Punch Brothers Take Carnegie Hall on an Imaginary Voyage

Punch Brothers came dressed as sailors for their November 4 show at Carnegie Hall and took the audience along on an imaginary voyage. The Unsung North American Expedition stop was a hometown show for Brooklyn-based bandleader Chris Thile and a return to the city where the band once held a residency at the Living Room on the Lower East Side.

The tour supports The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers, the band’s seventh album and first all-instrumental release. As their label, Nonesuch Records, puts it, “For a band known for pushing acoustic music into unexpected places, going fully instrumental may be the most adventure move they have made yet.” At Carnegie Hall, the band mixed the new instrumentals with older songs and short comedy sketches, with the crew “running into trouble” at several points along the way.

Punch Brothers play the instruments of a traditional bluegrass string band, with Thile on mandolin, Chris “Critter” Eldridge on guitar, Paul Kowert on bass, Noam Pikelny on banjo and Brittany Haas on fiddle. Some of their arrangements come closer to chamber music. From the back of Stern Auditorium, you could hear the musicianship in the way the five players made room for one another. Even in the most intricate passages, you could follow the melody as it passed from one player to the next.

The performance opened with Bon Iver’s “Woods,” which led into “New Bike,” the opening track on the new album, while the record’s closer, “New Book,” capped the main set. The nautical theme came through most clearly in a stretch that began with “Song of the Water Kelpie”, the band’s arrangement of a traditional tune, and continued into Josh Ritter’s “Another New World,” a ballad about a captain sailing toward the Arctic in search of an undiscovered world. After “Le Ruisseau,” the band made good on the “Sia shanty” pun by recasting Sia’s “Chandelier” as a sea shanty. The shark joke came right after, with a few notes of John Williams’s Jaws theme.

Pikelny had one of the night’s best lines, deadpanning that it was an honor to stand on a stage once graced by the Hanson brothers.

Late in the set, founding fiddler Gabe Witcher joined the band for “Rye Whiskey” and “Julep,” two songs he originally recorded with the band. Witcher left in 2023 after 17 years to focus on session and scoring work. His guest spot came just before “New Book,” the closing track from Haas’s first Punch Brothers album.

When the band returned us to shore with “All Ashore,” I was struck by how much fun Punch Brothers had made the evening. I would have happily stayed aboard a little longer.

Punch Brothers return to New York on November 14 at the State Theatre of Ithaca and November 15 at the Buffalo Center for the Arts.

Setlist: Woods (Bon Iver), New Bike, It’s All Part of the Plan, Found in a Frozen Fog, This Girl, Song of the Water Kelpie, Another New World (Josh Ritter), Le Ruisseau, Familiarity, My Oh My, Descend O Diamondback, Rye Whiskey, Julep, New Book, Woods (Bon Iver), All Ashore