Chris Thile will take the stage at 8 p.m. Friday Oct. 15 at Watervile Opera House, 1 Common St. in Waterville.

MacArthur Fellow and Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter Chris Thile is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion).

Most recently, Thile recorded “Laysongs,” out June 4, 2021 on Nonesuch. 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 “Ecclesiastes 2:24,” original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.

Tickets cost $68-$78.

For tickets, or more information, call 207-873-7000 or visit operahouse.com.

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