SAN DIEGO — Its lights-dimming title notwithstanding, “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” is a brightly life-affirming family affair for multiple-Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer and composer Chris Thile, his wife, actress/director Claire Coffee, and Thile’s virtuoso band Punch Brothers.

The allure of this eight-part Audible Originals Audiobook series of hour-plus-long shows — also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify — is heightened by the richly collaborative musical performances with James Taylor, Norah Jones, Jon Batiste, Kacey Musgraves and other guests.

“It was a dream team, if ever there was one!” said Thile, 43, the recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2012. “We want people to feel both comforted and energized by the show.”

“Mostly, we want the audience to be in a better mood at the end of each episode than they were at the beginning, and to see the world with slightly rosier glasses,” said Coffee, 44. The Monterey native’s TV acting credits range from “Grimm” and “The West Wing” to “General Hospital” and “Law & Order.”

Thile, an Oceanside native, rose to national prominence in the bluegrass-and-beyond San Diego trio Nickel Creek. He assumed an even higher profile in 2016 as Garrison Keillor’s handpicked successor to host the weekly PBS radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Thile also hosted “Companion’s” successor, “Live from Here,” which aired from late 2017 until mid-2020. “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” is an outgrowth of its two popular predecessors and a distinct entity unto itself.

“It really challenges us,” Coffee said. “You have to find opportunities and ways to keep people online for the entire show. So, we strived to keep things focused and consistent, and surprising, at the same time.”

“The Energy Curfew Music Hour” made its streaming debut in mid-October. All eight episodes of the first season were directed by Coffee, who also reads the show’s faux news segments and voices virtually all the female roles. The scripts were co-written by her, Thile, Punch Brothers banjo player Noam Pikelny and TV veteran Rachel Axler, whose credits include “The Daily Show” and “Veep.”

Thile and his Punch Brothers are the house band, performing multiple songs on their own and with the show’s 16 musical guests, two of whom are featured on each episode.

In addition to Taylor, Jones and the other big names who appear, the lineup includes everyone from Jason Isbell and Lake Street Dive to Madison Cunningham and Sylvan Esso. Each show features an exclusively all-acoustic musical format, an approach Thile has long championed for its warmth and intimacy.

“Organic music-making is so interesting to me,” he said. “I love that music can be made — sans electricity — in a small room, which sometimes gives you as clear a look as you can get at the humanity of making music. Not that I don’t love electronic music; I do. But it is well-represented in the public forum, whereas acoustic music is less so.”

The all-acoustic format is also ideal for the premise of “The Energy Curfew Music Hour,” which is the brainchild of Thile and Coffee. The couple will celebrate their 11th wedding anniversary on Dec. 23.

‘Arts and Waste Management’

Their show is set in a not-too-distant but old-fashioned (in a folksy way) future, in which “diminishing resources and extreme weather have ushered in a worldwide effort to ration electricity. America has instituted a weekly ‘energy curfew’ where the power grid goes down completely and we all live electricity-free for 24 hours. ‘The Energy Curfew Music Hour’ hits the airwaves an hour before the lights go out while the nation tunes in and turns off together before the Dark Day.”

Playing off “The Energy Curfew Music Hour’s” mostly tongue-in-cheek title, are the recurring references to two fictitious government entities, The Non-Essential Electronics Buyback Program and the U.S. Department of Arts and Waste Management.

The show, recorded in front of a live audience at the intimate Minetta Lane Theatre in New York, also revels in its faux sponsors. One episode is “brought to you by Squirrel Space People, eager to provide homes for squirrels,” and “Bootstraps, the publisher of the self-help book, ‘The Power of Nodding.’ “

At least two other episodes are sponsored in part by “The Bad News Bearers,” a company that employs “professional musicians” to deliver “bad news for you,” whether it be to fire an employee or to inform an unsuspecting woman that her husband is having an affair with her best friend. Then there’s “A La Carte Health Insurance,” whose spokesman cheerily trumpets: “You can live without your appendix! Do you really need to save it?”

These wry names and scenarios reflect a mutual appreciation for the playfully absurd by “The Energy Curfew Music Hour’s” husband-and-wife creators.

“If there’s any phrase that is appropriate, it’s ‘playfully absurd,'” Thile said in a recent Zoom interview.

Coffee, in a separate Zoom interview, noted two other factors that served as inspirations for the tone of the show.

“I grew up with science fiction and Chris grew up reading books by P.G. Woodhouse,” she said, speaking from the upstate New York home the couple shares with their 9-year-old son, Calvin. “And I love dreaming about what could be and what may be. I love the concepts of future worlds because they give you a path to where civilization could go and a far-reaching concept of what is possible.”

Timing also played a key role in the conception of “The Energy Curfew Music Hour.”

In June 2020, the COVID pandemic shutdown led to the cancellation of Thile’s 5-year-old radio show, “Live From Here,” whose final season was directed by Coffee. She and Thile had previously considered “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” concept as a show-within-a-show on “Live From Here.” The first episode of “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” was recorded in front of a live audience in November 2023.

“When ‘Live From Here’ was still airing, we thought we might do (‘Curfew’) as a serialized element,” Coffee recalled. “We never got it running for that show, but when Chris was approached to do another version of a musical variety show, we started talking in more concrete terms about how our concept of the future would work.”

Make that, a concept of the future that in some ways seems strangely and quaintly familiar.

