Okay, I think I gave Chris Thile's radio show a fair chance. I liked him as a musician and technician, and had been a long time fan of PHC, so I hung in there. I tried to like the show; I really did.
I stuck with it through him throwing his mentor under the bus for reasons best not brought up here. I stuck with it through the name change from the evocative "Prairie Home Companion" to the generic "Live From Here". I stuck with it through the six or eight new shows per year endlessly repeated (that may be a local phenomenon, but it has happened here). I put up with the major restructuring from a homespun narrative program to more of a musical variety format interspersed with mediocre comedians. But in the end, it is the musical direction of Thile himself that finally drove me away.
It's true that Garrison Keillor didn't really have all that great a singing voice, but he more than made up for his lack of musical prowess with his narrative skills. Thile actually has a pretty good voice, when he sings in full voice, which has depressingly become less and less as the show has gone on. Instead he has indulged more and more in a whiny falsetto which reminds me -- unpleasantly -- of why I never really liked Neil Young.
Thile's playing is impecable, no matter what he applies it to. But his compositional efforts seem to have wandered out to pasture and never come home. I get that he has to produce new material for every show, and that's not easy. And I have no objection to trying out experimental stuff now and then. But it can be overdone.
So many of the original tunes he presents on the show seem to be essentially formless; most of them go on far too long; the harmonies seem random; the melodies meander all over the place without ever either being developed or settling down; the lyrics are self-indulgent; and there's never any groove. It's as if someone took a bunch of Schoenberg's 12-tone music, removed all the dissonances, and used it to set a bunch of faux-relevant non-rhyming hipster poetry.
It's not even that I find the music bad; I just find it dull, uninteresting, and generic. None of these compositions particularly stand out from the others; they all sound like variations of the same song. From a music theory standpoint they're all competently composed. But they're not melodically, rhythmically, or lyrically catchy, and therefore mostly unmemorable.
After 20 years of listening to PHC, and 2 to LFH, I'm giving up on the show, which has begun to bore me to tears. End of an era, in more ways than one.
Note: The above is, of course, just my personal opinion. I don't require or expect anyone else to share it. But I do rather feel as though I've lost something, and this seems like a place where I could lay it out. If you love LFH and Chris Thile, I wish you all the best. By all means keep listening, and call me if he ever returns to his senses.
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