Ticket pricing:
- Gold Circle: $119
- P2: $89
- P3: $74
- P4: $59
- P5: $49
This event is co-presented by Wisconsin Union Theater and True Endeavors
Aoife O'Donovan and Chris Thile present Wassail! An Evening of Carols and Merriment.
Celebrate the season with GRAMMY Award–winning artists Aoife O'Donovan and Chris Thile as they illuminate treasured holiday songs with spellbinding harmonies and joyful musicality. Featuring newly written (and never before released) original songs, fresh arrangements of beloved classics, lively stories and good cheer in abundance, Wassail! is a warm invitation to gather, sing, and revel in the glow of the holidays.
Mandolinist Chris Thile is a MacArthur Fellow and founding member of Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. Aoife O’Donovan is a vocalist, guitarist, and founding member of I’m With Her and Crooked Still.
About the Artists
Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Aoife O'Donovan (pronounced EE-fa) moves freely beyond genre — weaving folk, bluegrass, and indie rock into something timeless. Deemed "a vocalist of unerring instinct" by The New York Times, she has released four critically acclaimed solo albums — Fossils, In the Magic Hour, Age of Apathy, and All My Friends — and accumulated ten Grammy nominations across a career defined as much by collaboration as by her solo work.
A founding member of the progressive string band Crooked Still and one-third of the folk trio I'm With Her alongside Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz, O'Donovan has built some of her most celebrated work in partnership. I'm With Her's 2025 album Wild and Clear and Blue took home two Grammys — Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Song for "Ancient Light" — and swept Folk Alliance International's Artist and Album of the Year. Her song "B61" had earlier earned her Folk Alliance International's Song of the Year.
She is the featured vocalist on The Goat Rodeo Sessions (the group with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile); has performed with over a dozen symphonies, written for Alison Krauss; and spent a decade as a contributor to the radio variety shows “Live From Here” and “A Prairie Home Companion”. O’Donovan continues to enchant audiences worldwide with her soul-stirring music and unwavering passion for storytelling through song.
Acclaimed Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and MacArthur Fellow recipient of the prestigious “Genius Grant,” Chris Thile is a multifaceted musical talent, described by The Guardian as "that rare being: an all-round musician,” and hailed by NPR as a "genre-defying musical genius." Thile is a founding member of the highly influential string bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek, and has collaborated with countless luminaries from Yo-Yo Ma to Fiona Apple to Brad Mehldau. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, Thile creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving the listener “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty” (New York Times).
Over the last couple of years, Thile toured with Nickel Creek in support of the critically acclaimed 2023 release Celebrants. Most recently, he has been captivating audiences with a playfully ambitious biographical composition entitled ATTENTION! (a narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra), and has been focused on the production of a new musical variety show, “The Energy Curfew Music Hour.” Created with Claire Coffee and featuring Punch Brothers, Season One is available on all podcast platforms, with Season Two exclusively out on Audible.
