LAYSONGS (VINYL)

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 Bela Bartok'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