'All Ashore' Out July 20

Nonesuch Records releases Punch Brothers’ first self-produced album, All Ashore, on July 20, 2018. The record includes nine original songs written by the band. In celebration of its release, Punch Brothers play at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on June 24 before embarking on a thirty-six-city US tour, kicking off on July 12 in Charleston, SC and continuing through September 17 at Red Rocks (details on next page); additional stops include Nashville, Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Orleans. All Ashore is available to pre-order now at iTunes, the Punch Brothers Store, and the Nonesuch Store, where the album tracks “It’s All Part of the Plan” and “Three Dots and a Dash” may be downloaded instantly; pre-orders from the Nonesuch store also include a limited-edition signed print. A video for “It’s All Part of the Plan,” filmed by Alex Chaloff at Nashville’s Layman Drug Company, may be seen here. All Ashore will be available at Spotify and Apple Music. The complete track list is below.

All Ashore follows Punch Brothers’ critically acclaimed T Bone Burnett–produced 2015 release, The Phosphorescent Blues, of which NPR said, “Punch Brothers sing of distraction and isolation in the digital age … the sound is all their own.” For All Ashore, the quintet—guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjo player Noam Pikelny, mandolinist and lead singer Chris Thile, and fiddler Gabe Witcher—again attempt to make sense of the world around them.

As Thile says, the album is “a meditation on committed relationships in the present day, particularly in the present political climate.” He continues, “We were hoping to create something that would be convincing as a complete thought, in this case as a nine-movement, or nine-piece, thought. Though it’s rangy in what it’s talking about, and in the characters who are doing the talking…”

Punch Brothers returned to the same room at United Recording Studios in Hollywood (formerly Ocean Way) where they had recorded both The Phosphorescent Blues and their 2010 Jon Brion–produced Antifogmatic. Thile says they felt they had “established a rapport” with the space; the same “level of trust and love that breeds confidence” also led them to produce the album themselves, for the first time.

“After four previous experiences we felt like we knew what we wanted. Going in we knew what we needed it to sound like and I think we had a specific enough vision to make the reality match up with that— as opposed to having someone navigate us toward something,” Thile explains. “Also, T Bone last time around, with engineer Mike Piersante, led us to a sonic place where we knew we wanted to be again.”

All Ashore Track Listing:
1. All Ashore
2. The Angel of Doubt
3. Three Dots and a Dash
4. Just Look at This Mess
5. Jumbo
6. The Gardener
7. Jungle Bird
8. It’s All Part of the Plan
9. Like It’s Going Out of Style