Nickel Creek at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, 30 Aug. 2023

The National Concert Hall, Dublin, announces the highlights of its programme for August, among which the Nickel Creek concert on Wed. 30 Aug. is prominent. The concert will take place at 8.00 p.m. on the Main Stage, with support by the Guatemalan singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno. Tickets are €45, €40, €35, and €27.50, depending on location, with a 10% discount for Friends of the NCH or for Groups of ten or more. The NCH blurb reads:

Nickel Creek are the trio of Chris Thile, Sarah Watkins, and Sean Watkins. After a nine-year absence, the platinum-selling, Grammy award-winning trio are set to return in 2023 with the highly anticipated album, Celebrants. Together a sum of more than their staggering parts, the trio revolutionized bluegrass and folk in the early 2000s and ushered in a new era of what we now recognize as Americana music. [...]

Celebrants is a bounty of 18 disparate but loosely connected songs written collectively during a creative retreat in Santa Barbara in early 2021. The result is perhaps the most audacious yet accessible release of the Grammy-winning trio’s 34-year career.

The entire enterprise is, naturally, shot through with the trio’s virtuosic picking and shiver-inducing harmonies. The lyrics - addressing love, friendship, time, and the universal travails of travel - combine the poetic and plain-spoken, hitting a sweet spot of ethereal and relatable as bridges are built, crossed, burned, and rebuilt.

© Richard Hawkins