Nickel Creek are one of the most exciting and innovative bands in bluegrass music today, combining orchestral sensibilities with rock and roll ambitions and a folksinger’s knack for storytelling.

After exploding onto the scene as young musicians in the early 2000s, the band returned from a long hiatus with last year’s Grammy-winning album, Celebrants. Taking the stage recently at the beautiful Strathmore Music Center, Nickel Creek delivered a marathon two hour set spanning five albums from a 20-year career.

Nickel Creek is something of a supergroup, featuring the virtuosic Chris Thile on mandolin as well as the siblings Sara and Sean Watkins on fiddle and guitar respectively. The trio began playing together as children in Southern California, and after years touring on the bluegrass circuit they tapped Allison Kraus to produce their self-titled album 2000 Nickel Creek, which earned them two Grammy awards as well as a reputation for innovation and dexterity. The group has been making music together for most of their lives, and they expressed this familiarity on stage in the DMV on March 14 in a musical joy and fluidity while joined by bass player Jeff Picker.

The band’s first three songs highlighted each member of the group in turn. On fiddle and vocals, Sara kicked the set off with the honky tonk romp “Where the Long Line Leads.” Next, Chris showcased his theatrical sensibilities with “The Lighthouse’s Tale,” an operatic story of star-crossed love between a lighthouse keeper and his fiance which Thile narrates from the perspective of the lighthouse itself. Finally, Sean threw down on the bluesy guitar-driven instrumental “This Side.” Spanning the band’s two decade career, these three opening songs neatly condensed Nickel Creek’s sonic adventurism, melodramatic storytelling, and instrumental chops.

Watch the official music video for “This Side” by Nickel Creek on YouTube:

As child prodigies, the trio have lived most of their lives onstage and inhabited the Strathmore’s beautiful concert hall with ease and grace. When they encountered some technical problems with in-ear mics midway through the set, the band didn’t miss a beat while gathering around one mic to deliver an intimate rendition of “When in Rome.” Chris, in particular, is a natural-born showman who relishes the audience’s attention, bounding on stage with an impish heel tap and cracking jokes in between most songs.

“We feel like instrumental songs need encouragement,” Chris joked while introducing the song “Going Out.” “There are fewer and fewer of them taking the world by storm these days. We want to bring back the popular instrumental. So here it is in the people’s key of B, in the foot-stomping signature of ?.”

While Nickel Creek burnishes their bluegrass bonafides on lightning fast instrumentals like that one, their songwriting belies the dramatic ambitions of a stadium-packing pop group. Their utilization of unconventional percussion techniques like claps, stomps, and snaps, as well as their use of harmony and dynamics on songs like “Stone’s Throw,” make this bluegrass quartet often feel more like a rock band. Thile played his mandolin like a guitar hero, with frenetic solos that strained at the song’s edges while still managing to control the chaos. This knack for creating catchy, larger-than-life songs has long set Nickel Creek apart, helping to establish progressive bluegrass as a vibrant and innovative genre in the Americana music scene. Little wonder that Nickel Creek will be opening for the cosmic country star Kacey Musgraves on her 2024 arena tour later this year.

The band’s two-song encore at the Strathmore encapsulated these dynamics perfectly. They returned to give their barn burner cover of Mother Mother’s 2008 alt-rock song “Hayloft;” Nickel Creek’s version trades the original’s drums and electric guitars for rapid-fire mandolin palm muting strums and lightning fast fiddling. The band then closed things out with “Holding Pattern” off their most recent album Celebrants. This beautifully sparse song uses dueting guitar arpeggios and intermittent snaps to evoke a stalled romance. “Hold me darling,” Chris crooned just before the lights cut out. “While the world burns down.”