Young, gifted and hip, Nickel Creek have had their music featured inBuffy and on the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?They talk to Tony Clayton-Lea.
Their music has been featured in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, thereby snagging the youth vote, and nudging their US record sales past the 500,000 mark. They've been touted by every magazine from Line Dancing Monthly to Time as the roots outfit to drag what is perceived by many as being an outmoded, old fashioned music into an area slightly more hip, credible and exciting.
What US bluegrass band Nickel Creek hadn't envisaged, perhaps, was the success of the Coen Brothers' movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its accompanying soundtrack, which has sold over 4 million copies since its release.
Now that bluegrass music is currently back in favour, acts such as Nickel Creek - brother and sister Sean, 24, and Sara Watkins, 20, respectively playing guitar and violin, and mandolin player Chris Thile, 20 - are being unwittingly cast as the movement's leading lights. Recently, they've been named (in Time) as one of five music innovators for the Millennium and have been honoured with two CMA (Country Music Association) nominations. This wouldn't be such an unusual thing if it weren't for the fact that the band has been around for 12 years.
They met as children when their parents took them to a pizza joint every week to hear a Southern Californian band called Bluegrass Etc. Chris and Sean were already studying mandolin, while Sara was concentrating on picking up the finer points of fiddle playing. Nickel Creek were thus formed, albeit with the steering hand of Chris's father, Scott. All would have been peachy keen and down-home if it hadn't been for a canny music promoter who thought the idea of a touring kid's bluegrass band would be equal parts cute and cash cow. Cue school lessons on the road and a festival touring circuit for a decade.
"It's been a long journey but it doesn't seem like it at all," says Sean Watkins. "We're three young musicians who grew up from the age of eight into our mid-teens playing bluegrass, and after that branching out and listening to everything from pop to Irish traditional, Celtic, jazz and classical music.
We all love the broad category of music. We don't call our music bluegrass by any means, but we're trying to gather more styles and make them a part of what we are.
"We keep evolving as a band, and who we are now is different from who we were a year ago, and much different from who we were a year before that. It never really gets old because it's always changing, and I think that's a part of what keeps music alive - that it grows and changes. It's the same with us. It is funny that we've been doing it this long, but it doesn't feel that way. We don't hate each other yet - we're actually just like a family." Watkins appears a decent, unaffected person, a 20-something American who, in a different dimension, could be a Limp Bizkit fan. The success of Nickel Creek, he says, is down to the simple fact they like listening to different kinds of music. He name checks as influences the likes of Bela Fleck, alongside rather less obvious names such as Radiohead, Pat Methany and the Turtle Island String Quartet. Oh, and Bach.
"We've always been into different kinds of music," he says, relating how his band can lurch a Bach partita into the centre of a traditional tune and have it sounding as natural as a sigh. "We grew up listening to bluegrass, all three of us, and to us that was normal - we thought everyone listened to bluegrass. As we came into our teens we listened to pop, what was playing on the radio at the time, a lot of stuff. But we also have a deep appreciation of roots-oriented music. We try to appreciate what we can from each genre of music." What about the rake of descriptions that have been bestowed upon the band: "bluegrass revivalists", "acoustic innovators", "Youthgrass", and my own favourite (by New York Times writer Terry Teachout) "post-modern polystylistic prodigies"? "That's a good one! We don't brand our music with any title, as such, although 'post-modern polystylistic' is a pretty good one. We just try to incorporate into it what we are and where we have come from. It's hard to pin down, but I suppose it's bluegrass-oriented acoustic pop. We'd really prefer if people left the descriptions behind them and just listened to the music. But people want to categorise things so badly it's difficult for some to look beyond the pigeonhole. Our goal is to make better music, and actually just listening to it is a great way of appreciating it for its own quality."
While Nickel Creek's base instrumental skills have been built through the swift, fluid and technical efficiencies of early bluegrass, their stance of playing music unrelated to the genre has angered the purists. "It's that way with anything," says Sean. "Jazz, classical - anything with serious roots is going to get criticism for branching out. It's important to respect where we come from - we know that. But it's also important to understand that the people who invented bluegrass were doing something new at the time, too. Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers were making completely new music and it was very exciting. Why was it exciting? Because it was new. We're trying to keep that same mindset, and use the great music that they created to do something new ourselves. There will always be the small, noisy contingent saying it's not traditional music, but you can't let that worry you." Is he content in the knowledge that as they grow older more and more people will disregard their age as an irrelevance? "It's been a part of our publicity, the fact that we're so young," admits Sean with an all too audible exasperated breath, as if the topic is old-hat. "The biggest deal is that we're young and we're playing bluegrass. Most people find that to be so strange, that we got into it so young. It's part of our story, that's for sure, but the music is still, and always will be, the most important part."
Nickel Creek's eponymously titled début album is out now on Warner Brothers. They play Whelan's in Dublin on Saturday, May 11th