Media outlets have been telling Americans what to fear for a long time, and it’s in the ever-increasing fearmongering that singer/songwriter and Nickel Creek member Sean Watkins found inspiration for the namesake song off his newest solo album, What to Fear. “Ever since I was a kid, I remember watching the local news, and they were just trying to scare me, but at the end it’s just, ‘Oh, you’re fine …,’” Watkins said, calling the constant terror-stoking followed by commercials “really misleading” and “just infuriating.” The new work, he said, isn’t so much abjectly political as it is a critique of “the strategizing that the media outlets do just so they can get advertising dollars.”
A member of the hugely popular Nickel Creek, Watkins, who plays sans bandmates Sara Watkins and Chris Thile at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club on Tuesday, May 10, uses his solo outings to sing about subjects that fascinate him. With the flames of media-maintained fear seeming to rise ever higher in the rhetoric surrounding the U.S. election and recent European terror attacks, Watkins’s newest album is a prescient one, even though the song title was in Watkins’s head long before its release.
He hopes the song and others on the album inspire thoughtful rumination on subject matter that, last decade, may have been totally taboo in the Clear Channel–curated folk-country realm. “With music, you can dive into and talk about lots of things that would otherwise be off-limits,” he said. “I never really want to preach. I just like to write about things that I think are interesting, and maybe someone hears it and thinks about something in a new way.”