Chris Thile & Michael Daves

The Baggot Inn jam

Chris Thile, born Christopher Scott Thile on February 20, 1981 in Oceanside, California, plays mandolin, guitar, violin and bouzouki and sings; he is a member of Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. Michael Daves is a bluegrass guitarist and singer. They began playing together in 2005 at a weekly bluegrass jam at the Baggot Inn in New York, and the duo has performed together since.

They recorded their first album over four days in January 2011 at Third Man Studios in Nashville, cutting 23 songs and choosing 16, and Nonesuch released Sleep with One Eye Open on May 10, 2011 (MusicBrainz lists a digital edition on May 6). Thile and Daves produced it, with Robert Hurwitz as executive producer and Vance Powell as engineer, and Robert C. Ludwig mastered it at Gateway in Portland, Maine. It earned a Grammy nomination for best bluegrass album in 2012 and, according to Wikipedia, reached number three on the bluegrass and Heatseekers charts. Third Man Records also issued the duo's 7-inch "Man in the Middle".

On the road

Setlist.fm shows them at the Square Room in Knoxville (May 18, 2011), World Cafe Live in Philadelphia (May 21), the Telluride Bluegrass Festival (June 17, with "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms", "20/20 Vision", "Sleep with One Eye Open" and "Man in the Middle"), the Newport Folk Festival (July 31), the Ellnora Guitar Festival in Urbana, Illinois (September 9, 2011), the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville (June 28, 2012), the Festy Experience in Roseland, Virginia (October 12, 2013) and the North Beach Bandshell in Miami Beach (February 12, 2017). Thile said that bluegrass gets all of its emotion, all of its righteousness from humanity and the mistakes that humans make.