GRAMMY Award Winner Chris Thile to Perform at Smothers Theatre

MacArthur Fellow and GRAMMY Award-winning mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile will come to Pepperdine University's Smothers Theatre in Malibu on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 8 PM.

As a mandolinist, singer, songwriter, Thile is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). 

Most recently, Thile recorded Laysongs, out June 4, 2021 on 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' 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 "Ecclesiastes 2:24," original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.

For additional information about the concert, and to purchase tickets, visit the Center for the Arts website.