Fiction Family
Intimate, hand-crafted folk songs featuring intricate guitar work and warm vocal harmonies. Perfect for slow Sunday mornings and quiet reflection.
Intimate, hand-crafted folk songs featuring intricate guitar work and warm vocal harmonies. Perfect for slow Sunday mornings and quiet reflection.
Fiction Family sounds like a conversation between two old friends who happen to be world-class musicians. It is the sound of wooden instruments vibrating in a small room, where you can hear the slide of fingers on strings and the soft intake of breath before a harmony hits. The music carries a gentle, organic weight that feels grounded in the earth but light enough to drift through an open window.
What makes this project distinctive is the intersection of Jon Foreman's existential, searching lyricism and Sean Watkins' virtuosic bluegrass-informed technique. While their main bands (Switchfoot and Nickel Creek) often lean toward grander production, this collaboration strips everything back to the essentials. The arrangements are clever without being flashy, using mandolin, upright bass, and piano to color the edges of songs that feel both timeless and modern.
Start with their self-titled debut. It captures the initial spark of their collaboration, moving from the jaunty, rhythmic drive of 'When She Fingers the Glass' to the haunting, sparse beauty of 'Closer to Heaven.' It is an essential listen for anyone who appreciates the craft of songwriting and the warmth of acoustic instruments.
Fiction Family is a musical collaboration between Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman and Nickel Creek guitarist Sean Watkins. The duo's self-titled, full-length album was released on January 20, 2009. The band has since added a drummer and a bassist, Tyler Chester and Aaron Redfield. According to Watkins, the band's name comes from the fact that "Usually when two guys make a record together, it sounds cool to call them the something brothers. But we're not, so that's how Fiction Family came to be." Says Foreman, "They are two words that hold a lot of meaning for me. I think that much of who we are as a culture lean towards fiction. As for the family of it, you have the entire nation that's kind of looking for family. That's one of the reasons why I like the name. Also both of us come from sibling bands and this is not a sibling band, so this is kind of a fiction family of sort."
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