Chris Thile - Laysongs (CD)

2021 release. 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'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

1 Laysong
2 Ecclesiastes
3 God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot
4 Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt.
1 5 Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt.
2 6 Salt (In the Wounds) of the Earth, Pt.
3 7 Sonata for Solo Violin, SZ. 117: IV. Presto
8 Dionysus
9 Won't You Come and Sing for Me