Label: Nonesuch
Released 6/4/2021
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 Béla Bartók’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
Track listing:
- Laysong
- Ecclesiastes
- God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot
- Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 1
- Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 2
- Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt. 3
- Sonata for Solo Violin, SZ. 117: IV. Presto
- Dionysus
- Won't You Come and Sing for Me