“We both loved the idea of the future being a little bit more like the past than any of us expected,” Thile said with a laugh. “Rather than flying cars, maybe the future is supposed to be a little bit more ‘back to the earth.’ And I was looking for any excuse to get more stripped-down acoustic music showcased. We thought a fun way to do it would be that all the lights go down and we pretend there’s a power outage, or that we’re in a future where we need to be conserving power.”

He laughed again.

“I used to listen to ‘The Lone Ranger’ and ‘Gang Busters’ radio shows, and I was obsessed with commercials for things like Cheerios,” Thile continued. “When COVID derailed everything, I didn’t think about the (‘Energy Curfew Music Hour’) idea until a very generous donor came forward and asked if I’d be interested in doing something like ‘Live From Here’ again.”

Thile politely declined to name that donor. But he allows that there were some creative differences between him and American Public Media, the producers of “Live From Here,” that made him a bit reluctant to repeat the same format. He proposed an all-acoustic music format, and the donor readily agreed.

‘Musical whiplash’

“I’m very proud of ‘Live From Here,'” Thile stressed. “But, sometimes, I think we ended up chasing something that we weren’t necessarily best at (with the range of musical guests) that you can get somewhere else, whether it be ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ or ‘Saturday Night Live.’“

As on his previous shows, Thile has a gift for putting his musical guests at ease on “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” — so much so that James Taylor, unprompted, shares a memory of his father rescuing him when Taylor was battling a heroin habit as a teenager.

Thile also uses the show to introduce listeners to the music of one of his favorite contemporary classical composers, Thomas Adès, who was the artist in residence at La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest this year and last year.

Together with the one-woman, three-man Punch Brothers, Thile ingeniously performs the first movement of Adès’ 2012 orchestral opus, “In Seven Days,” which Thile rearranged for mandolin, banjo, violin, guitar and upright bass. He and his bandmates then break down the very intricate music and its devious time signatures by playing excerpts from that first movement at a slowed-down tempo to help explain what’s going on in the piece.

The same episode of the show also features the veteran Americana-music duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, as well as the electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso, which clearly relishes the rare opportunity to perform in an all-acoustic setting.

“The potential ‘musical whiplash’ might be more than most people would enjoy!” Thile said. “But seeing how it all functions with Punch Brothers as the house band, I think maybe we can get away with more. And we can help underline the similarities, because great music generally has more in common with other pieces of great music (from other genres) than first meets the eye or ear.”

Make that, from nonmusical genres as well, as memorably demonstrated by a segment in the third episode of the show that purports to be sponsored by “the Rube Goldberg Variations mellow-bellow leaf blowing system, powered entirely by walking.”

Thile is surely not be the only Grammy-winning artist to fondly invoke Goldberg, the storied American cartoonist and inventor, who designed fanciful machines that relied on a series of improbable chain reactions to function. (The elaborate opening breakfast-making sequence in the 1985 Pee-wee Herman film, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is an especially loving homage to Goldberg.)

But Thile is surely the only artist to follow a nod to Rube Goldberg by performing an impeccably crafted solo mandolin rendition of the second section of composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s landmark Goldberg Variations.

“Chris and I worked specifically on what the (faux) sponsors would be,” Coffee said. “And the Rube Goldberg Variations came about from a ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if…?’ conversation. We were trying to go more analog with ridiculous inventions, like the mellow-bellow leaf blower, none of which really worked.”

Thile chortled as he recounted the creation of the Goldberg-meets-Goldberg segment.

“That started with a different concept about simulated technology in this world we created for the show,” he said.

“When you start bouncing ideas off each other, funny things can happen. And I knew about Rube Goldberg as a kid even before my mom’s stepmom sat me down with (pianist) Glenn Gould’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ album. If you listen to all of the ‘Goldberg Variations’ music in one sitting, you almost feel like you’re looking at one giant Rube Goldberg (creation). So, it didn’t take much to link those two.”

That the same episode also features performances by James Taylor and Guatemalan-born troubadour Gabby Moreno further underscores the show’s scope and range.

The results have delighted Thile, Coffee and the members of Punch Brothers. Ditto Bob Carrigan, the CEO of the Amazon-owned Audible, which is looking forward to presenting a second season of “The Energy Curfew Music Hour.” (Carrigan, by coincidence, is an avid avocational banjo player who has taken lessons from Punch Brothers member Pikelny.)

“In addition to spotlighting Chris Thile and Punch Brothers’ artistry, the blend of acoustic musical genres with incredible guest artists also piqued my interest,” Carrigan said, via email.

“I was thrilled with the first season. The show represents the kind of original, boundary-pushing work that Audible intends to offer our audiences at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York and listeners across the globe.”

Thile and Coffee are hopeful that future episodes can be filmed, rather than presented only in audio form. The two California natives laughed appreciatively when asked if their personal and professional partnership bolstered the contention that only your spouse will tell you when you have bad breath, figuratively and literally.

“She’ll give it to me straight, and I’ll give it to her straight, too,” Thile said. “Claire is not cowed one little bit by me. She’ll say: ‘Hey, this thing you love is not quite landing in the way you think.’ I might bluster about it a little, and then realize she’s right.”

“That’s why we work so well together,” Coffee agreed. “If something’s not working, it bothers me. We really trust each other, and that’s the relationship we’ve had since we met. So, we can defend each other’s opinion and listen to the dissent, and then find the best path forward. We definitely don’t agree all the time, but it always ends up in a better place for the disagreement.”

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