Music flows again for Nickel Creek

“With ‘Fire,’ I do think it was the best record we had made, and I also really did feel like there wasn’t a way to beat it at that point,” Thile said in an early April phone interview. “It felt like we had drained the well dry.”

Now, though, Thile and his Nickel Creek bandmates — siblings Sean Watkins (guitar) and Sara Watkins (violin) — have reunited, released a new album, “A Dotted Line,” and started an extensive tour.

The trio has also learned another important lesson about themselves. There is life after Nickel Creek — and this gives them a new perspective on the group.

“We don’t need Nickel Creek to be everything,” Thile said. “Before, basically … we had to get everything that we wanted out of music from Nickel Creek.”

Their time away on solo projects took some pressure off and helped them realize they didn’t have to do that.

“That’s the main difference I see,” he said. “We’re coming back to this project because there are things about Nickel Creek that we can only get from Nickel Creek and that we miss about it. Now, we can kind of distill … we approach writing music and performing music in a more natural and productive way than we ever have.”

The three musicians were certainly busy during their time away from the band.

Thile (pronounced thee-lee) made four albums with Punch Brothers, an ensemble that was even more bluegrass-oriented than Nickel Creek but pushed its music in adventurous directions.

Thile also did a 2011 album, “The Great Rodeo Sessions,” which featured collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan and Edgar Meyer and won a 2013 Grammy for best contemporary folk album. He further broadened his musical horizons with a 2013 solo album of his arrangements for mandolin of Bach’s sonatas and partitas.

Sean Watkins released two albums with Fiction Family, his duo with Switchfoot singer Jon Foreman. He also formed Works Progress Administration, a folk-rock group that featured Toad the Wet Sprocket frontman Glen Phillips and fiddler Luke Bulla.

Sara Watkins contributed to WPA, but focused mainly on starting a solo career. Two albums, a 2009 self-titled release and 2012’s “Sun Midnight Sun,” were produced by former Led Zeppelin bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones.

Last year Thile and the Watkins siblings began to consider a Nickel Creek reunion. They realized 2014 would mark the 25th anniversary of the group, which played its first show at a San Diego pizza parlor when Thile and Sara Watkins were 8 and Sean Watkins was 12.

Initially, the threesome thought they might record an EP and play a few shows.

“As we started working on new music, it just started coming,” Thile said. “So that was very encouraging. We were like, wow, we might be able to get a whole record together. We’re all sitting there going, I really like this. So we just got more and more ambitious with it.”

“A Dotted Line” feels like it picks up where “Why Should the Fire Die?” left off.

New songs like “Christmas Eve,” “21st of May” and “Where Is Love Now” have rich melodies and blur the lines between bluegrass, folk, country and pop. But the three musicians sound more assured — with Sara Watkins especially displaying new confidence as a vocalist.

Thile is eager to see how the public responds to “A Dotted Line” and to Nickel Creek’s live shows. If the response is positive, he feels the band members can reconvene periodically as Nickel Creek alongside their other projects.

“If we can get people to come with us, then I think it would be great to keep making music,” he said. “The only thing that could make it tricky … is if people only want to hear the old (songs). We’ll do it. We’re happy to go look at the baby photos, and it can be fun, but we don’t want to have to actually live there.

“I’m just nothing but honored that our music made as much of an impression on people as it did,” Thile said. “But at the same time, we all grow, and I don’t think anyone wants to be around people who are putting on an act, who are faking anything. … But like I said, hopefully it won’t be like that.”