An Evening with Sean Watkins (of Nickel Creek) Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sean Watkins has long been known for his work as one-third of the Grammy Award-winning Nickel Creek and, more recently, for helming, with sister Sara, the itinerant, genre-hopping Watkins Family Hour ensemble. But in the last year he has more assertively and impressively taken on the role of solo artist. What To Fear is a follow-up to 2014s acclaimed All I Do Is Lie, which had been Watkins first solo effort in nearly a decade, ten years that had been jammed with collaborative projects and a herculean amount of touring. On his own, Watkins displays tremendous warmth and soulfulness as a singer,a refreshing candor and humor as a lyricist, and prodigious skill as an arranger.As a writer, Watkins deftly juggles the observational and the autobiographical, convincingly taking on the personalities of others a stalker, a preacher, a cynical newscaster and then juxtaposing them with a voice that is clearly his own. Watkins singing unites disparate narrative threads; hes disarmingly honest and sympathetic, no matter whom the character he is channeling might be.Unlike most of his peers, Watkins has been a performer for more than 25 years. He was a mere 12 years old when he played his first gig in Nickel Creek, with sister Sara on fiddle and Chris Thile on mandolin, at a San Diego pizza parlor. Hes also been regularly invited to record and tour with many other musicians, among them Jackson Browne and Lyle Lovett. But What To Fear is all about Sean Watkins himself, front and center, as his songwriting matures and his persona as a solo performer blooms.
