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Listen: Nickel Creek releases new song, announces tour dates

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Nickel Creek is taking its reunion on the road.

After announcing this month that it will release a new studio album, its first since 2005, the adventurous bluegrass trio said Tuesday that it’s expanded a tour set to launch April 16.

“A Dotted Line” is due out April 1 on Nonesuch Records, nearly nine years on from Nickel Creek’s last album, “Why Should the Fire Die?”

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In 2007, the group went on hiatus, freeing its three members to focus on other projects; Chris Thile worked with Punch Brothers and Sean Watkins with Fiction Family, while Watkins’ sister Sara made two solo albums.

But last year, Nickel Creek, which formed in San Diego in 1989, reconvened at Thile’s home in New York to work on new music as the band approached its 25th anniversary.

“We fell into step very quickly,” Sara Watkins said in a statement. “We felt like we had started right up again.”

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Thile and the Watkins siblings later came together again in L.A. to record with producer Eric Valentine, who’d overseen “Why Should the Fire Die?” Said Sara Watkins of the sessions: “We were kind of picking up where we had left off.”

In support of the disc, Nickel Creek will play shows this spring and summer, including two dates at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and appearances at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the Newport Folk Festival; it’s also scheduled to stop May 21 at L.A.’s Wiltern.

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Listen to “Love of Mine,” a characteristically handsome cut from “A Dotted Line,” below.

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Twitter: @mikaelwood

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