Chris Thile's 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’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 modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.
Tracklist
1. Laysong
2. Ecclesiastes
3. God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
4. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 1
5. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 2
6. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 3
7. Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117: IV. Presto
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’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 modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.
Tracklist
1. Laysong
2. Ecclesiastes
3. God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
4. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 1
5. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 2
6. Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth, Part 3
7. Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117: IV. Presto
8. Dionysus
9. Won't You Come and Sing for Me
9. Won't You Come and Sing for Me