Nickel Creek building bridges on tour coming to Iowa City’s Hancher Auditorium

Friction and dissonance aren’t exactly the words that come to mind when you think about Nickel Creek.

The trio that includes siblings Sean Watkins on guitar and Sara Watkins on fiddle, as well as longtime friend Chris Thile on mandolin made their musical mark crafting a canon of expertly wrought progressive bluegrass dating back to the trio’s origins as teen prodigies who eventually caught the eye and ear of Alison Krauss.

The trio’s latest outing, “Celebrants,” finds the threesome coming together in the studio for the first time since 2014’s “A Dotted Line.” The resulting 18-song effort is steeped in what they describe in the album’s liner notes as being “ ... a record about embracing the friction inherent in real human connection.”

The seeds for this ambitious project were planted when the trio and their family units decamped to Santa Monica for a month of writing in April/May 2021. For Sara Watkins, following on the heels of the COVID-19 lockdown, the close quarters yielded plenty of fruitful creative moments.

“It was really incredible,” she said in a recent phone interview. “We were able to bring our families together and it was special symbolically for us, because Chris has a son that’s almost as old as Chris and I when our band started. It was this wonderful full-circle moment on a personal level of reconnecting our families in this new stage of life.

“Meanwhile, we still feel like the kids we always were, and to be able to reconnect, which ended up being what a lot of this album was about -- not even specific to the pandemic, but specific to this time in our lives where we find ourselves choosing things and deciding what relationships we really want to dig into.

“Chris had said that there’s a lot written about the beginning of a relationship: I love you, you’re perfect. And the end: I hate you and I never want to see you again.

“Most of our life is the middle,” Sara Watkins said. “For me, there is a mundane that we all experience once we get into a job. If we create anything solid, it becomes repetitious. There are benefits and drawbacks to that kind of thing. It was a special experience to be able to sort through that together and to talk about it in real conversation.”

Reconnecting with producer Eric Valentine, Nickel Creek also invited longtime friend Mike Elizondo to join in the fun. Elizondo, a producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist in his own right, who has worked with everyone from Dr. Dre, 50 Cent and Eminem to Cassandra Wilson, Sheryl Crow and Keith Urban, was a welcome addition. Watkins is quick to praise Elizondo’s contributions.

“He’s a musical monster, absolute sweetheart and a ridiculous super-successful producer,” she said. “We knew that we wanted to work with Eric Valentine as our producer, but we hoped that Mike would be OK contributing to the writing, the arrangements and playing bass on the record. He was super-into it.

“He and Eric Valentine have never worked together, but they were both mutual fans of each other. It just felt like we were loaded for bear on this project. We were able to meet up with Mike after that first month of writing and get his fingerprints on the album pretty early on. He had a tremendous effect on the album. It would be a very different record had he not been a part of it, especially the early writing and arrangement process that happened.”

Ambition runs amok from the roller coaster ride of the instrumental “Going Out ...” which finds Thile’s fingerpicking parrying and jousting with Watkins’ fiddle runs, to the world-weariness of “From the Beach” and its rich abundance of high lonesome harmonizing.

Elsewhere, “Stone’s Throw” uses major dynamic shifts to add drama to the questions of separation and unification within the day-to-day of a relationship. Best of all is the raucous and rambunctious “Where the Long Line Leads,” which finds the song steeped in the sentiment of “We only have a short time/But we’re making it a big one,” while Watkins’ singing is often as fiery as her fiddle playing.

In Iowa City

Audiences will hear a mix of old and new when the trio comes to Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024.

The sparkling interplay found on “Celebrants” will be a major part of the group’s live shows, Watkins said, particularly given how long it’s been since the trio has been on stage together for an extended period of time.

“We’re really looking forward to the live show and are really excited about the look and feel of the show in a way that we haven’t emphasized before,” she said. “We’re going to be trying to play what everyone wants to hear. The set lists will obviously vary.

“We’re shooting to have our live shows be cohesive with this new record and show the cohesiveness that exists with the material that spans from whenever our first album came out and now.”

While the ’90s saw these up-and-comers build a fan base through a combination of stellar live shows and a pair of independent releases — 1993’s “Little Cowpoke” and 1997’s “Here to There” — it was the crossover success of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack and how it made old-timey mountain music accessible that helped spark interest in Nickel Creek when the trio dropped their self-titled Sugar Hill Records debut in 2000.

It also didn’t hurt that the Watkins siblings and Thile converted Krauss’ interest in the band into her agreeing to produce that 12-song effort.

Time apart

Over the next two decades, Nickel Creek released another three records, separating to pursue other projects between activities with the group. When asked whether time away from each other helped stoke the fires for all this creative risk-taking, Watkins admits that each member’s ability to work on side projects during the group’s lengthy breaks is musical fertilizer for an album like “Celebrants.”

“Interpersonally, I think the breaks are important,” Watkins said. “In solo projects, we each get to take the reins and lead it 100 percent from our individual perspective. When we are in different bands, we play different roles and there are new challenges in each band.

“From each of those projects, we take new skills and lessons learned. Then we come back together and have new things to show each other — new skills and new fun toys in terms of musical and human perspective. A lot of times when you’re only in one band, it can feel pretty monochromatic pretty quickly.”

With the band back together, Watkins is grateful to be able to reconnect with both her bandmates and the group’s fans.

“I will say that when we were thinking about what we wanted to say to our audience when we come back on tour is that sentiment that people hear at the beginning of the record in the song ‘Celebrants’: ‘My God, it’s good to see you,’ ” she said. “That’s what we want to convey.”