whole world and self-concept: ‘Oh, I’m the kind of person who loves the symphony orchestra.’ ”

Thile, 45, a native of Oceanside, California, began playing mandolin when he was 5 years old; he won a mandolin championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, seven years later. The aspiring star released his first solo album, “Leading Off,” in 1994 when he was just 13. He later spent about 1½ years at Murray State University in Kentucky, but dropped out because of the time demands of his increasingly successful performing career. He performs regularly with Nickel Creek, a bluegrass trio with the siblings Sara Watkins, fiddle, and Sean Watkins, guitar. Its breakout 2000 album, which was produced by Alison Krauss, achieved platinum status with 1 million units sold. The threesome produced its most recent album in 2022 and toured extensively in support of that release.

Thile is also a member of the Punch Brothers, a Grammy Award-winning quintet that produces what music critic Stephen Holden in the New York Times called “American country-classical chamber music.” The Punch Brothers has a new podcast in which it presents live recorded episodes of a variety show called the “Energy Curfew Music Hour.” (In 2016-20, Thile served as the host of the radio show “Live from Here,” a follow-up to “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor.)

And if all that wasn’t enough in Thile’s mainstay bluegrass-folk realm, he recorded the voice of Wendall for an updated presentation of the Country Bear Musical Jamboree, a show featuring a group of singing “audio-animatronic” hillbilly bears that opened in 2024 at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Thile as Wendall sings what Disney calls a “countryfied” version of “A Whole New World” from the movie “Aladdin,” with singer-songwriter Allison Russell in the role of Teddi Barra. “I’m an absolute, raving Disney fan,” Thile said. “They found that out and asked me if I would do that and that was about the quickest ‘yes’ you could possibly imagine.”

So if he can pull that off, perhaps Carrie Fisher, a rooftop bar and a symphony orchestra isn’t such a stretch for him, after all.