"I'm still marveling at it," says Nickel Creek fiddler Sara Watkins of the band's two-year-old, self-titled debut album. "I always think that everybody that would want it, already has it. And then they keep finding new people."

The number of people who did want that album exploded over the past year-and-a-half. Nickel Creek sneaked into the Top 200 more than a year ago and more than a year after its release, it's quietly perking its way beyond 700,000 copies sold. The acoustic trio's following has been something of a (blue)grassroots creation, as it built an initial fan base from the progressive bluegrass community while gradually incorporating fans from outside the genre.

With little buzz up front, Nickel Creek -- which also includes mandolin phenom Chris Thile and Sara's brother Sean Watkins on guitar, both also sing -- took in fans by the handful, with spirited live sets that have altered the fabric of what acoustic music can be. "The Fox," the sometimes-twenty-minute, jazzy folk-pop jam, perhaps best summarizes Nickel Creek's sound. Peppered with lightning fast instrumental breaks, the song finds common language between bluegrass and those other styles. On some nights, the song features Thile's speed-read injection of "Subterranean Homesick Blues"; on others, Sara inserts a snippet of Radiohead's "The National Anthem."

While Nickel Creek charmed and crawled its way to success, the band's recently released second album, This Side, made a more immediate splash. The album jumped onto the charts at Number Eighteen with sales of 51,000 (a number Nickel Creek took a year to reach) and edging out Snoop Dogg's latest, perhaps giving birth to a new West Coast rivalry.

The group's back-story was fairly well-documented during the seemingly endless promotional duty that gave Nickel Creek its legs. In a nutshell: Three pre-teens met at a regular bluegrass gathering at a pizza joint in their native San Diego at the recommendation of Sean's piano instructor. They learned their trade while being home-schooled, concocting a sound rooted in bluegrass's trademark inter-playfulness, but sans the genre's time-honored constraints. A few years later, fellow acoustic square peg Alison Krauss heard the band at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium and eventually went on to produce both Nickel Creek records.

"She's been a good fit for us," Sean says. "She's very comfortable to work with, and at the same time she stretches us and tries to get us to do new things." A music video followed, a novel format for anyone even tangentially related to the bluegrass set. The buzz around the album, and the group's lively performances, finally began to swell.

"I always say it's a pie chart," Sara says, describing the band's sound. "And you divide all the different influences we have, these little slivers and slices. Bluegrass definitely has the largest slice. It is the foundation and is the primary way we started thinking about music -- soloing and structures. It's there, and we're proud of it, and we feel fortunate to have grown up in that environment."

"We're more bluegrass than anything else," adds Sean, "but to call it bluegrass isn't quite right."

Indeed, with This Side, Nickel Creek continue to move forward, with the collage of acoustic instrumentation as the bluegrassy anchor. The trio trade licks on the instrumental "The Smoothie Song," serve up some dissonant, avant-minded strings on "I Should've Known Better," harmonize about disorientation on the title track and head back to folk roots on a creepy, emotionless version of the traditional "House Carpenter."

It's a mix that would sound desperately disparate were it not for the common tongue in which the group speaks. Like other iconoclastic artists -- say Willie Nelson or Miles Davis -- Nickel Creek's sound is immediately different and recognizable, owing more to Ezra Pound ("make it new") than Ernest Tubb ("keep it country"). Lest the chops that open the album on "Smoothie" get too bluegrassy, Thile leads a take on Pavement's "Spit on a Stranger" ("a weird, fun, confusing little pop song," he says), as two fundamentally different songs become comfortable bedfellows.

And theirs is a relaxed environment in which little is wasted. Thile has released three solo albums, including All Who Wander Are Not Lost earlier this year. Sean has one under his belt (Let It Fall, also released this year), with a second due early next year. "One of the hardest processes is picking out which songs are going to work well with other ones," Sean says. "But the song get-togethers before the recording process starts are exciting. There's always ideas all around and everybody's got what they've been listening to since the last one. But if something doesn't make it, there's always the next album or one of our solo CDs."

All three talk about wanting to record and release a third album next year. Between solo projects, Thile's regular session work (the only Nashville resident of the three, he most recently played on the Dixie Chicks' Home) and touring, that outlook seems a bit optimistic. But with all three in their early twenties and frighteningly polite and centered ("We'd make a dreadful Behind the Music," Sean jokes), Nickel Creek don't need to rush anything.

The group's only controversy might be the occasional cold shoulder from traditional bluegrass purists. "There are festivals where Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury are too progressive," Sara says. "We don't go to those festivals because they don't like us. And that's fine. We don't want to play places where they don't like us."

But by using bluegrass rather than being used by it, Nickel Creek have found opportunities that only Krauss had successfully mined before them. This Side is that kind of album that tweaks some of the limitations put on music. The trio has a fiery instrumental sound, and yet, their chops aren't flashy embellishments but rather doled out in almost classical portions that best serve what are tightly wound pop songs. A creature with so many sides, Nickel Creek are almost best defined by what they're not.

"We listen to so many different things," says Thile, "but we'll also have three copies of the same album. We like to do different things and play with other colors." Adds Sara, "I think we move in the same direction. But we definitely take steps forward in that direction. I think it would have been more of an effort to put out a record that sounded like the last one. And we would've failed miserably."

And the ambitious way of going about their craft has worked for Nickel Creek, who this fall have landed opening gigs for Willie Nelson as well as John Mayer.

"We need them in the music," says Ronnie McCoury, the award-winning mandolin player in the venerable Del McCoury Band. "The music's great and it sounds new. And to see that they're that young, I think that really helped put it over. They're young and they can back it up."

ANDREW DANSBY
(October 17, 2002)